South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (review)

In the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, South Koreans were shocked and embarrassed that their country required a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As Jesook Song recounts in the opening of South Koreans in the Debt Crisis, November 21, 1997 (the date the government initially agreed to accept emergency assistance) was decried throughout the land as a “second national day of humiliation,” the first marking colonial annexation by Japan on August 22, 1910. More surprises were to come. Though the bailout helped South Korea avoid defaulting on its international debts, assistance came with strings attached: “structural adjustments” (kujo chojŏng) promoting the now familiar neoliberal recipe of deregulation, privatization, trade liberalization, open capital markets, and so forth. Adoption of IMF “conditionalities” would touch off a cascade of broader changes during the next several years and involve not only government policies and corporate practices, but also all levels of society. Such a transformative process has understandably inspired numerous studies. Yet, while South Koreans in the Debt Crisis joins an already well-developed collection of IMF-related texts, Jesook Song’s work is noteworthy in many ways.

Readers will likely be impressed by its combination of grand scope and fine ethnographic detail. Song attempts to provide “a comprehensive picture of developments in South Korean welfare society during the crisis,” and therefore marshals a truly diverse array of data, as signalled in her methodological abstract (pp. x–xi):

To outline the developments of the crisis, I gather and contextualize narratives from formal interviews with un(der)employed young adults working in public works programs, government officials working on homelessness and youth unemployment policies, and social reform activists working in homeless shelters. I also draw on informal conversations with academic government experts, police officers, a taxi driver, and homeless women. I analyze visual texts (film and TV dramas); spatial texts (the Seoul Train Station Square and Pangnim textile factory); novels and mass-media reports; and public events

(symposiums, seminars, and demonstrations).

What emerges is a wealth of thought-provoking accounts of what it meant to be “IMF-ed,” from the standpoint of the homeless or unemployed young persons— the two main welfare recipients she examines—as well as from the perspectives of social workers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, religious leaders, mothers, fathers, and more. Furthermore, by analyzing discursive patterns in mass media, popular culture, and public forums, Song draws out important insights on how the culture industry tended to represent only a partial picture of lived experiences during the crisis—in particular, privileging “male breadwinners” over supposedly “irresponsible housewives” and thereby obscuring the reality of many real homeless women.

A second noteworthy characteristic is the skilful use of critical social theory (most notably, Michel Foucault’s formulations on “governmentality”) to illuminate and guide the study of a welfare system that arose at a “particular historical conjuncture” in South Korea’s modern experience. The Asian Debt Crisis coincided with the Kim Dae Jung presidency (1998–2003), meaning that pressures for neoliberal transformation came at a pivotal moment in South Korea’s democratic transition when civil society actors finally managed to gain significant roles in policymaking processes. Accordingly, Song does not focus narrowly on IMF dictates or the Korean state bureaucracy’s directives on “structural adjustments.” Instead, she embraces the additional challenge of revealing how various social actors—including former democracy activists—discussed, enacted, and became implicated in the creation of neoliberal governmentality in the sphere of social policy. As she pithily explains, her book is “an ethnography of social governing, not of state bureaucracy.”¹

Song convincingly demonstrates broad participation in policy-deliberation and consensus-building processes leading to a new form of social governing, highlighting individual actions as well as discursive constructions that divided people into deserving and undeserving recipients of public assistance. Under the emergent neoliberal regime she describes—with its distinctive “mentalities of rule” and “technologies of power”—welfare came...