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Abstract: The 1997 IMF crisis in South Korea introduced a neoliberal social and political environment marked by precarity, competition, and unemployment. These changes specifically impacted youth and young adults who were faced with tremendous pressures to comply with a new competitive subjectivity. As a result of these neoliberal changes, youth and young adults in South Korea underwent a transformation to their notions of “home”. This study seeks to exemplify two ways in which notion of “home” in neoliberal South Korea had been transformed. Firstly, young adults and youth have embarked on studies abroad to increase their human capital, as well as to situate their newfound subjectivity in the neoliberal context of ‘home’ abroad. Secondly, the neoliberal environment has had transformative effects on the familial structures of youth, further reinforcing changes to their ‘home’ environment.
Keywords: neoliberalism, youth mobility, Korean youth, home, human capital
The financial crisis in East Asia had long-standing repercussions for its population of youth and young adults. Specifically, in South Korea (referred to as Korea henceforth), the Asian financial crisis culminated in a bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1997.[1] Under new neoliberal labour market reforms, stable and long-term employment in Korea became rare and unemployment replaced it as the norm. As a result, Korean young adults and “youth” within this era experienced a heightened sense of failure and anxiety in facing a new neoliberal environment marked by precarious employment, competitiveness and individualization. Faced with struggles in finding employment and transitioning into adulthood, “youth” in Korea took on measures such as studying abroad and engaging in private education to situate themselves as valuable neoliberal subjects – which only resulted in feelings of isolation. The notion of “home” is tied to meanings of belonging, and is understood as a space of security, solitude, privacy, non-interference and comfort. In the context of neoliberal Korea, the increasing competitiveness and unemployment resulted in struggles among youth to find a sense of belonging. This paper will argue that the changes brought on through the IMF neoliberal bailout in Korea resulted in a transformation of youth notions of “home” by reinforcing individualist and isolating discourse. This will be exemplified through two ways; first I will examine the group of Korean traveling students who travel abroad in hopes to acquire human capital or to better the “self” and how this global experience restructures their sense of belonging and home within an international context. Subsequently, I will examine how neoliberalism changes family structures, altering the roles of family members, which transforms the dynamics of these homes. Throughout these examples, I will draw on theorists such as Foucault and Althusser for the purpose of providing additional support.
Interviews were conducted with three young adults in Korea, who reported that the original state of ontological security, feelings of safety and comfort from the world outside have disappeared in the wake of neoliberal policy.[2] Youth therefore struggle to situate themselves within this ever-changing, competitive environment and seek out a sense of belonging. This search for belonging arises due to ideology which represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.[3] Ideology does not represent the system of real relations that govern individuals but represents instead the imaginary relations of the individuals to the real relations in which they live.[4] In Korea, this is represented through the neoliberal discourse which creates a tension between the idealized neoliberal home and belonging promoted through the discourses of the state, versus the isolated reality. In 2011, the administration under Lee Myung-Bak presented a report arguing that if the unemployment of young adults is consistent, Korean economic progress will be destroyed, and social unrest will be compounded.[5] With this discourse, there have been programs that encourage students to become global citizens and interpellate them into a subjectivity that aspires to be mobile, flexible, global and where they are believed to freely and individually choose their own life course.[6] The Lee administration promoted overseas working holidays as part of a five-year global youth leaders training initiative which facilitated the outbound flows of youth trainees, interns, volunteers and working holidaymakers.[7] These policies therefore encourage youth to seek global experience and serves as an instrument to situate youth into this neoliberal framework. These global experienced are framed as having a two-fold purpose; first, students want to construct a better self by acquiring human capital for this new neoliberal employability. Secondly, they encompass neoliberal practices as a means to reinforcing their new neoliberal subjectivity, creating a new sense of “self”.
Youth are encouraged to constantly increase their human capital. Human capital is presented as creating a link between education and employability in the context of high economic growth and are told that the primary mechanisms to increase one’s human capital are through investments in education and training.[8] An increasingly popular avenue for increasing one’s human capital is through the notion of becoming more “globalized” and studying abroad. The generation of youth within neoliberal Korea is labeled “Generation G”, the G meaning “global”.[9] Other labels include “Spec generation”, “spec” meaning “specification” which pertains to resume-building activities to attain long-term employment, acceptance into a prestigious college, continuing studies for the English proficiency tests and aiming for a high grade point average .[10] Dominant discourses concerning youth transitions to adulthood and belonging are linked to a global mindset, knowledge and skills and were reinforced by the Korean labour market and educational sector.[11] One of the key terrains in which human capital is inscribed is through fluency in English. In Korea, English became one of the most significant skills that measure one’s alignment to the job market. Koreans are characterized as having a case of “English fever”.[12] It has been reported that Koreans spent an estimated 15 trillion won a year on English-related activities such as standardized tests and exchange programs.[13] Among the four million individuals taking the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) worldwide each year, Koreans compose more than 1.68 million.[14] Hence, by returning from abroad programs, especially from those which promote English, returnees are presented in the local media as cool, intelligent and elite multilinguals with access to membership into the global community.[15] This imagery creates a potential home within the global community and among Korean society for these youths.
Secondly, youth traveled abroad to situate themselves within this neoliberal subjectivity. Neoliberalism promotes individualization and self-management and allowed youth to feel autonomous and independent to make decisions to study or travel abroad. Studying abroad has been framed as an experience that allows for greater acquisition of soft skills, maturity, enhanced self-awareness and increased independence. In a study which interviewed 30 young Korean nationals aged 21-31 on working holidays, most respondents anticipated that the global experience of working holidays would enable them to seek their “true self”.[16] Neoliberal states promote the notion of freedom and independence as a means to facilitate the individual desire to travel abroad and to transform the self into this global, flexible citizen.[17] Hence, the notion of freedom operates as a dominant ideology to cultivate neoliberal subjectivity, despite it actually interpellating and embodying the interests of the state, businesses and multinational corporations.[18] This creation of the entrepreneurship of self is legitimized through the protection of life – in the sense that one is contributing to one’s self development, anticipating a future return.[19] The discourse of autonomy, creativity, and individual character creates this idea of the management of self and the entrepreneurial spirit of the self, which are reinforced through practices such as traveling abroad.[20]
Despite travelling abroad to reinforce one’s human capital for employability or to reinforce neoliberal subjectivity, these travels further isolate youth and transform their notions of home. Through dominant discourses, youth are pushed to enter into the “global community” and become more flexible, mobile citizens. But this process only ends up displacing them into this foreign environment and hinders their sense of belonging.[21] Indeed, unemployment and precariousness in the Korean labour market already isolate Korean youth, and the travels abroad only further reinforce this effect. In the United States, the number of tertiary and precollege students from Korea increased nearly 61% in the first decade of the 21st century. With this increase, studies have shown that young students from Korea felt socially isolated and this led them to spending most of their time isolated in their own rooms and homes of their host families.[22] Most students did not make friends with their American classmates but tended to cultivate relationships with fellow Korean peers in their schools.[23] A large number of these students also engaged with virtual communities and social networks. The internet serves as an accessible and important way to cope with boredom and loneliness and allowed Korea students to access Korean-based web services, consume more familiar media products and keep in touch with peers and family members back in Korea.[24] Hence, through access to Korean media and Koreans abroad, they have materialized this imagined community among Koreans and have become more relaxed in their “home” space built across borders. This new living space therefore forged as a “transnational home” built upon transnational communities, a place to maintain connections with families, friends and cultural activities while simultaneously living abroad.[25] Althusser suggests that ideology recruits subjects or transforms the individuals to subjects through interpellation or hailing, allowing subjects to locate themselves in the system.[26] The neoliberal environment in Korea allows youth to ‘locate’ themselves as neoliberal subjects and flexible, global citizens in this new context. Within these transnational contexts, Korean students ‘locate’ themselves and ‘locate’ others around them, allowing them to build a sense of home with other Korean students or perhaps within a virtual community.
Additionally, neoliberal reform in Korea permeated a sense of governance into the homes of youth through family restructuring. Although youth were already subject to individuating governance through the modern regime, this governance could also be illustrated through the family members. Firstly, neoliberal reforms in Korea served to individualize and subject them to a form of self-governance. Similar to Foucault’s notion of prisons which extends fear and the need for governance, Korea’s precarious employment situation results in heightened pressures to become self-improving, competitive citizens and youth internalize these pressures, internalizing the governance of the state.[27] Neoliberal policies also restructure the dynamics and roles within individual families. As kinship is often associated with the notion of “home” and of familiarity, comfort and security, these transformations serve to disrupt youth’s ideas of “home”. The family becomes an apparatus used to cultivate “norms” of the youth in individual ways. Much like how the prison creates the idea that delinquency may be lurking within each of the youth, the neoliberal era marked by high unemployability creates the notion that one’s child could possibly be a failure.[28] The fear of potentially having a failure of a child grows within each of the family structures. Many young adults remain within their parent’s homes since they are unable to secure employment, reinforcing the image of struggling youth and their inability to transition into “adulthood”. In Korea, a high percentage of young adults live with their parents, in 2005, a reported 69% of men and 67% of women aged 30 to 34 remained in their parents’ homes.[29] Young adults and youth are the face of the future, both within the state, as vehicles to propel the competitive economic regime, as well as within the family unit, as the primary breadwinner for the rest of the family members. As youth are faced with low paying and insecure jobs, so many young Koreans avoid entering into the labour force and remain unprepared to take on this breadwinning role. This results in the oldest Koreans are being forced to remain in the job market and forego their traditional role as retired dependents, thus inversing the traditional structure in which the younger generation is to care for the older once they have achieved a certain degree of adulthood.[30] Instead, in the wake of the precarity and fear within neoliberal Korea, family members have made it a moral imperative to improve the outcomes of their youth. In particular, mothers have taken on the role of educational manager, forcing youth and young adults to maintain a childlike role within the family.[31] The role of “educational manager” entails ensuring that their child does not end up a as a nujo (loser). This discourse of nujo reveals the collective fear of young adults in being stigmatized, and how this stigma may extend to be associated with others within the collective family unit.[32] As a result, the mother must take on the role of maintaining the integrity of the family and that of educational manager for their children to achieve educational success and contribute to the neoliberal state.[33] This role is expected; mothers within the neoliberal era are painted as feminine, dedicated housewives who are savvy customers and purchase the best commodities for their children to flourish.[34] Media reports often presented images of mothers praying in churches for their children’s success on their exams, further reinforcing the common narrative that behind every successful youth is their mother.[35] The South Korean family structure therefore becomes a factory of neoliberal subject production for the emergence of flexible global children and education manager mothers as a collective familial project for social mobility.[36] Hence, in the literal sense, the neoliberal structures of Korea transform the youth’s notion of home through familial structures and the changes to the roles and dynamics between its members. It replaces the idea of a home as a private, secure and personal space into one that is used to nurture competitive individuals used to enhance Korea’s global stature. It also restructures the roles of mothers who may have once been a confidante and a source of comfort, into one that extends the governance and pressures of the neoliberal, competitive state. Through its ability to transform the roles of mothers as well as internalizing self-management within youth, neoliberalism penetrates the domestic spheres of youth, stripping away any sense of privacy and non-interference. Rather than a source of solitude, comfort and privacy, the home becomes an extension of the neoliberal state and its values of competitiveness, individuality and precarity. Through the use of neoliberal ideology which promotes self-management, independence and improvement, youth are under the impression that the state allows them to create their own subjectivity, but the reality shows that mothers extend their subjection.
In conclusion, “youth” is not just an age but the feeling of inability to attain full adulthood by securing long term employment – and through this inability to place oneself, youth in Korea look elsewhere for “home”.[37] Within the neoliberal shift of Korea following the 1997 IMF crisis, youth have had new experiences of “home”. Through their travels, desires to study abroad and changes within familial structures, “home” emerged as a conflicting site where youth struggle to navigate their own personal aspirations within this new context and striving to find a sense of belonging and security. Following the IMF reforms and the emergence of increasing unemployment and irregular hours, youth were simultaneously marked as the hope for the future while also being used as the scapegoat for economic hardships and uncertainty due to their own non-competitiveness. Many individuals faced challenges in transitioning into “adulthood” and locked them into a state of perpetual mobility, unable to lock down a true sense of “home” within the state, abroad, and within familial structures.
Jennifer Han is a 4th year student at the University of Toronto pursuing a double major in Peace, Conflict and Justice and Political Science.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, edited by Ben Brewster, 127-186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 (2001).
Cho, Hae-joang, “The Spec Generation Who Can’t Say ‘No’, Overeducated and Underemployed Youth in Contemporary South Korea.” Positions 23, no 3(2015): 437-62.
Cho, JinHyun. “Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever and Linguistic Insecurity Among Korean Interpreters.” Multilingua 3, no. 5 (2015):687 – 710.
Foucault, Michel. “Illegalities and Delinquency.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 226-238. New York: Pantheon, 1975, (1984).
Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” In Power Essential Works of Foucault, vol. III, edited by James D. Faubion, 63-91. New York: The New Press, 1979 (2000).
Jung, Minwoo. “Precarious Seoul: Urban inequality and Belonging of Young adults in South Korea.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25, no. 4 (2017): 745-767.
Kim, Hye-Kyung. “Familist Individualization of Ever-Single Korean Youths in their Late 30s: Individualization and Transformed Familism in the Neoliberal era.” Korea Journal 56, no 1 (2016): 33-60.
Kim, Sujung. “Voluntarily exiled? Korean State’s Cultural Politics of Young Adults’ Social Belonging and Korean Students’ Exile to a U.S. Community College.” Higher Education 76, no. 2 (2018): 353-367.
Kim, Tae-Sik. “Transnational Communication Practices of Unaccompanied Young Korean Students in the United States.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25, no. 2 (2016): 148-167.
Lukács, Gabriella. “Labor Games: Youth, Work, and Politics in East Asia.” Positions 23, no. 3 (2015): 381-409.
Park, So Jin. “Educational Manager Mothers: South Korea’s Neoliberal Transformation.” Korea Journal 47, no. 3 (2007): 186-213.
Song, Jesook. “ ‘Venture Companies,’ ‘Flexible Labor,’ and the ‘New Intellectual’: The Neoliberal Construction of Underemployed Youth in South Korea.” Journal of Youth Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 331-351.
Yoon, Kyong. “Transnational Youth Mobility in the Neoliberal Economy of Experience.” Journal of Youth Studies 17, no. 8 (2014): 1014-1028.
Yun, Ji-Whan. “The Myth of Confucian Capitalism in South Korea: Overworked Elderly and Underworked Youth.” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 2, (2010): 237-259.
[1] Sujung Kim, “Voluntarily exiled? Korean State’s Cultural Politics of Young Adults’ Social Belonging and Korean Students’ Exile to a U.S. Community College,” Higher Education 76, no. 2 (2018): 357.
[2] Minwoo Jung, “Precarious Seoul: Urban inequality and Belonging of Young adults in South Korea,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 25, no. 4 (2017): 762.
[3] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 2001), 163.
[4] Ibid., 165.
[5] Kim, “Voluntarily exiled?” 360.
[6] Kyong Yoon, “Transnational Youth Mobility in the Neoliberal Economy of Experience,” Journal of Youth Studies 17, no. 8 (2014): 1017.
[7] Ibid., 1015.
[8] Gabriella Lukács, “Labor Games: Youth, Work, and Politics in East Asia,” Positions 23, no. 3 (2015): 390.
[9] Hae-joang Cho, “The Spec Generation Who Can’t Say ‘No’, Overeducated and Underemployed Youth in Contemporary South Korea,” Positions 23, no 3(2015): 445.
[10] Ibid., 446.
[11] Yoon, “Transnational Youth Mobility,” 1015.
[12] JinHyun Cho, “Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever and Linguistic Insecurity Among Korean Interpreters,” Multilingua 3, no. 5 (2015): 689.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 693.
[16] Yoon, “Transnational Youth Mobility,” 1016.
[17] Kim, “Voluntarily exiled?” 355.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Jesook Song, “ ‘Venture Companies,’ ‘Flexible Labor,’ and the ‘New Intellectual’: The Neoliberal Construction of Underemployed Youth in South Korea,” Journal of Youth Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 337.
[20] Ibid., 338.
[21] Tae-Sik Kim, “Transnational Communication Practices of Unaccompanied Young Korean Students in the United States,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25, no. 2 (2016): 149.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 154.
[25] Ibid., 159.
[26] Althusser, “Ideology,” 182.
[27] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power Essential Works of Foucault, vol. III, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1979, 2000), 83.
[28] Michel Foucault, “Illegalities and Delinquency,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1975, 1984), 232.
[29] Hye-Kyung Kim, “Familist Individualization of Ever-Single Korean Youths in their Late 30s: Individualization and Transformed Familism in the Neoliberal era,” Korea Journal 56, no 1 (2016): 40.
[30] Ji-Whan Yun, “The Myth of Confucian Capitalism in South Korea: Overworked Elderly and Underworked Youth,” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 2, (2010): 238.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Kim, “Voluntarily exiled?” 361.
[33] So Jin Park, “Educational Manager Mothers: South Korea’s Neoliberal Transformation,” Korea Journal 47, no. 3 (2007): 186.
[34] Ibid., 196.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., 205.
[37] Lukács, “Labor Games,” 387.
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