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Highlights
- In Privilege and Anxiety, Hagen Koo examines what has happened to the Korean middle class in the era of neoliberal globalization and demonstrates that global economic change brought more profound changes than mere economic decline and shrinking size to this class.Globalization has inserted an axis of polarization into the middle class, separating a small minority that benefits from the globalized economy from the large majority that suffers from it.
- About the Author: Hagen Koo is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
- 162 Pages
- History, Asia
Description
About the Book
"Privilege and Anxiety is about the transformation of the Korean middle class over the past four decades. The Korean middle class grew rapidly during the period of industrial development and provided a social base for the political stability and democratic transition in the 1980s. But it began to decline abruptly from the mid-1990s and is now widely believed to be in deep economic and social crisis. Hagen Koo argues that, rather than focusing on the shrinking size of the middle class and the rise of a distinctly inegalitarian society, the more significant change to the middle class is actually qualitative, namely that the Korean middle class has transformed from a relatively homogeneous, fluid, and upwardly mobile class into an internally divided, fractured, and anxiety-ridden class."--Book Synopsis
In Privilege and Anxiety, Hagen Koo examines what has happened to the Korean middle class in the era of neoliberal globalization and demonstrates that global economic change brought more profound changes than mere economic decline and shrinking size to this class.
Globalization has inserted an axis of polarization into the middle class, separating a small minority that benefits from the globalized economy from the large majority that suffers from it. This internal differentiation generates a challenging dynamic within Korean society, as the newly affluent seek to distinguish themselves from the rest of the middle class to establish a new, privileged class position. Privilege and Anxiety explores how these tensions play out in three areas: consumption and lifestyle, residential differentiation, and education. In all three areas, the dominant orientation of the affluent middle class is to preserve their newfound privilege and to pass it onto their children. Their new class practices, Koo argues, bring great anxiety to both the winners and losers of neoliberal globalization.
Review Quotes
Koo's book opens up a multitude of fruitful questions for future research.
-- "The Developing Economies"About the Author
Hagen Koo is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He is the author of Korean Workers.