2 A Morphogenetic Perspective of Grassroots Nationalism
A Case of South Korea
Abstract
Chapter 2 provides the broader theoretical perspectives that I have deployed for the analysis of data on the selected empirical topics. Starting with the chosen definition of nationalism, which is a form of social movement, I elaborate on grassroots nationalism and calculated nationalism. Then I introduce Margaret Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic approach which closely examines related structural and cultural contexts, which go through a continuing transformation based on individual agents’ properties actively engaging with structure and culture for change. At the end of Chapter 2, I demonstrate the value of analysing news reports as the main source of data for this project.
Keywords: grassroots nationalism, calculated nationalism, morphogenesis, morphostasis, critical realism, analytical dualism
This chapter aims firstly to review several different kinds of nationalism to provide an overview of the theoretical views around nationalism. I will move on to discuss why the study of nationalism and national identities requires an adequate understanding of personhood, the formation of which is in a dialectical relationship between agency and structure. I also consider nationalism to be in constant flux rather than to be static. Thus different kinds of nationalism are constantly produced, reproduced, and consumed as part of the process of social change. Therefore, I regard nationalism as a social movement (Goodman 2017), which implies that a national movement accompanies nationalism. I will devote much space to how individual agents actively engage in the social movements and how their personhood changes from primary agents, corporate agents, and then to voluntary social actors,
Han, G.-S., Calculated Nationalism in Contemporary South Korea. Movements for Political and Economic Democratization in the 21st Century. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723657_ch02
becoming and acting as agents for change—i.e., the process of engaging in the grassroots movement.
Nationalism
What are the key elements which comprise nationalism? “The preservation of the cultures, customs, governance, and identity” has been crucial in classical definitions of nationalism since the components are considered essential for the establishment and maintenance of a sovereign state (Stacey 2018: 8). Nationalism refers to a sense of “belonging to a common nation, which is defined by citizenship in the same nation-state; most often associated with feelings of loyalty and patriotism toward the states and fostering solidarity among citizens” (Stacey 2018: 8). The populist notion of nationalism is for one to claim her country’s superiority over other nations, whereas patriotism refers to being committed to one’s country. These popular notions do not align with Stacey’s definition of nationalism, which notes there is a clear overlap between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is inclusive of patriotism, not vice versa. Also, within this book, I consider nationalism as an ideology that is in pursuit of a nation’s “independence, self-reliance, integration and glory” (Kim 2016: 230). Stacey acknowledges nationalism as an ideology as well as an affective sense of belonging to a sovereign nation (p. 8). Stacey also stretches the definition of nationalism to be “a network of attitudes, norms, and actions that provide the necessary political, social (including moral), and cultural value to a nation or national identity, while simultaneously providing obligations for members of the nation in order to maintain and develop” nationalism (Stacey 2018: 8). The members of a nation all tend to have an affective sense of belonging to their nation, but the types of nationalism to which the members attach themselves will vary. When a proportion of the members of a nation feel the nation’s socio-political, cultural, and national identity is breached, they may form a protest group, which can lead to a social and/or national movement.
The strands of what nationalism is about are based on an emphasis on a particular dimension of a nation. Ethno-nationalism was once a commonly accepted form, just as a nation was understood as “a self-conscious ethnic group” (Connor 1973: 3). Classical nationalism typically does not support globalism or multiculturalism. Such classical nationalism is closely associated with the Alt-Right and the rise of Donald Trump and with commercial nationalism, which supports nation branding to revamp national identities (Stacey 2018: 9; Volčič and Andrejevic 2016). Ethno-nationalism determines the national identity based on ethnicity and one’s “adopted national identity is superior to all others” (Stacey 2018: 11). Other factors that take critical roles in ethno-nationalism are shared heritage and common language (p. 11) and the members of a nation are much like part of an extended family (Muller 2008: 20), e.g., pure-blood nationalism (Han 2016b).
The non-territorial nature of the internet and a large scale of migration have made it “difficult to uphold a collective sense of national identity on shared images, representations, myths” (Eriksen 2007: 1). South Korea has rapidly become a multicultural nation and ethno-nationalism in Korea is increasingly losing its grip. Kang Won-Taek finds that the younger generations in South Korea see their own identity based on the nation-state of South Korea relatively more than the blood-shared Koreans which tend to encompass Koreans in the North and the South as well as the Koreans living outside the peninsula (Kang 2006). South Korea is at, or has just walked across, its crossroads as to what the future direction of its nationalism ought to be. The nation is currently and broadly divided between the progressive and conservative parties although the division is far from clear-cut. The tension between these two different parties is an ongoing and complex dimension of the nationalist movements in South Korea ever since the time of Japanese colonialism (1919–1945).
James Goodman (2017) rightly sees nationalism as a specific type of social movement of capitalist modernity. Similar to a critical realist discussion of social change and movement, to be discussed later, Goodman contends that an analysis of nationalism ought to focus on its “cultural and structural origins and development” concerning their “political-contextual dynamics” (p. 18). Goodman (2017: 7) suggests five broad approaches to understanding nationalist movements: “ethno-national, modernization, state-centred, class centred, and uneven development variants.” Goodman’s five approaches are based on his historical sketch of the ways in which nationalism has emerged, and been reproduced and consumed in many parts of the world, with reference to some key theoreticians of nationalism. Here, I intend to partially re-interpret Goodman’s approaches and note their applicability to the study of nationalism in South Korea (hereafter Korea unless specified). My goal is to provide a broad sketch of the Korean nation-state’s development with reference to Goodman’s five general theories of nationalism before I review a few different approaches to studying grassroots nationalism, such as banal-, everyday-, and embedded nationalism.
In the first approach, ethnic identity is a crucial factor in the development of nationalist movements, in which nationalism refers to “identity or loyalty to the ethnic group, more a cultural identification than a political ideology” (Goodman 2017: 7; Connor 1994; Smith 1998). Ethnic nationalism has been a source for the elites to exploit, as well as a goal for the masses to aspire to in the postcolonial and divided Korean peninsula (An 2018; Shin 2006). Since the massive increase in the number of newly settled Koreans who were born outside of Korea, there has been a majority movement towards “nouveau-riche nationalism” to advocate ethnic nationalism (Han 2016b). However, pure-blood nationalism has become rapidly outdated and there is increasingly a call for “open nationalism” (Kim 2009).
Second, the coming of the modern industrial society has been possible through the reformation or discarding of traditional thoughts and deeds that were prevalent in pre-modern society (Goodman 2017: 7; Gellner 1987). As the Korean nation-state has strived to achieve modernization and development, which was perceived as a necessity for the sake of prosperity of the nation and its individual members, workers have increasingly adopted new and modified values, rather than rigidly adhering to older values, e.g., filial piety, a seniority-based promotion at work (Han 2016a, 2019). However, tensions between the old and new values continue, in the context of the existence of widely contrasting forms of nationalist movements which underpin diverse and different goals, e.g., modernization, old and new values.
Third, Goodman (2017: 7, cited from Breuilly 1982) defines nationalism “as a political ideology carried by nationalist movements that emerge to challenge monarchical claims to unhindered realm over territory and people.” However, as Goodman (2017) notes, state-centred policies and nationalism have worked in close cooperation with private capitalist interests, especially of the conglomerates. In the absence of a monarchy, Korean society has still faced an “active” modernization. Democratic movements in the last few decades have been a nationalist movement to remedy this close link between the government and the private sector/capitalist interests, and the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution is one example of them.1
Fourth, some writers such as Eric Hobsbawm and Jim Blaut have used Marxist theory to see “nationalism and nationalist movements as expressions of class conflict” (Goodman 2017: 8). In line with Hobsbawm’s view of nationalism as an ideological apparatus of the ruling classes, the state elites’ promotion of the national interest is largely geared towards reproducing and maintaining dominant capitalist relations (Hobsbawm 2012). Similar to
1 The phenomenon of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution was the scholarly stimulus for the whole project and this chapter gives some prominence to the phenomenon. However, the morphogenetic approach to nationalism as a social movement applies to other empirical topics discussed in the chapters.
what has just been discussed, the state elites in Korea have worked closely in the interest of dominant capitalist groups, even to the level of collusion.2 A possible consequence is that the capitalist classes have often bullied and exploited their employees, e.g., the Korean Air nut rage scandal in 2018.3 In the case of Korean Air, it carries the nation-state’s title but has little to do with its people’s interests. Ordinary people’s standing against its vice president’s bullying behaviour became a national movement at the grassroots level, which engendered a type of nationalism, e.g., ordinary people’s massive responses to gapjil (workplace bullying). The movement was an expression of grassroots as to what they think the relationships ought to be like between the employer and the employee, the senior and the junior, the manager and the worker, in the Korean nation-state.
The fifth view notes that the “historical unfolding of global uneven development is the determining variable of national movements” (Goodman 2017: 8). The capitalist world system is such that there are spatially unequal capitalist relations of production and consumption between the countries of the core, periphery, and semi-periphery (Wallerstein 2004). These spatially unequal relations are also reflected in the forms of inequalities in each of these countries, which maintain capitalist stability (Goodman 2017: 8; Amin 1980). Even in the era of globalization, South Korea as an industrial nation takes the spaces of both the core and semi-periphery, which raises the question of how to protect its national interests. That is, Korea inflicts exploitation against another country on the one hand, but also is exploited by the core countries on the other hand. Wallerstein’s thesis on the world system explains much about unequal economic relations among the core, periphery, and semi-periphery. However, along the line of Wallerstein’s structural approach, it is intriguing to note Tom Nairn’s argument that the real origins of nationalism “are not in the folk, not in the individual’s repressed passion for some sort of wholeness or identity, but in the machinery of world political economy” (Nairn 1977: 337). Nairn’s argument completely ignores the people’s agency, and I am particularly interested in exploring the people’s agency, while incorporating the political economy. I
2 In 2019, the ruling Democratic Party’s effort to reform the Prosecution Office faced strong opposition with the collusion between the major opposition/conservative party, Prosecution and the Press. As of early April 2022, the Democratic Party is still looking into reforming the Prosecution and Press prior to the coming of the Yoon Suk-Yeol’s Conservative regime on May 10, 2022.
3 Discussed in Chapter 8, this air rage incident occurred at John F. Kennedy International Airport, when the Korean Air vice president was dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant served her macadamia nuts.
argue that with notable economic development in the last several decades, Korean democracy has also made remarkable improvements, coupled with individual citizens’ autonomy by all means.
I have so far noted that there are social movements within all societies, and every social movement accompanies one or more types of nationalism. As I am intending to investigate Korean people’s nationalism, what are the general theories that I can consider and deploy? First of all, banal nationalism is particularly concerned with the taken-for-granted national symbols such as national flag, national anthem, patriotic associations, which are “reproduced and represented through everyday life and popular culture” such as sport, travel, mass media, food, weather reporting and at home (Knott 2015: 1–2; Edensor 2002; Billig 1995; Ichijo and Ranta 2016). The nation-state may be embedded in people’s “trivial” or “banal” acts (Storm 2018: 117). However, the scholars of banal nationalism, despite their recognition of the engagement of ordinary people more than the elites, tend to underestimate the “human agency” of the ordinary people (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 537; Knott 2015: 2).
Jonathan Hearn (2007: 661) raises a question potentially relevant to the present research as follows. For example, in the annual Edinburgh Festival, Bank of Scotland “as an institution has helped to affirm a taken-for-granted Scottishness” and the Governor of the bank “took the ‘salute’ of the massed military pipe bands at the final Tattoo of the summer of 1995” (p. 661). The question here is whether the Bank of Scotland provides its staff with “a banal context for reinforcing belief in a Scottish identity” or “Scottish identity provides a resource for reinforcing staff commitment to the bank” (p. 662). I find that both arguments are equally plausible. However, I contend that Scottish identity or Scottishness is prevalent and pre-exists within and outside the bank prior to any banal context within the bank, which is in line with Hearn’s conclusion (pp. 662–663). With reference to the present study, Korean people’s Koreanness and grassroots national identities are not only autonomous on one hand, but also construed in the given structure and culture of the society. This process is about the creation as well as reproduction and sustaining nationalism.
Everyday nationalism acknowledges and maintains the significance of “everyday life” as a crucial part of the inquiry. Knott (2015: 1) finds that the uniqueness of everyday nationalism is to affirm Hobsbawm’s (2012: 10) point that nationalism is not only “constructed essentially from above” and “which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below,” conceived by Hobsbawm as the “assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests or ordinary people.” I contend that Hobsbawm’s definition of nationalism is in close affinity with the critical realist analysis of the structure and agency in fully understanding a social phenomenon (Archer 1989, 1995). The need to combine both top-down and bottom-up nationalism without conflation in either direction is recognized by other scholars as well (Brubaker et al. 2006). The everyday perspective may not be as dramatic or sensational enough as elite nationalist perspectives or movements to attract the interest of the masses. Yet, it could have developed over a long period and be situated deeply in the minds of the ordinary people, thus enduring and highly influential. Anthony Cohen (1994) is one of the scholars who add prominence to the agents’ voices to nationalism in a nation-state. I contend and agree with Cohen that in a nation-state, nationalism can be persuasive and can be truly meaningful if it can reflect and “refract their personal and local experience” (Cohen 1996: 810).
Cohen’s attempt to recognize the “bottom-up” dimension is commendable and shares Billig’s intention to include the voice of “different factions, whether classes, religions, regions, genders or ethnicities” as “the voice of the national whole” (Billig 1995: 71). However, the extent to which his kind of bottom-up nationalism, i.e., personal nationalism, is sociologically sound demands a view. Also, how it operates in reality and whether it can fully and diligently reflect the grassroots perspectives remains unclear (p. 595). In fact, this argument equally applies to banal nationalism, everyday nationalism, and personal nationalism. A critique against these bottom-up approaches is that they can be decontextualized and therefore apolitical (Hearn and Antonsich 2018: 595). While I accept that there is a chance that the everyday approaches (e.g., everyday nationalism, personal nationalism) could lack structural and cultural dimensions, I also see a danger of possibly underestimating the agency of the “ordinary” people. Hearn and Antonsich (p. 595) suggest that embracing the plural perspectives from “bottom-up” will address this possible shortfall. Nonetheless, Hearn and Antonsich (2018) who are not convinced about Edensor’s (2002) thesis of “everyday nationalism” are cautious about the possibility of ending up reproducing “an image of nation which is blind to the ethnic, racial and religious diversity which populate it” (Hearn and Antonsich 2018: 600, also see Antonsich 2016). Not all the individual agents may be aware of structural and cultural factors, in which their meaning-making activities take place. I contend that if we are willing to take on board the plural perspective from the bottom-up, some of the perspectives are bound to reflect the structure and culture of the society. This is because the agents cannot exist in a structural and cultural vacuum.
The assumption here is that there ought to be inherent relationships between the social structure/culture and the individual agents. How we analyse the kind of nationalism that takes structure and culture into consideration remains a question. However, nationalism as social action or social movement is an emergent property out of an organized group of people with a set of goals, thus it cannot be dissected to micro levels of analysis (Hearn and Antonsich 2018: 597). The property is more than the sum of “the parts of micro details.” Thus, one of my aims will be to investigate “how people connect to nationalism” (p. 597), and what the agents make out of the given structure and agency with reference to national affairs of politics and economy within the given sovereign nation-state, South Korea. This is an effort to uncover “how individual selves get ‘sutured’ (Hall 1996: 5–6) into taxonomies of identities and how strange, subtle and quixotic this process can be” (Hearn and Antonsich 2018: 599). Recent research along this line is Kaufmann (2017: 21), arguing for complexity as it incorporates everyday nationalism, personal nationalism, contested nationalism, multivocality, and local nationalism as follows:
Against a classic view which sees national consciousness diffused from elites down to masses and from centre out to peripheries, complexity allows for the emergence of national identity from below. States and elites are important actors but the role of mass publics in the everyday production and consumption of nations is vital (p. 21).
Kaufmann (2017: 22) particularly notes why it is worth paying attention to bottom-up approaches in the era of ubiquitous media:
[Emergence] explains why national movements may arise from the “bottom-up” interactions of private associations, leisure providers and the media rather than the deliberate efforts of state elites. National identity, except in the most centralised and authoritarian states, is distributed within individuals in a population such that the collective representation of the nation cannot be read off official documents or a single individual (p. 22).
I reiterate that a fuller understanding of nationalism ought to cover the features of nationalism constructed from above as well as from below because elite nationalism and everyday nationalism in a nation-state are dialectically intertwined. Richard Jenkins (2004: 15–26) aptly argues that a crude reification of a distinction between the self and society, agency and structure, or internal and external realities is to be avoided. According to Hearn (2007: 650), Jenkins is not convinced about the perspective that privileges “the self” (see Cohen 1994; Craib 1998). I argue that bottom-up nationalism has not been given enough attention in general, especially in fast-changing countries such as South Korea with a remarkable achievement of democracy and economy, and it deserves fuller exploration. Indeed, what is emerging from below matters to me more than, or as important as, “top-down orchestration by elites” (Kaufmann 2017: 21).
It goes without saying that an analysis of nationalism “from below” is essential especially in the context of democracy (Cohen 1996). Individual agents’ lower-level interactions, commitment, and emotional attachments to their nation-state are essential for its sustainability (Kaufmann 2017: 9). However, what is the extent to which nationalism is “constructed essentially from below” in the era in which the people of a nation are fairly well informed of, and have much to say towards, national affairs? Today, South Koreans have over 99.9 per cent literacy, 98 per cent hold a secondary diploma, and 70 per cent hold a post-secondary diploma.4 I argue that it is increasingly untenable to imagine that the formation of nationalism is little influenced by, or has little to do with, the people at the grassroots level especially when media are ubiquitous and the people are educated and well-informed. This is not to completely downplay the significance of “top-down” perspectives on nationalism. In fact, the top elites and bureaucrats continue to engender a type of nationalism and operationalize it. The state, encompassing the top elites, “is logically opposed to individual agency” (Herzfeld 1992: 21), as the bottom-up perspectives are in the way of the state’s control of the masses. For example, suppressing grassroots and imposing elitist nationalism were common for the Korean military dictators in their effort to industrialize the nation and also for a civilian regime to help the nation overcome the Asian economic crisis in 1997.5 However, top-down nationalism might have been intended for particular purposes, but may be understood and perceived differently and/or indifferently by the grassroots (cf., Brubaker et al. 2006).6 This discrepancy between the elites and the grassroots in terms of nationalism and national identity is unlikely to help us understand the real picture of nationalism and the national identity of a nation (Knott 2015: 2). And
4 “Education in South Korea.” World Education News + Reviews, October 16, 2018, https:// wenr.wes.org/2018/10/education-in-south-korea, accessed March 3, 2022. I acknowledge the importance of meaningful literacy.
5 See the section later in this chapter on brief vicissitudes of nationalism in Korea for the last several decades.
6 Brubaker et al. (2006) note that ordinary Hungarians and Romanians in Cluj remained mostly indifferent to their mayor’s nationalist sentiment and also nationalist ideas suggested by political and cultural elites in Hungary.
there are times when the elites are more easily able to engender top-down nationalism for reasons against the interests of the nation and its people (Kim 2016: 233), and at other times, this may be more difficult. Similarly, “bottom-up” nationalism may easily find its way into public discourses at times, and it may be more difficult to do so at other times. An example of the latter is the military and dictatorial period in Korea from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. It is not as though there is nothing in common between “top-down” nationalism and “bottom-up” nationalism. Indeed, there may be a degree of overlap, yet they are different.
Knott (2015: 2) points out that, in the study of nationalism, how nationalism and national identity are experienced and desired by the grassroots continue to be under-researched with some exceptions (Condor 2010; De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak 1999; McCrone and Bechhofer 2015). This is particularly so in the context of Asian society, which is what the book intends to investigate. The political and economic context of Korean society in recent years in particular has brought about the impetus to understand bottom-up nationalism. This is natural as the grassroots hope for changes for the better in terms of their working conditions, life chances, democracy, reunification, human rights, etc.
What should be the objects of analysing everyday nationalism? Knott (2015: 5) observes that scholars of nationalism and national identity typically focus on analysing “categories of analysis” formulated from above rather than “categories of practice,” experienced from below, i.e., by the ordinary people in everyday life (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). This is an attempt to recognize the individual agents’ autonomy in terms of their active partaking in the process of social movements as well as this impact on bringing about changes to society. Skey (2011) suggests that five different areas be measured as experienced by people’s everyday practices and experiences of nationhood and national identity: spatial, temporal, cultural, political and self/other (cited in Knott 2015: 5). However, it is important to bear in mind that Skey’s suggestions can be interpreted and applied differently, depending upon the socio-historical contexts under examination. Applying these ideas to the case of South Korea without reinventing the core ideas developed by Brubaker and Cooper (2000) and especially Skey (2011), I will be paying attention to the following dimensions: (1) Korean grassroots’ views of how the nation and national identity are manifested and experienced within or around the demarcated territory; (2) The grassroots’ views of the uniquely distinct features of Korean identity that are more important than other features; (3) Key values and ideas that form Korean cultures and how these are implemented or breached; (4) People’s expectations, frustrations, and satisfactions about the politics of the nation. My intention here is not to follow the suggestions slavishly, but to study the experiences of the grassroots regarding some selected events which make up the empirical chapters of the book.
There are four broad modalities to observe everyday nationalism, suggested by Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008): “talking, choosing, performing and consuming” (cited in Knott 2015: 6). I find three of them particularly relevant to Korean nationalism and identity under examination in this work. First, “talking” (pp. 539–540) refers to individuals’ perception of the nation, i.e., what the nation means to them, what the nation is expected in its governing the people, and how the nation should be in support of diverse people with their needs at different times. Second, “performing” (pp. 545–546) is concerned with how the nation can facilitate the individuals’ making meaningful life in their everyday life, bearing in mind the human agency of the individual agents (p. 546). Third, as consumers of nationalism, people express their assessment, reception, and preferences towards “national products and projects” (p. 549), such as major national policies for reformation.7
Returning to Knott (2015: 6–7), I noticed some of her criticisms of everyday nationalism. First, the category of “ordinary people” is too broad and ignores the existence of the different statuses and classes within a society (cited from Smith 2010: 84). I argue that the middle and lower class may or may not be put together as “one voice” standing for a social movement, depending upon what the foci of the social movement and the consequent analysis are. However, the “more” national and significant the issue at stake, the broader range of people can be included in the category of “ordinary people.” Second, everyday nationalism is primarily dealing with “the contemporary aspects of nationalism, while neglecting, if not rejecting, the ‘causal-historical methodology’ of previous nationalism scholarship” (Smith 2008: 567, cited in Knott 2015: 7). I contend that this criticism is unwarranted and rather ignores a reason that everyday nationalism has come about with the specific need to incorporate individual agents as influential actors in the making of history. This suggests that everyday nationalism is not ahistorical. Moreover, even if a researcher examines a social phenomenon at a particular historical point, she ought to consider the topic in a longer span of time and this will make the study historical rather than ahistorical (Mills 1959). Third, everyday nationalism centring on a primary focus can downplay the pre-existing institutional and policy contexts which can both enable as well as restrain
7 These three elements make crucial components of calculated nationalism to be discussed later.
the agents’ opportunities for taking action (Knott 2015: 7). This potential danger of decontextualizing the study phenomenon is not a problem of everyday nationalism per se in any case, but this has more to do with whether a researcher is willing to contextualize fully the study topic.
In my work to investigate grassroots nationalism in 21st-century Korea, nationalism is in line with everyday nationalism. Here I reproduce the contribution and nature of everyday nationalism as observed by Knott
(2015: 8).
By focusing on human agency, everyday nationalism has also emphasised the contingency and messiness of nationalism in everyday life, by highlighting the inconsistencies and contradictions in how nationalism and nationhood are expressed and experienced in everyday life (cf., Jones and Merriman 2009; Skey 2011).
I expect some of these characteristics will be observed from my investigations of grassroots nationalism in Korea by a group of people who have expressed their nationalism and national identities at the time of this research, i.e., 2016–2022.
Before closing my discussion of everyday nationalism, I make notes on methodological nationalism as its critique further justifies the need for everyday nationalism. Following the criticism of the studies of nationalism within the frame of methodological nationalism, as argued by Berger and Conrad (2015), Storm (2018), and Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002), a nation-state as a unit of analysis is limiting. In brief, methodological nationalism sets a nation-state as a unit of analysis and has an effect of “downwards conflation” (Archer 1995: 33,61), in that “the agency of the self in the construction of the nation” is understated and that there is no or little space for the agency of individual members (Cohen 1996: 804). Cohen strongly advocates that “the creativity and agency of the individual” should be recognized in understanding nationalism (p. 805). In this study, I will explore the ways in which there are competing groups and divisions within a nation-state in its process of nation-building and nation-reconstruction.
On the basis of methodological nationalism, “nationality” or what Anderson calls “nation-ness” (2006: 13) makes “a fundamental predicate of self-identity” (Cohen 1996: 804). Cohen (1996: 802–805) finds it problematic that the “nation” as a grand category downplays the agency of individual members of the nation and says nothing specific about its individual members. Instead, Cohen proposes “personal nationalism,” implying that “nationalism (qua personally constructed commitment to the nation) is an expression of self-identity” (pp. 804–805). For example, a nationalist politician would formulate a collective version of nationalism for the sake of bringing together her electorate, but the individual member would personalize it. A successful politician should be able to enable individuals to relate it to their own needs and desires. Cohen argues that
An interpretation of the phenomenon of nationalism that fails to recognize its personal nature—that presumes its commonality of meaning among a population—must be a gross simplification and must therefore be misleading. It would also understate the creativity and agency of the individual (Cohen 1996: 805).
I find that Cohen’s proposition of personal nationalism clearly recognizes the dimensions of individual agents’ experiences and perceptions of nationalism. With reference to Scotland, Cohen (1996) illustrates personal nationalism as follows:
My self commands the Scottishness by which it is described. It is my right to command it; and it is an infringement of that right for the anthropologist or anyone else to treat my self, however it is described, as a mere reflex of some larger structural condition (italic in original, p. 806).
I recognize Cohen’s attempt to inject back the role of individual agency in the formation of nationalism and national identities. As noted, others perceive the concept of personal nationalism as privileging agency over structure, or conflating national identity into personal identity, thus blurring the distinction between the two (Hearn 2007: 666; Jenkins 2004). A revised version of nationalism that overcomes the problem of downplaying or overplaying individual agency, e.g., banal nationalism and personal nationalism, is “embedded nationalism,” which corresponds to my earlier discussion of everyday nationalism or nationalism from a critical realist perspective. Indeed, Hearn aptly points out that the question of theorizing nationalism in light of the above-mentioned discussion is a variant of the long-lasting “theoretical debates about the relationships between macro and micro processes, and structure and agency” (Hearn 2007: 671; Barnes 2001; Layder 2006). In line with Layder’s critical realist perspective, Hearn presents embedded nationalism as follows:
… personal and social dimensions of national identity are mediated by concrete and ongoing social settings through which power relations get negotiated. The salience of symbolic resources, in this case national identities, depends on how they appear to illuminate struggles for control over one’s more immediate social environment (Hearn 2007: 671).
In summary, I have started with my quest for the most appropriate theory of nationalism that represents grassroots nationalism. Banal nationalism, personal nationalism, everyday nationalism, and embedded nationalism are some of the prevalent models. There is much in common amongst them, yet there are some subtle differences. Whilst there is much insight from personal nationalism and everyday nationalism, embedded nationalism is most in line with the morphogenetic approach for the present work. Nonetheless, the point of these new forms of nationalism is about adequately recognizing the individual agency in understanding nationalism or national identities.
The relevant questions to explore further based on the current debates on the everyday approach to nationalism are as follows:
Despite its intention to appreciate the grassroots perspectives, what are the ways in which the everyday approach operates in reality? This is an investigation about “a theoretical account of how nationalism is grounded in everyday action” (Hearn and Antonsich 2018: 597).
Korean and international scholarship has written about the rise of nationalism in Korea as it was shaped by growing imperialism, such as Japanese and Chinese (Mitter 2013; Shin 2006). Despite many changes under the influence of globalization in the 21st century, and the close intertwining between globalization and nationalism (Osterhammel 2013: 696), there is little awareness of Korean nationalism with reference to everyday Korean politics and economy in contemporary Korea—the grassroots perspectives.
Nationalism and Grassroots Nationalism in Korea
In the history of modern Korea, two major events continue to influence Korean nationalism and national identities in contemporary Korea: Japanese colonialism (1910–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953). Dictatorial and democratic regimes have long deployed the legacies of these incidents to legitimize their national policies and the nation’s future directions in all facets of governance. This is “state-nationalism” (Choi 1996; Yoon 2000; Cho 2008: 85), which is a form of “top-down” or elite nationalism which has translated into a ruling framework of nationalism to inform and control the people of the Korean nation-state. In addition to those two major influential events which shaped the properties of Korean nationalism, numerous other incidents have reconstituted Korean nationalism, such as the April 19 Revolution in 1960, the Democratic June Struggle in 1987, the 1997 IMF Intervention at the time of the Asian economic crisis. These national incidents offered the leading regime justifications to engender new forms of nationalism to lead and control the people of the nation-state, resulting in top-down nationalism. For example, during the national economic crises such as the 1997 IMF intervention and restructuring, the President and the ruling political party were judged by their effectiveness and ability to rescue the whole nation from a crisis, which also contributed to the legitimacy of the regime.
Another form of nationalism that is live and prevalent in the middle of major national incidents, and often ignored but crucial in understanding the aspirations of the people is “bottom-up” or grassroots nationalism. People at the grassroots level reflect on whether or not their nation-state’s political stability and economic strength can sustain the wealth and wellbeing of individuals and the whole nation-state. Grassroots nationalism refers to and represents people’s perception, image, and anticipation of their nation-state.
Reviewing nationalism in Korea in brief for the last several decades, we notice its drastic changes, along with the nation’s rapidly emerging political and economic changes. During Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, a serious discussion of nationalism, which attempted to incorporate North Korea, was considered ideologically unacceptable and could not embrace the North’s ruling ideology of juche (self-reliance). However, in the 1980s, Korea’s economic development and its expansion of foreign diplomatic relations, coupled with democratic movements, stimulated the values of researching nationalism in the academic community as well as its values in the Korean society (Kim 2016: 218). Achieving democracy and facing globalization and multiculturalism, Korean nationalism, which had been centred on pure-blood nationalism, collected much criticism for its exclusivity (Shin 2006; Han 2016b). This is why “open nationalism” was called for (Kim 2009). However, Kim (2016: 218) questions what open nationalism is and laments that there has been little effort to investigate or suggest alternatives to the past understanding of Korean nationalism.
The prevalent scholarly and public understanding of Korean nationalism has been a “top-down nationalism,” engendered and led by significant national leaders and policies. Elitist and politically motivated interpretation of those leaders’ propositions to hold together the ethnicity-based nation, has been the dominant perspective on Korean nationalism. This trend has been inevitable because of the common Korean belief in ethnic nationalism, that is, all Koreans share the same ancestors and are “blood-linked” (Shin 2006). I argue there is something more than “blood-linked” in Korean nationalism in the 21st century of individualism and materialism. This book explores how people at the grassroots level have encountered and coped with the major political and economic changes since the 1990s, spectacular achievements, and disasters within the nation and beyond, such as revisiting the legacies of Japanese imperialism, economic democratization, the trial for President Park Geun-Hye’s misconduct, and consequent reformulation of their new realities of the nation, resulting in and questioning grassroots nationalism and national identities. The book aims to depict a timely opportunity to investigate how grassroots nationalism is being manifested in almost never-before-seen ways.
As noted, over the last half a century of Korean history, the threat of possible aggression by North Korea, thus the need for Korean reunification, and anti-Japanese sentiment have provided a strong impetus for the whole Korean population to advocate ethnic nationalism. We are now in the digital era, especially web 2.0 to facilitate communications. Whilst we do not blindly support the idea of “every netizen as a publisher” there are fairly open platforms to express life aspirations and experiences. The Korean “netizens” and new Koreans in prosperous Korea may not be as militant as past university students who rose up against the Korean authoritarian regime thirty years ago, but they have open internet space to express their views in the context of free and advanced Korean politics, which leads to the mass manifestation of their aspirations towards their nation offline. This is how the contemporary public expresses their struggles in search of their individual and national identities—a fundamental human effort to make sense of their existence. These efforts represent “grassroots nationalism.”
“Bottom-up” or “grassroots” nationalism in this book refers to a “set of bottom-up discourses on nationalism re-shaping national imaginations among people, bringing the nation closer to the everyday experience of the general public” (Ma 2007: 149). For example, President Kim Dae-Jung adopted a neo-liberal economic policy and maintained a distance from the nationalism of a protective and defensive nature, under the economic management of Korea by the International Monetary Fund (Chŏn 2003: 48). The nationalism was generated to financially protect and rescue the nation from bankruptcy. However, Kim’s regime, the industries, and the advocates for neo-liberalism led to an economic nationalism that was designed to justify the workers’ responsibility to bear a “share of difficult times,” to cope with long working hours and inadequate salaries (Kwŏn 1994: 16; Chŏn 2003: 48). The mass responses such as the “gold-collection campaign” during the 1997 economic crisis to rescue the nation-state (Cheon 2017) are part of grassroots nationalism.
However, the problem of top-down or elite-led nationalism, as opposed to embedded or grassroots nationalism, is that the political leaders need to “create a discourse with which people of different minds, differently located in a society, can feel comfortable” (Cohen 1996: 810). The political leaders readily claim to know what people think and want, and even attempt to validate they have their claims right, manipulating the media and putting their own words into people’s minds (p. 810). Yet top-down nationalism remains problematic. The reason to Herzfeld (1992: 49) is straightforward: “nationalism imposed from above fails ‘to recognize the role of the ordinary person in taking the grand images presented by the leadership and recasting them in the more familiar terms of local experience’” (cited in Cohen 1996: 811). The kind of elite-imposed nationalism may serve the elites’ political goals for a short term, but may not endure for the needs of the people or for the sake of higher values such as liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace.
Post the Korean War, nearly all the political regimes have been preoccupied with building the economy, under the threat from North Korea, as a way to claim their political legitimacy (Han and Sharp 1997). The political leaders’ effort to create a shared discourse with the grassroots has been rather limited despite the latter’s persistent call for a democratic nation, politically and economically, in search of their personal and national identities, which make up integral elements of grassroots nationalism.
A good portion of Koreans from all age groups have developed a distaste for Korean nationalism, undemocratic regimes, and neo-liberal economic policy, demonstrated through many mass rallies. Some forms of Korean nationalism are considered outdated and irrelevant and this is a reason to suggest an “open nationalism” in the contemporary context, which can help Korea to overcome the problems resulting from divided Korea, millions of Korean diaspora overseas, and newly settled Koreans (Kim 2009: 42; Youn 2013). I contend that the dominance of the rhetorical top-down nationalism (Chang 2014) needs to be questioned and many call for open nationalism. Korean nationalism remains a strong force to hold together the Korean nation-state and its people. Top-down nationalism is, at times, undoubtedly essential for pertinent ideologies to settle and remain a significant part of a nation’s identity. However, it is also vital to have a good understanding of how the pertinent ideologies or top-down policies infiltrate into the lives of the people in the nation. Grassroots nationalism has sustaining power to have a lasting influence. Yet, there is a severe lack of an empirical understanding of grassroots nationalism in Korea. That is, although there have been continued grassroots and civic movements ever since the Korean War, a critical investigation of such movements in recent years is in need, especially to understand what the grassroots think about a series of notable social events which have much to do with political and economic democratization. Further, it is of utmost importance for the leaders to listen to the concerns at the grassroots in depth. This listening is a natural part of an advanced democracy (Dobson 2014). Also, it is critical to investigate what is in the “everyday minds” of the Korean people if the nation is to remain a coherent nation-state.
Since the end of the Korean War, most Korean presidents such as Rhee Syngman and Park Chung-Hee, Roh Tae-Woo, and Kim Young-Sam deployed nationalism as a measure to legitimize their political regimes (Kim 2016: 220–222). However, Kim Yung-Myung (2016: 222) points out that the kinds of nationalism deployed were generally not centred on the nation’s “independence, self-reliance, integration, expansion, and glory” (p. 230) or “political-economic nationalism” (p. 222). For example, Park Chung-Hee’s nationalism often promoted ultra-nationalistic sentiment, culture, and tradition (p. 222). Kim (2016: 222) points out that throughout Korean history nationalism has been low and nationalistic sentiment high and that there are two reasons for this: (1) toadyism in Korea’s relations with powerful neighbours and (2) pure-bloodism (Kim 2011).
Kim’s criticism of the studies of Korean nationalism is that the usage of the concept, nationalism, is too broad and this problem partially results from the adoption of the English word, nationalism, itself, which does not “properly distinguish between the nation, state, and citizenship which are all ingredients of nationalism” (Kim 2016: 247).8 The English word, nationalism, is translated in Korean as 민족주의, 국가주의 or 국민주의, of which the focal point is the nation, state, and citizenship, respectively (Kim, 2016: 225).9 As a result, Kim points out that past studies of Korean nationalism do not separate nationalism from nationalistic feelings and sentiment, and passion for the nation. However, in light of his own suggested definition of nationalism as an ideology in pursuit of a nation’s “independence, self-reliance, integration and glory,” everyday nationalism in operation among the ordinary people is very likely to incorporate the nation, state, and citizenship. Moreover, Kim’s subscription (or his desired form) of nationalism
8 In this book, the Korean nation-state and Korean state have been used interchangeably. 9 I am in complete agreement with Kim (2016: 229) that a blunt adoption of the use of the English word nationalism in the study of minjokjuui, gukgajuui or gukminjuui is problematic.
to the kind of nationalism that leads the movement towards “national independence, integration, and self-reliance” (p. 247) seems in line with or limited to a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up understanding of what nationalism is. In this respect, past studies’ adoption of the broad concept of nationalism had an advantage in seeking to understand everyday nationalism.
In brief, Kim raises the problems with the ways in which nationalism has been deployed by the elites and the scholars, blurring the boundary between nationalism and nationalistic sentiment. I argue that Kim’s definition of nationalism is elitist and makes it difficult to research and discuss everyday nationalism. In terms of everyday nationalism, nationalism cannot be distinguished from nationalistic feelings and sentiment, culture, and tradition as well as a passion for the nation. Kim’s argument seems to unintendedly downplay the voices of ordinary people and the possibility of what may be called “grassroots democracy,” resulting in “throwing the baby with the bathwater.” They are “part and parcel” of nationalism that can be manifested differently at different times by different members and people of a nation-state. After all, the grassroots’ expression of nationalism is far broader and deeper than the elites.
Calculated Nationalism
Before moving to discuss a critical realist view of nationalism, I wish to note a driving element in the operation of grassroots nationalism in South Korea. It is “calculated nationalism.” Blurring boundaries of the nation-states and new forms of political action have put the notion of citizenship in flux. What we have known as a citizen has faced a contradiction and an expansion in recent decades. For example, Donati (2016: 41) argues that what he calls “a transmodern (societal) citizenship is currently springing from a nascent global civil society rather than from the nation-state.”10 Donati (p. 64) adds that citizenship is not a matter to grant “from above,” but an actual experience—“the result of a bottom-up approach, i.e., originating in the subjects’ wills—of belonging to a number of relations governing
10 More specifically, Donati (2016: 63) notes, “Societal citizenship lays emphasis on the sociability and relational characters of the rights that concern it, since it consists of a number of primary and secondary rights and duties governing the individuals’ mutual relations. It highlights both the relational character of individual rights and duties and the rights and duties pertaining to the civil and civic forms of association.”
individuals, families and broader social groups as the subjects of citizenship in particular times and places” (my italics). That is, the subjects are not only governed by nationalism in particular times and places, but form and “practice” their own kinds according to their calculated needs as exemplified by many grassroots social and political movements in Korea.
There are diverse groups of people who will attribute their civil activities as essential elements of their citizenship such as artistic groups, advocates for the environment, advocates for gender equality, etc. However, it is increasingly becoming less prevalent that one’s citizenship is largely based on or related to the rights and duties required for the existence and operation of a nation-state. For example, when the Korean nation-state was assumedly built on ethnic nationalism, Korean nationalism was commonly understood accordingly. However, the influx of newly settled or naturalized “Koreans” into the boundary of Korean citizenship and the expansion of the national boundaries have significantly changed the context. Thus, the reunification of the two Koreas, because of their blood relations, does not make sense to the younger generation whereas it does to the older generation. In this respect, the younger generation’s nationalism is much more calculated than that of the older generation (Han 2018). In fact, so is it even to the older generation. The apparent coming of calculated nationalism in the politically free and economically affluent Korea is not an accident but an expected consequence. C. Brough Macpherson’s concept of “possessive individualism” sheds light on calculated nationalism (Cohen 1996; Macpherson 1964).
… the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. … Society consists of exchange between proprietors (Macpherson 1962: 3).
In the continuing process of Korean society shifting from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, the Korean people are increasingly finding their worth and value as the proprietor of their own skills and capacities valuable enough for exchange. In brief, Koreans are becoming more individualized and this is increasingly reflected in their membership of and representation of the nation-state with sovereignty. This is not to say such representation was previously non-existent, but that it is becoming more apparent in recent decades.
The rights and duties attached to citizenship have gone through changes especially in Europe and North America since the concept of citizenship was established after the end of World War Two (Donati 2016). From the viewpoint of a nation-state, on one hand, a “smooth operation of the citizen’s rights and duties through a relational management” has become an urgent and ongoing issue for most nations under the influence of globalization (p. 54). On the other hand, how an individual citizen perceives their civil, political, social, and human rights (p. 56),11 how economic rights are achieved, and how they can relatively easily meet their duties are serious matters. When citizenship was largely based on “ethnic nationalism,” Koreans were more willing to concede their rights but meet their duties. However, they now see their nation-state to be politically, economically, and internationally “competent” and their expectations of the nation-state in terms of their rights and duties have changed significantly. This is how the birth of calculated nationalism has come about.
What is the significance of calculated nationalism? The 2008 Candlelight vigil is noted as a turning point from which civil movements occurred due to their frustration over their immediate personal concerns, e.g., the consequence of consuming the beef affected by foot and mouth disease (Hong 2017), which implies that civil movements prior to 2008 might have been predominantly about national concerns or nationalism in the context of nation-building rather than an individual pursuit. The 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution is unique as it results from the combination of calculated personal as well as national concerns. For example, Noh Hyeong-Il and Yang EunKyeong (2017: 16, cited in Jung 2017: 261–262) argued that the attendance at the candlelight demonstrations was an effort in search of identities and is motivated by individualistic benefits.
Other related examples are as follows. First, during the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, North and South Korea attempted to form a unified women’s hockey team of North and South Korea as the North Korean team decided to join the game only a few weeks prior to the official play. It was for the sake of promoting a harmonious ethnic relationship between the two Koreas. Young people responded negatively to the removal of South Korean players for the sake of including North Korean players. The South Korean players’ hard work and right to hold onto their own participation were considered more important than advancing the North and South relationship. Second, Seon Dong-Ryul, the baseball team coach for the 2018 Asian Game, faced severe criticism for selecting the list of final players not strictly based on merit. Koreans are now much less likely to accept such unfairness. In brief, calculated nationalism refers to an ideology that
11 Donati 2000—this has been cited in Donati (2016: 55).
combines nationalism, national sentiment, and individualism for the sake of cultural and economic interests. Much in common with “calculated nationalism” is Emma Campbell’s “globalized cultural nationalism” with reference to the young Koreans’ adoption of universal values such as modernity and transnationalism in the context of emergent structural properties, e.g., globalization and neo-liberalism (Campbell 2016, ch.4). I contend that contemporary Koreans consider economic interests as important as their cultural values, and that calculated nationalism applies across all age groups in general.12 Cho Younghan’s (Cho 2020: 187) “individuated nationalism” is along the same line. Cho (2008) presents two sports personnel as “a national individual” and points out that the Korean economic crisis during the IMF’s intervention in the late 1990s offered Koreans the opportunity to “rethink the notions of nationalism and national development” (Cho 2008: 85). Similarly, the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution made a predominant proportion of Koreans ask, “Is this a proper nation-state?” This question also raises a fundamental question about the notions of Korean nationalism and national identities.
The Morphogenetic Approach
In my review of how nationalism can be best researched and adequately represent the viewpoints of the people of a nation-state, the scholars have noted that a fundamental issue embedded in the debate is rather about the debate on how social scientists can incorporate and deal with structure and agency in their understanding of the society (Hearn 2007: 671; Barnes 2001; Layder 2006). I now extend the relationship between structure/culture and agency to how one can examine grassroots nationalism and social movements.
Theoretically, there are two broad approaches to the reasons for the occurrence of large-scale civil grassroots movements: agential and structural. First, agential approaches incorporate the following three strands: (1) analysis of the participants, (2) political elites’ abuse of power and authority, and (3) the capacities of existing civil movements’ organizations (Heo and Yoon 2018: 144–146). Second, structural approaches measure the following: (1) the level of openness or exclusivity of the political system (e.g., the ruling party’s openness to opposition/minor parties), (2) the regime’s level of oppression and
12 Campbell (2016) argues young people developed negative attitudes towards reunification.
However, the North-South summit in 2018 showed otherwise.
instability, (3) the level of conflicts within the ruling regime, and (4) the level of alliances between social movement groups and other socio-cultural and economic elite groups (Heo and Yoon 2018: 144–147). However, the agential approach suffers from “a structural vacuum,” and the structural perspective ignores the morphogenesis of the people. While the agency of the participants can be analytically separated from the structure and culture (e.g., analytical dualism), an explication with one without the other is inadequate.
For example, empirically, there have been numerous and competent Korean publications explicating the origins of the Candlelight protests. What are the key strands of the study of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution? One notable is a “cultural turn.” Kim Sungmoon (2018) sees the Candlelight Revolution as an attempt to restore civil society in Korea in which people closely practice Confucianism as a moral and philosophical doctrine (p. 3). Kim contends that a central underlying idea of civil society in Korea is “neither economic interest nor liberal pluralism, concentrated on negative liberty and the right to freedom of association, but passion for democratic self-government” (p. 4). Undoubtedly, Confucian principles undergird democratic self-government. However, a Korean understanding that a Confucian democratic government has encouraged the candlelight holders to take the social action is open to debate and is largely “cultural.” In other words, Kim argues that the “oppositional, resistant, and rebellious civil society” has been an underlying source of the Korean democratization, and that Confucianism is the ideational engine of such a civil society (p. 5). I argue this cultural turn is insufficient to explain the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution, for example.
Here, I present a morphogenetic perspective, utilizing many competent studies and analysing protesters’ public speeches registered on YouTube and other (social) media outlets, with reference to calculated nationalism. The latter is an attempt to acknowledge that a specific context of any large-scale protest needs to be taken into account. In general, Korean scholarship in nationalism has been at the centre of social sciences due to the geopolitical context of the Korean peninsula, based on its colonialism, the division of the Korean peninsula after the Korean War, and rapid westernization and globalization. Critical and insightful studies have been produced, addressing poignantly some of the features as continuing to affect the formulation of Korean nationalism (e.g., Shin 2006; Seo 2004; Han 2016b). However, newly emerging forces within the nation and beyond the national boundary have crept into the dynamics of Korean politics, economy, and culture. For example, the younger generation’s higher expectations in an affluent Korea as well as their disappointment and anxiety in the neo-liberal context have profoundly affected their perception of Korean nationalism. I am proposing a systematic approach to understanding contemporary Korean nationalism as a social movement.
Critical Realism and Analytical Dualism
According to critical realism, the depth of social reality is ontologically stratified, and there are three different domains: the real, the actual, and the empirical. The real domain represents causally operative structures, at the level at which causal laws and mechanisms operate and engender socio-economic phenomena in certain ways. The actual domain represents events produced by causal laws or mechanisms (i.e., the real domain). Most of these events may not be easily observed, but a small number may be. The latter make up the empirical domain (Mingers 2004; Han 2016b: 16), which we can measure or observe.
How are the grassroots bringing about changes to Korean society in recent years? This is an empirical question that I attempt to understand based on a critical realist approach which is a broader camp of morphogenetic approach. Three assumptive terms in understanding social change and movement are structure, culture, and agency, which are the three ingredients of explaining social change (Porpora 2013: 27). Society is composed of two parts, i.e., structure (material) and culture (ideational). While structure and culture are often conflated, they are not the same, but conceptually different in sociological studies. A social scientist’s theoretical and methodological standing is based on their understanding of the mediation between structure/culture and agency. Here, I follow a critical realist standing in that personal emergent powers’ mediation between structure/culture and agency leads to either reproduction of or change to the society. Structure, culture, and agency hold their own unique and varied emergent powers. These structural, cultural, and personal emergent powers, which are necessarily related components of social actions, are causally effective on each other. Structural and cultural emergent powers enable and constrain individuals and their use of personal emergent powers to moderate such influence on their life chances (Archer 2000; Wimalasena 2017). Archer’s morphogenetic approach enables us to “address the issue of separate but entangled processes in a way that does not lead to central conflation” (Clegg 2016: 501). Therefore, a social analysis should incorporate the separate elements of structural, cultural, and personal emergent powers individually, and “their association with each other should be understood and explained” (Wimalasena 2017: 396). Let me elaborate on theoretical assumptions on the key terms, structure, culture, and agency.
Structure refers to systems of human relations among human actors occupying social positions—relations such as power, competition, exploitation, and dependency, ethnocentrism, welfare policy. Thus structure precisely refers to “relations among social positions that human actors occupy” (Porpora 2013: 27; Archer 1995: 178; Porpora 2015: 99).13 Uneven relations of authority, political or economic power may lead to corruption, bribe, or abuse of such power (e.g., gapjil, forced labour). This critical realist definition of social structure allows for “emergent material” relations as follows. According to Porpora (2007: 425),
… although all human relations are established and maintained by some human activity, emergently material relations exist—with independent effects of their own—even apart from agents’ knowledge of their existence. Examples include relations that—even without agents’ knowledge—are exploitative or that otherwise place agents’ interest in conflict.
This definition is closely in line with a Marxist political economy perspective in recognizing that human competition to acquire better and more material resources as part of living their life to protect themselves from nature or to elevate their socio-economic or cultural positions in comparison with the rest of the society. This point can be reiterated by “Marx’s insight that we are committed to continuous practical activity in a material world, where subsistence is dependent upon the working relationship between us and things, which cannot be reduced to the relations ‘between the ideas of men’” (Archer 1995: 291).
Culture is “the realm of intersubjectivity, ideas, and ideational influences” (Archer 1996: xiii, cited in de Souza 2014: 146). To put this differently, culture refers to ideas, theories, beliefs, and values (Horrocks 2009: 51) or the “corpus of existing intelligibilia—by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone” (Archer 1996: 104).14 In a realist tradition, Archer (1998) makes three propositions in regard to culture: “(1) the nature
13 Broadly speaking there are four different conceptions of social structure: “(1) patterns of aggregate behaviour that are stable over time; (2) lawlike regularities that govern the behaviour of social facts; (3) rules and resources; and (4) systems of human relations among social positions” (Porpora 2007: 422).
14 Archer makes “an analytically important distinction between Cultural System and the Socio-Cultural. The Cultural Systems refers to the existing intelligibilia: the ideas that can be expressed at any one time (whether these are actually expressed or not)” (Clegg 2016: 500). A best known example is Marx’s notion of “relations of production.” Donati (2016: 54), in his definition of structure, includes “the various cultural, normative, political and economic dimensions of society.”
of ideas is that they are real; (2) the sharing of ideas is contingent; and (3) the interplay between ‘ideas’ (cultural system) and ‘groups’ (socio-cultural interaction or level) is dynamic and accounts for cultural elaboration (modification of existing ideas and/or introduction of new ones)” (cited in de Souza 2014: 146). Unlike structure, if anyone questions where culture resides, it is ultimately in the shared consciousness people carry around in individuals’ heads (Davies and Harre, 1990, cited in Porpora 2013: 32).
Agency refers to the persons in a society, i.e., who may take the roles of agents or actors. Agent is one who exerts power, or has the power to act. Actor is one who takes part in a situation to bring about change to or reproduce structure or culture. While culture is what people collectively create, agency is what they individually do with it (Porpora 2013: 27).
Making no distinction between structure, culture, and agency or conflating between culture and structure, or conflating between structure and agency is a shortcoming of the theories put forward by Bourdieu and Giddens (1981, 1984, 1991). Giddens, for example, redefines structure as “rules,” thereby conflating structure into agency (Porpora 2013: 26). Social constructionist perspectives of self and identity (e.g., Althusser 2000; Butler 2006; Rose 1996) downplay “individual characters and unique subjective responses,” producing an inadequate understanding of the intersections between the individual and society (Layder 2006: 274; Hearn 2007: 671). Shortcomings of other strands of theories include downwards conflation (e.g., sociological holism, structuralism, methodological collectivism), whereby individual agents are dissolved into structure or culture,15 or upward conflation (methodological individualism), whereby the opposite occurs (Archer 1995: 34, 46; Porpora 2013: 28, 32). Similar to the problems of downward conflation and methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), Anthony Cohen (1996) notes that the “nation” as a grand unit of analysis does not say anything specific about the individual members of a nation-state. Instead, Archer proposes analytical dualism, arguing that “structure and agency are dialectically related but ontologically and analytically distinct” (Porpora 2007: 425). Neither structure nor agency has primary control over the other. Porpora (2013: 27) further illustrates distinctions between culture and structure by comparing the ideal with the material, the subjective with the objective, and notes that the former in each pair falls in the realm of culture and the latter in the realm of structure.
15 Other studies focus predominantly on the broader context and structure of the society (Heo and Yoon 2018).
Persons are more than just passive occupiers of the capacity to be reflexive about their emotional needs and life chances. They have material interests and idealistic beliefs, out of which they can actively express their social concerns to translate them into action (Porpora 2013: 28). That is, a person’s properties and powers, through internal conversation, actively mediate between agency and structural/cultural circumstances (Porpora 2013: 28). This ignites a start for social change. Having now introduced critical realist definitions of structure, culture, and agency, what are the ways they are interlinked to each other in bringing about social change? Human beings are constantly working together collectively as they intendedly or unintendedly contribute to reproducing or changing the structure or culture of society. This is how they can maintain or modify their collective identities as components of “maintaining or transforming the socio-cultural structures which they inherit at birth” (Archer 1995: 255).
As noted already, personal emergent powers’ mediation between structure/culture and agency takes a crucial role in bringing about change or no change. Individuals in society vary from one to another in regard to the extent they exert influence on society for a change. They can be described as persons, agents, and actors as follows.
Persons, Agents, and Actors
While the individual members necessarily inherit the social structure and culture, which enable and restrain any activities of the social agents, it is the latter who deliberate on the reproduction or change of the society and exert influence on the society to take an effect. Archer calls this continuing process of deliberation, internal conversation. The significant role of society in this process is undeniable.
People are social beings. Society is a necessary precondition for people’s existence and also forms an essential part of their internal deliberations, which are the key mechanism for the agency to relate to the social structure and vice versa (Archer 2003: 117). Archer reiterates that “without nullifying the privacy of our inner lives, our sociality is there inside them because it is there inside us” (Archer 2003: 117). The significance of the internal conversation as personal emergent power (PEP) is that it mediates between structure and agency, i.e., mediating “the impact of the causal powers of society” (structural emergent properties (SEPs) and cultural emergent properties (CEPs)) upon each one of us as agency (p. 118). Unpacking this mediating process, one should be aware of how agency responds to, and exerts its influence on, the causal powers of society (structural and cultural emergent properties). Archer’s solution is to make a distinction between agents, actors, and persons—a stratified model of people, which I elaborate on below (Archer 2003: 118).
Humans are all involved in the internal conversation, alternating subject and object, i.e., talking with, listening to, and responding to themselves (Archer 2003: 121). This inbuilt capacity is a way for humans to engage in maneuvring their life in society and is manifested through reflexivity. This is because society is consistently part of what constitutes us the human, and thus society naturally enters the internal conversations (p. 122). It is an inherent human capacity to reflect upon “our own objective social circumstances and the relationship of these circumstances to our personal projects” (p. 122). The characteristics and the ways to engage in internal conversation differ from person to person. Archer presented four broad types of reflexivities: Communicative-, Autonomous-, Meta-, and Fractured reflexivities, depending upon what their ultimate concerns are (p. 122). These reflexivities are also the processes of “becoming the kind of Actor whose role is the social expression of our personal identities,” actively rather than passively (p. 122). Personal identity can also induce causal efficacy, and, for instance, has the capacity to transform our initial agential status and continue to modify our subsequent placements over a period. As persons, we can also mobilize “the causal power to personify our roles as Actors in a unique manner, to modify them incrementally, or to find a role personally wanting once we have come to occupy it” (p. 122).
A Stratified Model of “People”: Agency, Actors and Persons
In order to engage in unpacking the mediation through the internal conversation between structural/cultural emergent properties and agency, Archer (2003) introduces a stratified conception of the human being, i.e., persons, agents, and actors. A crucial question one can ask in differentiating the stratification of humans is as follows; “who is actively personifying any social role in a particularistic manner and thus participating in active role-making rather than passive role-taking” (Archer 2003: 121)? This question is the key to who or what different/specific persons make of their initial involuntary placement as social agents (primary agents), then sooner or later make of their voluntary placement as social agents (corporate agents), and consequently to what they do as voluntary social Actors (p. 121). To re-iterate basic points, Agent is one who exerts power, or has the power to act. Actor is one who takes part in a situation.16
16 https://wikidiff.com/agent/actor
Agency
First of all, agents refer to “collectives sharing the same life-chances” and an agent refers to a person holding a position who receives parts of scarce resources available in the society. That is, everyone is an agent (p. 118).17 However, not all the agents are the same in terms of the level of privileges that they enjoy. All the members of a society are “involuntarily placed in a collectivity” who share the same life-chances and they are referred to as primary agents (p. 118). As the primary agents grow and mature over time, they sooner or later find themselves or voluntarily locate somewhere along the spectrum ranging from the least privileged to the highly privileged. The circumstances of primary agents at the time of birth condition their potential as to what type of Actors they would become, their choice of becoming a particular type is a voluntaristic act. Their aim is to express their ultimate concerns and values through a role(s) and translate them into action (pp. 118–119).
Corporate agents are the ones who are active with clear sets of interest and consequently mould the context for all actors (Archer 1995: 260). Primary agents inhabit the context that Corporate agents form for all actors. This act of inhabiting the context reformulates the social milieu that Corporate agents want to control (p. 260). Primary agents tend to be passive while they can grow to be Corporate agents, pursuing social movements.
Agents’ level of knowledgeability of reality differs, depending upon their life trajectories. Some agents are well informed about the conditions of the society in which they live and others have “defective, deficient and distorted knowledge” (Archer 1995: 252). The level of knowledgeability is likely to influence which agents turn out to be actors and what type of them.
Actors are the formerly agents who self-consciously conceive of, and take up, a role(s) of social projects in which they thought worthwhile investing their effort. The roles will necessarily accompany social identity which represents who they are (Archer 2003: 118). Thus, taking up “roles” or socially expressing our personal identities is a distinctive feature of Actors (Archer 1995: 276; 2003: 122). Social movements generally involve struggles among actors holding social positions and representing multiple parties, supported by differing power and resources (Porpora 2013: 31).
Persons refer to human beings with common humanity. They are the anchorage upon which the Social Agent and the Social Actor are based (Archer 1995: 280–281). Continuity of consciousness is an integral part of a person (p. 283). Whether as an Agent (becoming a member of social
17 That is, one’s existence without the need of resources is not possible.
movements) or as an Actor (personifying roles in specific ways), it is the same person with self-awareness who is concerned with constraints and enablements in what they do, and the same person with self-consciousness is aware that their reactions today will affect what they need to deal with tomorrow. This is how the person constantly questions “the meaning and explanation of social action” they engage in (p. 282). An implication for society and its change is part of the persons’ consciousness that they own; and the persons’ own expectations create the sense of responsibilities as their own that “someone ought to do something about it” (p. 283). Unless the persons have a sense of responsibility, no change in the society will be brought about. Emphasizing the continuity of consciousness, Archer (p. 287) notes that being human is to exist as “the body plus,” “the plus” of which refers to consciousness.
In addition to (1) self-awareness, every person has (2) personal and (3) social identities, all three of which are properties and powers of a person (Archer 2003: 119). Basic human identity is fundamental to a person and personal identity is formulated first and prior to our sociality. “Social identity is emergent from personal identity” (Archer 1995: 284). Pointing to the pre-existence of personal identity, Archer contends that living persons necessarily entail “properties of persons which are non-social nature. … Homo sapiens constitute a natural kind, which as such is fundamentally irreducible to the imprint of society” (p. 287).
Personal identity (as a personal emergent property) refers to one’s achievement in relation to their necessary involvement in their facing three realities—nature, practice and society (Archer 2003: 120). Personal identity is concerned about our “physical well-being in the natural order, about our performative achievement in the practical order and about our self-worth in the social order” (p. 120). Thus, personal identity precisely represents “what we care about most and the commitments we make accordingly” (p. 120). Social identity is “a sub-set of personal identity” and refers to an emergent property and power of a person, deriving from their social concerns and roles (p. 120).
The stratified conception of the self can provide insights into the question of the ways in which how Agency engages Structure/Culture in order to initiate social movements. Archer’s (p. 121) following questions are such questions that realist research is bound to ask, again:
Who is actively personifying any social role in a particularistic manner and thus participating in active role-making rather than passive role-taking[?] This is the key to what different persons make of their initial involuntary placement as social agents and to what they do as voluntary social Actors (Archer 2003: 121, italics in original).
In brief, it is the personal emergent powers (PEPs) that initiate the internal conversation that mediates between structure and agency, thus either morphogenesis (social change) or morphostasis (social reproduction) occurs (Archer 2003: 121). To put it differently, the mediation between structure and agency resembles “how external experiences interact with internal deliberations to co-determinate our life-courses” (2003: 123). Our modified life-chances have an effect to modify us as individual humans, but also exert influence on structure, i.e., double morphogenesis.
“How society is both part of our constitution and part of our internal conversations” (Archer 2003: 123–124) is at the heart of the stratified conception of the self—agents, actors, and persons, which is further illustrated with reference to a person’s life trajectory. Once a person is born and until she matures, she remains disengaged from other things/resources and other people. The properties of this self/person (“I”) are private rather than public, and individual rather than collective. The mature self realizes the involuntary nature of social characteristics in terms of how she acquired them from her family and adjacent social context. These “object” properties constitute part of a primary social agent (“me”) as well as the collectivity who are similarly privileged or under-privileged. The primary agent still remains private rather than public, and is reluctant to take any collective action. Corporate agents (“we”) are now willing to participate in social action, collectively and publicly. Actors (“you”) take leader roles to deal with social concerns as a way of expressing the most pressing and ultimate concerns (Archer 2003: 124). This stratified conception of a person is a continuing cycle to complete and restart through an ongoing internal conversation, which leads to a change in a person and exerts influence on the society—double morphogenesis.
Social Change and Morphogenesis: Structural, Cultural, and Group Elaboration
A society consists of particular structural properties that characterize its socio-political and economic elements as affecting the life chances of the people. Structural or cultural properties (which make up structure or culture respectively) are not static but continue to go through a change. Structural properties are not what contemporary actors can create in a short span of time through manipulation of material resources or human-created governance (Archer 1995: 138). Structural properties, which have been passed on to contemporary actors, can face internal or external stimulus by “material existents” (raw resources) or “human instantiation” (rule-governed). The stimulus may be intended or unintended. Thus, consequently produced are emergent properties, which will exert influence towards forming structural properties. As I am interested in understanding social change from the viewpoints of actor-centred changes to structural changes, it is crucial for the actors to be critical of current structural properties which may be translated into desirable or undesirable, or “neutral” social phenomena. What ignites actors to identify social phenomena or their related structural properties problematic enough and lead them to engage in a social movement? What kinds of capacities or experiences are required of actors? According to Daniel Little (2012), the overall process of social movement and change is as follows:
Agents are formed within a set of social structures—norms, language communities, power relationships. The genesis of the agent occurs within the context of these structures. On a larger time scale, the structures themselves change as a result of the activities and choices of the historically situated individuals who make them up.18
Summarizing this from the viewpoints of actors as a set of cycles over a period of timeframes could be as follows: socio-cultural conditioning of groups → group interaction → group elaboration (Archer 1995: 248). Archer contends that people are necessarily stratified in terms of their “prior structural conditioning and individual differences between persons,” which enables the researchers to account for “the regular patternings of wants in different parts of society and of the personal differences which make resulting actions something quite different from mechanical responses to hydraulic pressures” (p. 252). As the agency is involved in group elaboration, this elaboration which is social in nature, necessarily involves and accompanies structural and cultural elaboration. It is worth noting that human agency is always full of creativity, depending upon a particular time and place (Joas 1997; Porpora 2013: 29).
Broadly speaking, social change is a result of a dialectical relationship between human agency and the contexts in which those agents are placed.
The contexts include structure, culture, and physical surroundings (Porpora
18 Little, Daniel. May 23, 2012. “The Social World as Morphogenesis,” https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/05/social-world-as-morphogenesis.html, accessed January 22, 2019.
2013: 29). There are a few kinds of change we can observe. First, new inventions such as the computer, motor vehicle, and smartphone have brought about changes to capital-labour relations, marketing, distribution methods, divisions of labour, cultural consciousness, and other prevalent culture and social relations. Thus, a change initiated by the agency who was situated in an “earlier” context now brought about changes to structural and cultural context (Porpora 2013: 30). Second is the type of change that is brought about with the change of culture, i.e., ideas, theories, beliefs, and values, which can influence architecture. This refers to a kind of paradigm shift. For example, the Protestant ethic has brought about how Christians have approached the economy in their everyday life (Weber 1958 (1930)). The third kind of change may take place due to an accumulation of knowledge and skills within a sector. The change could be much less dramatic as it can take place within a genre or an existing framework. For example, a meso-level of change such as a post-Fordist production regime in the 1980s accompanying the incorporation of new information technologies and increased white-collar services has not led to an alternative to capitalism, but notable modifications to it including increased inequality (Porpora 2013: 30).
Having discussed double morphogenesis—individual agents going through changes themselves and also exerting emergent powers on the society—as well as the changes occurring to the structural and cultural contexts, how do these social changes get elaborated? Individuals’ and Groups’ Elaboration of Their Values
The question of what forms the centre of the key features in explaining a social phenomenon has given birth to diverse social theories and new ones are still being created. As noted earlier, I consider the agency and structure debate a key to explaining and understanding social phenomena. Critical realist debate on agency and structure is prevalent and well accepted by social scientists although there are diverse approaches to this debate. Individual agency and social structure are not separate from each other, but are closely intertwined in the ways in which a social phenomenon is formulated. Thus, the agent and structure are indispensable parts of one mechanism that produces a particular social phenomenon. A social phenomenon impacts on, as well as is influenced by, other social phenomena, which continue to bring about changes to the relevant social phenomena. Empirical observation of individual agents only is limited in revealing a full picture of a social phenomenon. It is pointless to contemplate a complete structural control over an individual agent or an agent’s complete independence from the
Figure 2.1 The Elaboration of Structure, Culture, and Agency with Reference to the Morphogenesis of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution
Structural, cultural and socio-economic conditioning (leading to ideational and discursive shaping): Political and economic structure with much legacy of dictatorship and exploitation of workers (Tasks: Identify some internal & necessary (i.e., emergent) consequences from contingent unintended consequences; Work out internal/necessary and contingent relations within the structural properties; As a result of internal or external factors, are there incompatibilities/contradictions or complementarities?)
----------------------------------------------
T1
Socio-cultural and group interaction (leading to ideational and discursive reshaping or reinforcement): Actors mobilize a large proportion of people (persons and primary/corporate agents); Using social media; Large scale candlelight meetings accompanying music and performance; Broadcasting the meetings through YouTube; Putting pressure on the government (Unintended consequences may serve the interests of some agents/actors; What are the modes of interaction in structural and cultural systems?: Defensive, Concessionary, Competitive or Opportunistic)
-----------------------------------------------------------
T2 T3
Structural, cultural and group morphogenesis or morphostasis (leading to the elaboration of reproduction): Impeachment of
President Park Geun-Hye; Presidential election called; New momentum built to democratize the politics and economy;
Intention to re-configure the future of the nation19
--------------------------------------------------------------
T4
Source: Based on archer (1995: 264)
given structure (Lee 1994: 184). Individual agents’ actions are enabled as well as restrained by the given structure (Bhaskar 1979).19
Despite the close intertwining between the agent and the structure, critical realists have analytically separated agent from structure in order to illustrate how a social phenomenon is produced in an open system of a society. This section is to explicate a critical realist perspective on how Korean grassroots or individual agents as a group elaborate on their social and political concerns as they are engaged with bringing about new social and economic order, i.e., a new structure, with some reference to the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution.
One of my key tasks in the book will be to describe and analyse the complexity of the (inter-)relationship between the structure(s), culture(s), and agents of the position-practice system of the topic under examination—the
19 Elaborated structure is concerned with “the production of common goods as relational goods” (Donati and Archer 2015: 198–228; Donati 2016: 55).
impeachment of President Park Geun-Hye and build the momentum to construct a new nation. In analysing data, an important task is to identify the components and emergent properties of structure, culture, and agency:
SEPs (structural emergent properties): “those internal and necessary relationships which entail material resources, whether physical or human, and which generate causal powers proper to the relations itself” … “distributions of resources, roles, institutional structures, social systems” (Archer 1995: 177, cited in Horrocks 2009: 52).
CEPs (cultural emergent properties): These are properties of cultural system—“relations between the components of culture” (i.e., ideas/ theories/values/beliefs)—and independent of the socio-cultural “relations between cultural agents” (Horrocks 2009: 51, 53). Ideational morphogenesis occurs through a process of socio-cultural interaction of diverse agents and actors who formulate ideas on the basis of the real or perceived transformative potential of the political unfolding due to the misconduct (Horrocks 2009: 50).
PEPs (people’s emergent properties): “the capacities of component members (affecting their consciousness and commitments, affinities and animosities) and exerted causal powers proper to their relations vis-à-vis other agents or groups” … “distributions of resources, roles, institutional structures, social systems” (Archer 1995: 177, cited in Horrocks 2009: 54).
Why do the individual members engage in national affairs and social movements? What are the political, economic, and socio-cultural changes that the individual agents (i.e., agents and actors) desire? Reproduction (status-quo, morphostasis) or change (morphogenesis) results from what agents and actors do to the structure and the culture. The above-given Figure 2.1 is a description of the overall change occurring with reference to structure, culture, and agency. Paying specific attention to the agents, what are the ways in which individual agents go through the changes themselves and get involved in the morphogenetic sequence? In other words, how do diverse groups of individual agents become elaborated? Archer suggests ten steps of the morphogenetic cycle of Corporate and Primary agency (see Archer 1995: 264–265). As shown in Figure 2.1, there are three broad phases: (1) Socio-cultural conditioning of groups (phase T1); (2) Group interaction (phase T2 to T3); and (3) Group elaboration (phase T4).20
20 It is not my intention to illustrate these phases in the empirical chapters, but to inform the readers of what is involved in the morphogenetic cycle of Corporate and Primary agency, which
The first phase includes the initial three steps. First, all agents are (dis)privileged with different levels of structural and cultural properties, which sort out Corporate Agents21 from Primary Agents at the start of each cycle. Second, Corporate Agents challenge the given situation and start engaging in maintaining or remodelling the current socio-cultural system and its institutional operations, i.e., making changes whatever they could before full effects come about. Primary Agents continue their life within the socio-cultural system that Corporate Agents have maintained or remodelled. Some Primary Agents may or may not like the emerging directions of change. Third, all agents are diverse in terms of their level of prior interaction with other agents, and consequently, so diverse is the level of knowledge.
The second phase has a further four steps. Fourth, Corporate Agents’ interaction alters the structural and cultural context of Primary Agents whose own dispositions and learning progressively modify the prior environment. Fifth, continuing interaction between Corporate and Primary Agents over time in pursuit of social change redefines them. Perhaps a good number of Primary Agents reject existing or “traditional” relations and/or beliefs and values. Sixth, Corporate and Primary Agents’ actions, sometimes in conjunction with the media, pressure groups, or political figures, could bring about changes to the relevant local and/or national policies, which enable as well as restrain further actions to bring about social change. That is, access to some political or economic benefits or equality that were not obtainable by particular groups in society is now achieved or created such potential. Seventh, an increasing number of Primary Agents being aware of the state of the problems (e.g., inequality, exploitation, human rights) can take actions through minimalist reaction, disorganized co-action, or organized interaction, depending upon the given institutional context in which they are placed. A consequence is aggregate effects.
The third phase contains further three steps. Eighth, Corporate Agents’ interaction generates emergent properties, thus, for example, Primary Agents produce aggregate effects. Ninth, Social Agency is elaborated societally and sectionally, which leads to a significant shrinkage of the group of Primary Agents, who “become incorporated or transformed into Corporate Agents, thus swelling this category” (Archer 1995: 265). Tenth, social change is achieved as “the resultant of aggregate effects produced by Primary Agents
will be part of personal emergent properties (PEPs) in each empirical chapter.
21 For example, knowledgeable social activists or university students engaging in student movements.
in conjunction with emergent properties generated by Corporate Agents and thus does not approximate to what anyone wants” (p. 265).
The above-mentioned three phases and ten steps do not occur in a linear fashion in an actual social movement; they are much more dynamic in an open system of society. For example, in the lead up to the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution, some steps of the first two phases might have been in progress for a while, involving Primary and Corporate Agents while it is also possible that other Primary and Corporate Agents took action at the start of the Candlelight Revolution—the third phase.
Research Methods
In my research activities, I have always valued media representations as they effectively and uniquely capture the given structure, culture, and individual agency of a society at a particular time. What sort of data is acceptable to be the sources of social scientific analysis can be controversial even within a particular discipline. Media reportages and especially the audience perspectives which they have expressed may not be the same as the interview-based data in an artificial setting. All the settings are artificial including the views expressed on social media. However, what is useful is diversity, not the approaches to include one and exclude another. Therefore, any set of data should be used cautiously.
News reports and editorials represent how media interpret and react to the current and major issues in the given context (Le 2010). As the media is ubiquitous, it has become the vessel of information and the representations of what the media consumers including primary agents and corporate actors have in mind regarding a particular social phenomenon or social movement. Media platforms such as YouTube, internet news, and blogs often record many offline activities. The quality of these is as genuine as interview data and they make an important source of data for social scientific analysis (Bryman 2016: 558). Survey or interview data can be collected through the use of tools designed according to the researchers’ needs, and the interview data can be affected by social desirability. However, the data available through the internet are not free of bias or pollution one way or another but are independent of the researchers. The internet-based data and news representations also cover a broad range of demographics and geographical diversities. Some of the data such as the public speeches made at the social movements are primary data and others such as internet news are semi-primary or secondary. The semi-primary data are valuable in their own right as they indicate the reporters’ biases as well as social desirabilities. Indeed, media narratives offer the researchers extensive data for analysis and enable in-depth descriptions of emergent social structural, cultural, and agential properties to understand social phenomena (Han 2016b: 4–6; Bryman 2016).
Traditional surveys are not always adequate for the study of nationalism (Malešević 2018: 556). The survey methods tend to heavily rely upon relatively narrow and socio-historically “decontextualized, instant, snapshots of popular attitudes” (p. 556). A deeper level of analysis of structure and culture is necessary. As Malešević argues, “many more social indicators than the traditional surveys” are required (p. 556) and I will take into consideration socio-historical, economic, and political contexts. For example, what individual speakers at public rallies or news reportages express needs to be understood in the context.
Yves Deloye emphasizes the “invisible” features of nationalism. For example, national identity and nationalism may be hidden within “various, ambiguous lines, based on largely unconscious processes … without easily identifiable actors” (Deloye 2013: 617–618; cited in Kaufmann 2017: 12). According to Deloye, living in an environment with nationalistic traditions and cultures, listening to music with national characteristics, and purchasing national brands of machines may be one’s stronger indication of nationalism than attending nationally significant days of celebration (Kaufmann 2017: 12). These suggest that nationalism is embedded in the everyday lives of ordinary people in a nation-state, which partially justifies my search for Korean nationalism from how the grassroots express their views on the prospect of reunification, Park Geun-Hye regime’s influence peddling, Japan’s forcibly recruiting Korean labour during the Second World War, Abe’s trade provocation against Korea, and employers’ unfair treatment of workers.
I have applied the principles of grounded theory methodology to data analysis, undertaking open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Open coding involves breaking down and analysing words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs and developing their properties and dimensions. The aim is to identify concepts, events, and incidents, which are then grouped to form a category(ies). A category is discovered when concepts are compared one against another and appear to be closely related to a similar phenomenon (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Han 2000: 253). A rigour of analysis involves careful comparisons, looking for similarities and differences between incidents, events, and other instances of phenomena.
Axial coding involves making connections between major categories or between a category and its subcategories by examining the conditions and context under which an event occurs and by examining the consequences of any relevant action and interaction. In practice, open coding and axial coding are often carried out alternatively and simultaneously. Selective coding involves the process of selecting the core category, i.e., the central phenomenon under investigation for each chapter and systematically linking or integrating it to other categories, which leads to an analytic version of the descriptive narrative of the central question under investigation (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Han 2000: 254). Given the large amount of data and analysis over a long period for this project, rather than in a concentrated period, NVivo has been particularly helpful for the purposes of a systematic analysis.
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