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From Tradition to Consumption: Construction of a Capitalist Culture in South Korea, by Dennis Hart. Korean Studies Dissertation Series No. 2. Seoul: Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2001, 202 pp. (ISBN 89-88095-44-8; Cloth, 20,000 won).
Reviewed by Robert Hassink
University of Bonn
Hardly any country in the world has industrialised as quickly as South Korea. Its combination of spectacular economic performance and shared growth therefore has attracted ample attention from international scholars and policy-makers. Since the 1970s Korea's success story has become a main subject of research in development economics. Countless books and articles have been published on the Han River Miracle and, more recently and fewer in number, on the causes of the economic crisis at the end of the 1990s. Very few publications, however, deal with the decline of pre-industrial society and the emergence of a new culture characterised by mass consumption as a consequence of South Korea's fast economic development. Dennis Hart's From Tradition to Consumption: Construction of a Capitalist Culture in South Korea fills this gap.
From Tradition to Consumption portrays the shift to cultural modernity as the product of state policies on industrialisation as well as the reasoned response of people to rapidly shifting forms of labour and everyday life. Keys to this transformation from agrarianism to modernity have been the drastic alteration of the family from a unit of production to a unit of consumption and the redefinition of gender roles in Korea. The pressing need for production and consumption to bolster economic development have resulted in the creation of a middle-class family marked by the white-collar male and the urban housewife. These new social roles make the process of consumption central to the family and promote the act of consumption as the basis for modern identity.
The book starts with a relatively long preface in which Hart sets out the main aims, methods and structure of the book, explaining his choice of Korea as a case study to focus on cultural change as a companion of capitalist industrialisation and his emphasis on empirical data from the 1980s. He points out the emergence of a middle class during that time and the disturbing effects of the economic crisis at the end of the 1990s. The author's theoretical approach is informed by cultural Marxism.
Chapter One, "Materialist Culture and Korea," explains the main theoretical concepts and terms used in the book. Hart accepts the definition of culture as a set of inherited beliefs and perceptions used by people under similar circumstances to live with one another and that capitalism both forces people to dismantle traditional sociocultural forms and provides a recipe for their recreation, especially through consumption. Hart justifies the focus on a single country as a case study by noting that although relations between culture, capitalist society and consumption may be theorised in general, "the final form, the speed with which this remaking proceeds, its exact magnitude and the levels of resistance all vary depending upon the specific culture, history and legacies of a society" (p. 9).
Chapter Two sets out Korea's historical legacies, discussing yangban, the patriarchal family system, and the Confucian basis for correct social relations. Hart emphasises the differences between yangban and commoner families and the roles played by women in these families. Chapters Three, Four and Five describe and analyse industrialisation and modernisation in Korean society. These chapters discuss migration patterns from the countryside to large cities, emerging urbanisation induced by industrialisation, and the consequent shift from home production in villages to domestic consumption in large cities. The author also elaborates here upon the rise of the middle class and role of men and women in modern Korean society. Hart's main argument here is that the middle class is defined by consumption and material possession and that men and women have a different relationship to the market, as producers and consumers, respectively. The male realm is now located outside the household metaphorically instead of outside the house physically as in pre-industrial days. According to most South Koreans, the proper place for married women remains the home, which causes much frustration among housewives. Chapter Six examines the impact of advertising on mass consumption. Hart argues that advertisement makes the behaviour of mass consumption "appear normal while educating people in the rituals and purchases which are appropriate to their material existence" (p. 156). The concluding Chapter Seven contains both a summary of the study as a whole, but oddly, a detailed section on South Korean politics.
In 2002 this volume was recognised as a "Distinguished Academic Book" by South Korea's National Academy of Sciences, the country's most prestigious scholarly organisation. One might therefore expect the book's strengths to exceed its weaknesses. However, I do not find this to be the case. The book undoubtedly fills an important gap in academic work on South Korea, but its mixture of quantitative and qualitative evidence is not presented in a robust and convincing way. First, much of the empirical material is outdated, as it stems from the 1980s. Although the author attempts to justify his selection of this time period, South Korea's culture and society change so rapidly that empirical evidence rapidly becomes outdated as well. Secondly, at some points, particularly in Chapters Three, Four and Five, this empirical base is itself at times thin and presented in a partial and disordered way. For example, pages 61-62 present figures and a table about the middle class, but without defining how the term is to be understood; page 98 offers two overlapping tables on divorce rates that contain contradictory data; page 99 presents research results based solely on discussions with six women. Thirdly, a random check of about half the references turned up many errors of citation: some sources mentioned in the footnotes are not listed in the bibliography; at other times the year of publication in the footnote does not correspond with the one in the bibliography. Occasionally footnote citations refer without a date to an author with several publications in the bibliography, leaving the reader to guess which reference is meant. In addition, tables appear without any citation of source. Such deficits are not acceptable in a published PhD thesis, let alone a work that has been recognised as a distinguished academic book.
Nonetheless, despite its shortcomings, the book succeeds in presenting interesting and creative ideas on the relationship between economic development and culture in South Korea. Hart's ideas will also encourage readers to think further about factors that might have facilitated or hindered the shift from traditional to mass consumption culture, but which have not been dealt with in the book, such as the role of religion, the concept of compressed modernity (Chang 1999), and the lack of indigenous social revolutions in South Korea.
References:
Chang, K-S. (1999) "Compressed modernity and its discontents: South Korean society in transition, "Economy and Society 28, 30-55
Citation:
Hassink, Robert 2002
Review of From Tradition to Consumption: Construction of a Capitalist Culture in South Korea, by Dennis Hart. (2001)
Korean Studies Review 2002, no. 16
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr02-16.htm
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