INTRODUCTION
Compressed Modernity and Its Structural Risks

1 The Theme and Purpose

The compressed realization of developmental, institutional, social, and cultural goals in many postcolonial nations has simultaneously been a historical process of structurally rendering their peoples and societies to confront particular difficulties, contradictions, and jeopardies that accrue to the contexts, conditions, and manners of such compressions. South Korea, despite its globally renowned performances in industrial development, political democratization, and sociocultural advances, has not been exempted from such hard historical and structural realities of compressed modernity, which is defined as:

Compressed modernity is a civilizational condition in which economic, political, social, and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner with respect to both time and space, and in which the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements leads to the construction and reconstruction of a highly complex and fluid social system. Compressed modernity can be manifested at various levels of human existence - that is, personhood, family, secondary organizations, urban spaces, societal units (including civil society, nation, etc.), and, not least important, the global society. At each of these levels, compressed modernity necessitates people's lives to be managed intensely, intricately, and flexibly in order to remain normally integrated with the rest of society. Compressed modernity is thereby subjected to a mutual escalation effect among such different levels.

(Chang, K. 2017a)

None of South Korea's achievements in compressed modernity can be clearly categorized as success, if not failure. If any, they have bravely or effectively incorporated economic, technoscientic, social institutional, cultural, and ecological risks as the basic conditions of developmental and other compressions. This is evident in that endemic political crises, frequent financial and industrial predicaments, widespread labor displacements, worsening intellectual and cultural confusions, and even radical symptoms of demographic meltdown have accompanied South Korea's globally distinct march in national development and modernization.

The current book aims to present an integrative critical account of South Korea's compressed modernity, focusing on various manifestant and latent risks accompanying its distinct risk-based developmental and other transformations, and also appraises its common structural conditions, shared with many other supposedly "successful" postcolonial nations. It thereby purports to universally configure compressed modernity's generalizable risk properties. This book has been prepared as a companion book to the author's previous book, The Logic of Compressed Modernity (2022, Polity Press; also published in Korean, Chinese, French). The two books will complete the author's lengthy effort at establishing an original theoretical-cum-analytic paradigm in studying postcolonial societies' social and developmental ascendance and its structural costs, with special attention to the exemplary South Korean case. Like The Logic of Compressed Modernity, this work builds upon critical scholarship on South Korea (and many other similarly situated postcolonial nations) as a sociological field and on compressed modernity as a theoretical framework. Its approach is critical both in the academic and social intellectual senses. Its critical scientific contributions to the comparative modernities debate, institutional and cultural sociology, political economy of development and social policy, and so forth, will also serve useful social intellectual functions in freshly rethinking and reforming various unforeseen predicaments of compressed modernity and development.

In an earlier article (published in a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology, 2010, edited by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande), I explained compressed modernity as internalized reflexive cosmopolitization in order to point out a modern and/or late-modern society's compressive exposure to and incorporation of spatially (civilizationally) and temporally (historically) boundless influences and resources of knowledge, technology, information, culture, ideology, capital, political power, and so forth. Accordingly, compressed modernity on the one hand assumes a historically and regionally universalistic nature and, on the other hand, incurs literally endemic social, ideational, institutional, financial, ecological, and other risks, whether or not each concerned society finds or judges itself to be successful in its reflexively or reflectively conceived goals of transformation. (See the next section for distinguishing between "reflective" and "reflexive.") Those societies in which collective transformative proactivism is distinctly intense and effective, and thus compressed modernity appears distinct by all standards, may be duly expected to generate and manifest particularly diverse and complex risks. To name a few in the late-modern context, South Korea, China, and the like have impressed the world with uncoincidentally parallel symptoms of encouraging developments and disturbing risks.1

This book has been written to systematically elucidate such risks of compressed modernity, mostly in the concrete sociohistorical context of South Korea, a country on which most of my earlier writings on compressed modernity have focused. As a related outcome, it will offer various sociological and historical implications of compressed modernity for the Beckian world of risk society (Beck 1992, 1999, 2011a), thereby helping to complement Beck's unfinished intellectual evolvement in exhaustively comprehending risk society and its metamorphosis, from the national to the European (or world regional) to the global level, and from the modern to the late modern, to the now late late-modern stages. This possibility will offer a critical step forward for theoretically and analytically bridging between "reflexive modernization" and compressed modernity.

This study on various risks of compressed modernity in the South Korean context, as well as under the broad postcolonial and cosmopolitan conditions, methodologically adopts the strategies of analytic induction and triangulation. While deductive explanations may be derived from the conventional history and social sciences to deal with separate elements of various components of compressed modernity and its risks, the structural relationship or order among these components can be addressed only by relying on analytic induction with regard to historical realities. This analytic strategy

employs in a self-conscious and disciplined way the same strategies we see used in everyday life and in sophisticated historical explanation. Yet it has a more explicitly analytic orientation. It begins with thoroughly reflected analytic concerns and then seeks to move from the understanding of one or a few cases to potentially generalizable theoretical insights capable of explaining the problematic features of each case .

(Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 36-37)

Relatedly, it may often be very economic to flexibly reanalyze empirical results produced from those studies which happen to deal with subjects associated with compressed modernity and its risks, albeit, from possibly different theoretical or empirical interests. As to data collection, the strategy of triangulation is adopted, in order to complementarily use various quantitative, qualitative, archival, and secondary data as they are logically placed and integrated in the analytical narrative of each chapter.

2 Modernity as Risk(s): Historico-Social Realities and Theoretical Problematics

In theoretical and intellectual terms, (classic) modernity as risk was most emphatically elucidated by Max Weber, a Prussian scholar-intellectual and statesman, whose fundamental legacy has been manifested in numerous "neo-Weberian" schools of critical social theory. His analysis of social rationalization as embodied in bureaucratic principles and organizations incisively pointed out the "iron cage" of rationally processed and controlled social life, in which the so-called "means-end reversal" - that is, the procedural formalities-substantive purposes reversal - is routinely normalized (Weber 1948, 1968). Perhaps, not coincidentally, a distinct group of German intellectuals and academics (including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas) have influentially elaborated on Weber's prescience in order to reveal and warn modern society's variously regressive tendencies in suffocating, not liberating, citizens and communities under the rigidly authoritative, or even authoritarian, systems of social control and administrative governance.2

In more recent decades, Emile Durkheim's critical concern on modernity has increasingly been reiterated and elaborated on, amid the widespread decline or degeneration of civil society across Western societies, not to mention postcolonial societies elsewhere. Durkheim's thesis on the organic solidarity, or intangibly contractual interdependence among autonomous socioeconomic subjects in the modern era, does not imply that such social order is automatically constructed if individuals (and private firms) are left to themselves to pursue random inclinations and interests (Durkheim 1933, 1972, 1979). In fact, it was Durkheim who most crucially underlined the...