Global Knowledge Capitalism, Self-woven Safety Nets, and the Crisis of Employability

Abstract

In the global economy, workers are increasingly expected to cultivate an unprecedented repertoire of abilities in an immaterial world of work. This signifies a limited shift in capitalist expansion in the post-Fordist world in relation to workers' employability therein. A model of worker subjectivity was introduced into Western management and psychology discourse surrounding employability in the 1960s and 1970s. In a developed, post-industrial global economy, management has begun to view workers less as cogs in the wheel or less as rational and predictable entities than as dynamic individuals with the capacity for symbolic reasoning, intelligence, independently generated ideas, and even the desire to work for the sake of self-fulfilment! The Fordist workplace was expected to become a distant memory and organisations were to become “learning organisations” rather than the hierarchical, Dickensian workfloors of the manufacturing age. Nevertheless, rather than offering freedom from the iron cage of capitalism, workers face a contemporary form of coercion that substitutes political representation with a set of expectations and limitations intended, ironically, to result in workplace emancipation. Emphasis on employability of individuals through workers' creation of self-woven safety nets demonstrates an elite-led project to reduce government responsibility for employment welfare. In order to make this claim, the article looks at the case of education policy in South Korea after the economic crisis of 1997.

The author would like to acknowledge the continuing support from fellow members of the International Political Economy Group (IPEG), a working group of the British International Studies Association. These individuals include Louise Amoore, Andreas Bieler, Paul Cammack, Phil Cerny and Nicola Phillips, whose comments and advice have made the writing and publishing of this piece possible.

Notes

1. Raj Aggarwal, “Technology and Globalization as Mutual Reinforcers in Business: Reorienting Strategic Thinking for the New Millennium”, Management International Review, Vol. 39 (1999) pp. 83–104.

2. Ibid.

3. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-run Companies (London: Harper & Row, 1982).

4. See, for example, Jean-Claude Usunier, International and Crosscultural Management Research (London: Sage, 1998).

5. I will not comment extensively on discussions of the meaning of culture as applied to rapidly transforming business environments in conjunction with informationalisation movements, but these ideas are expanded in, for example, Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke (eds.), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002). The culturalisation of economies' workers has also been documented by such authors as Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Scott M. Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994); Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1999); Paul du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture/Cultures of Production (London: Sage, 1997); Laurence Ray and Andrew Sayer (eds.), Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn (London: Sage, 1999).

6. Hugh Wilmott, “Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1993), pp. 515–552.

7. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005).

8. Ibid., pp. 113–117. Thrift talks about the “new economy”, which was first defined in the 1980s and became a kind of brand in itself to describe a picture of restructuring based around the rapid escalation of information- and technology-driven societies.

9. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1999).

10. C.S. Myers, Industrial Psychology in Great Britain (London: Cape, 1927), quoted in ibid.

11. Rose, op. cit., p. 119.

12. Ibid., p. 112.

13. UK Competitiveness White Paper, Aims: Government and Business in the Knowledge Economy, No. 1.5 (1998), available:<http://www.dti.gov.uk/comp/competitive/wh_ch1_1.htm > accessed September 2005. Amoore writes that experts condone technology as a structure and an agent, and attempt to universalise a belief in the “best” technology, and its attainment as a primary goal. See Louise Amoore, Globalisation Contested: An International Political Economy of Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Louise Amoore, “Globalisation, the Industrial Society and Labour Flexibility”, Global Society, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1998), pp. 49–74.

14. Alessia Contu, Christopher Grey and Anders Ortenblad, “Against Learning”, Human Relations, Vol. 56, No. 8 (2003), pp. 931–952.

15. Phil Brown, Ant Hesketh and Sarah Williams, “Employability in a Knowledge-driven Economy”, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2003), pp. 107–126 (p. 114).

16. Michael Perelman, Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

17. UNESCO and the ILO have been the leaders in this dialogue. As early as 1945, UNESCO's member states declared that they believed in “full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge”. Perhaps this is the basis for a renewed interest in workers' knowledge management and self-directed knowledge acquisition. See, for example, ILO, Changing Role of Government and Other Stakeholders in Vocational Education and Training, Training Policies and Systems Branch, Employment and Training Department (Geneva: ILO, 1999), available:<http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/tve/nseoul/docse/rcrolgve.html> (accessed October 2005); Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo (ed.), Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives (Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education, 2002); World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000, Education for All (EFA), available:<http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=365> (accessed October 2005).

18. Young-jun Kim, “Direction of Lifelong Education Policy for 2004 of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources”, Paper presented at UNESCO 21st Century Dialogue international forum “Building Knowledge Societies”, Seoul, Korea, July 2004.

19. Jae Boon Lee, “Strategy for Developing Lifelong Learning in Korea”, International Seminar on the Lifelong Learning Society and Knowledge Revolution in the 21st Century, Jeju, Korea, September 2004.

20. Interview held at the KEDI in Seoul, Korea, on 10 April 2005.

21. International Monetary Fund (IMF), Stand-by Arrangement: Summary of the Economic Program, Republic of Korea (5 December 1997), available:<http://www.imf.org/external/np/oth/korea.htm > (accessed October 2005).

22. K.H. Hong, “Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge-based Society: Issues and Lessons in Korea”, Speech delivered at “Making Lifelong Learning a Reality”, International Policy Seminar of IIEP/UNESCO and KRIVET (Paris: UNESCO, 2003).

23. F.K. Park and J.H. Lee, The Social Impact of the Financial Crisis: Labour Market Outcomes and Policy Responses in Korea (Seoul: Korea Labour Institute, 1999).

24. Kim Dae Jung, Inaugural Address, 1998. Quote from Dal Yong Jin, “Socioeconomic Implications of Broadband Services: Information Economy in Korea”, Information, Communication and Society, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2005), pp. 503–523 (p. 508).

26. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

25. Business Korea, Facing the Nation (Seoul: Business Korea Ltd, 1998), p. 7.

27. Stephanie Strom, “Labour Cutbacks Pose Problem for South Korean Economic Recovery”, New York Times (24 February 1998) p. 4.

28. Ibid.

29. C. Rowley and J.S. Bae, “Globalization and Transformation of Human Resource Management in South Korea”, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), pp. 522–549 (p. 534); I. Ledemel and E. Dahl, “Public Works Programs in Korea: A Comparison to Active Labour Market Policies and Workfare in Europe and the USA”, in F. Park, Y.-B. Park, G. Betcherman and A. Dar (eds.), Labour Market Reforms in Korea: Policy Options for the Future (Seoul: World Bank and Korea Labour Institute, 2001), pp. 196–214 (p. 205).

30. D.J. Park, J. Park and G.-C. Yu, “Assessment of Labour Market Response to the Labour Law Changes Introduced in 1998”, in F. Park, Y.-B. Park, G. Betcherman and A. Dar (eds.), Labour Market Reforms in Korea: Policy Options for the Future (Seoul: World Bank and Korea Labour Institute), pp. 125–150.

31. Ibid.

32. Author's interview with a Korean Federation of Metalworkers union leader, BASF Yosu site, Seoul, Korea, 14 August 2002.

33. Korea International Labour Foundation (KOILAF), “Changes in the Employment Structure: Recent Developments, Current Labour Situation in Korea” (Seoul: KOILAF, 1999), available:<http://www.koilaf.org/publication/link16.htm#4 > (accessed October 2005).

34. S.B. Uh, “Employment: Structure, Trends and New Issues”, in Labour Relations in Korea (Seoul: KOILAF, 1999), pp. 50, 51. At a KOILAF-organised meeting for foreign CEOs on 15 April 2005, attended by the present author, the Minister of Labour apologised for Korea's inability to reach international standards for HR flexibility.

35. This information was gathered from the author's interview conducted with Dr Ji Hee Choi, researcher at KRIVET in Seoul, Korea, 9 August 2002.

36. KRIVET, Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Korea (Seoul: KRIVET, 2000), p. 8.

37. See Phoebe Moore, “Revolutions from Above: Worker Training as Trasformismo in South Korea”, Capital and Class, No. 86 (2005), pp. 39–72.

38. C.S. Ihm, “VET Reform and Lifelong Learning in Korea”, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1999), pp. 309–321.

39. Tae-Dong Kim, “Challenges of Globalization to Korea”, in Korea in the OECD Perspective: Shaping Up for Globalization (Seoul: Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, 2000).

40. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 18–23.

41. Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1981), pp. 126–155.

43. Ibid.

44. UNESCO, “Establishment of a Long Term Programme for the Development of TVET”, General Conference 30th Session, Paris, 1999, available:<http://66.102.7.104/search?q = cache:tsYZI- 3e0bwJ:www.unevoc.unesco.org/annex/30c17e.pdf + UNESCO + international + standards + korea + lifelong + learning&hl = en&client = safari > (accessed October 2005).

42. UNESCO, Country Report: Education for All, the Year 2000 Assessment, available:<http://www2.unesco.org/wef/countryreports/korea/contents.html#cont > (accessed October 2005).

45. Min Hee Kim, “Employers and Workers are Partners: New Labour Culture Seeks Co-prosperity through Coexistence (Ministry of Labour)”, The Korea Herald (Wednesday 24 November 1999), p. 18.

46. Dr Kim, Dae Hwan, Korean Minister of Labour, “Labour Policy Directions 2005”, KOILAF-organised breakfast meeting in Seoul, Korea, 15 April 2005 (meeting attended by author).

47. Since 1997, most government ministries in Korea have organised supplementary research institutes of a similar calibre to KRIVET.

48. Information available on the KRIVET homepage, available:<http://www.krivet.re.kr/krivet-htm/eh/index.html > (accessed October 2005).

49. Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1983), pp. 162–175 (p. 173). Trasformismo is a government strategy of assimilation of views or habits through conjuncturally imposed changes. Gramsci wrote about this concept in the context of the Risorgimento and competing parties' process of amalgamation, but the concept also involves material projects which minimalise the chances for workers' revolution; see Moore, “Revolutions from Above”, op. cit.

50. Aggarwal, op. cit.

51. World Bank, World Development Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998/99).

52. In October 2004 education experts met to settle the agenda for this decade. The International Experts Meeting on Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Bonn, Germany, published Learning for Work, Citizenship and Sustainability, available:<http://www.unevoc.unesco.org/sustainable/index.htm > (accessed October 2005).

53. UNESCO (1999) Final Report, Second International Conference on Technical and Vocational Education (Paris: UNESCO), p. 29.

54. K. Lee, “New Direction of Korea's Vocational Education And Training Policy”, Paper presented at the International Conference on TVET, Adelaide, Australia, 2001.

55. Young-jun Kim, “Direction of Lifelong Education Policy for 2004 of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources”, Focus IV: Colloquium on the Lifelong Learning Society, UNESCO and Korea, Newsletter of the Korean National Commission for UNESCO (2004), available:<http://www. unesco.or.kr/unescokorea/past_no3/index.html > (accessed October 2005).

56. Lee, “Strategy for Developing Lifelong Learning in Korea”, op. cit.

57. For a more specific discussion of what is expected of the worker in the Korean knowledge economy, such as individualism, flexibility and LLL, see Phoebe Moore, Revolutions from Above: Transnational Class Struggle and the Case of South Korea (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming January 2007). Another good overview of the specific changes to the culture of the Korean workplace is found in Lin Bao Yun's “Labour, Capital, and the Globalisation of the Korean Economy”, in James Lewis and Amadu Sesay (eds.), Korea and Globalization: Politics, Economics and Culture (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), pp. 36–60; and for a historically contextualised series of events linking education and training policy with development goals see “South Korea” in David Ashton, Francis Green, Donna James and Johnny Sung, Education and Training for Development in East Asia: The Political Economy of Skill Formation in East Asian Newly Industrialised Economies (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 53–77. For a discussion of Korean labour struggle as a result of industrialisation see Hagen Koo, Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), and for an excellent case study of management issues and labour uprising in one chaebol, see Seung-Ho Kwon and Michael O'Donnell, The Chaebol and Labour in Korea: The Development of Management Strategy in Hyundai (London: Routledge, 2001).

58. Mats Alvesson and Stanley Deetz, Doing Critical Management Research (London: Sage, 2000), p. 11.

59. Peters and Waterman, op. cit.

60. Dan Schiller, “How to Think about Information”, in Vincent Mosco and Jane Wasko, The Political Economy of Information (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 27–44.

61. Bob Jessop, “The State and the Contradictions of the Knowledge-driven Economy”, in John R. Bryson, Peter W. Daniels, Nick Henry and Jane Pollard (eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 63–78.

62. Soonghee Han, “Knowledge Revolution and the Emergence of Lifelong Learning: The Postmodern Condition”, Paper presented at the International Seminar on the Lifelong Learning Society and Knowledge Revolution in the 21st Century, Jeju, Korea, September 2004.

63. UNESCO, “Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge”, Science for the 21st Century: A New Commitment, World Conference on Science, Budapest, Hungary, 26 June–1 July, available:<http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/declaration_e.htm#knowledge > (accessed October 2005).

64. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations”, op. cit., p. 39.

65. KOILAF, Labour Relations in Korea (Seoul: KOILAF, 1999), p. 108.

66. Derrick L. Cogburn, “Globalization, Knowledge, Education and Training in the Information Age”, Centre for Information Society Development in Africa, Working Paper 2005, available:<http://www.unesco.org/webworld/infoethics_2/eng/papers/paper_23.htm > (accessed October 2005).

67. Malcolm Knowles, The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, 3rd edn (Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1984), pp. 8, 9.

68. Marcia L. Conner, “Andragogy and Pedagogy”, Ageless Learner 1997–2004, available:<http://agelesslearner.com/intros/andragogy.html> (accessed October 2005).

69. Malcolm Knowles, Andragogy in Action. Applying Modern Principles of Adult Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984).

70. Malcolm Knowles, The Modern Practice of Adult Education. From Pedagogy to Andragogy, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Cambridge Adult Education, 1980).

71. Ibid., pp. 9–12.

72. Information attained during the author's interview with Dr Lee, Jae-Boon, Director General of the Center for Lifelong Education, KEDI, 19 April 2005.

73. Paul Stoneman, “Introduction”, in Paul Stoneman (ed.), Handbook of Economics of Innovation and Technological Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), pp. 1–13 (p. 3).

74. Jeremy Howells, “Knowledge, Innovation and Location”, in John R. Bryson et al. (eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy, op. cit., pp. 50–62 (p. 52).

75. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

76. Howells, op. cit., p. 58.

77. ILO, op. cit., p. 4.

78. Contu et al., op. cit., p. 942.

79. Other critiques of education reform for human resource initiatives include Soong-hee Han, “Is the Lifelong Learning Era Emerging?” p. 53, Journal of Lifelong Education, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002); and Hee-su Lee, “Exploring the Meaning of the Transformation from Learning Society to Learning Economy” pp. 4–5, Journal of Lifelong Education, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2001).

80. The concept of “individuality” is contested as a culturally appropriate subjectivity in every context. Rosenau states that individual power is often misunderstood because advocates have “equated skills with information … have thought in terms of individuals acting alone rather than collectively … have underestimated the extent of the authority crises that are part and parcel of the transformations presently sustaining global turbulence”. James N. Rosenau, “The Skills Revolution and Restless Publics in Globalized Space”, in Michel Girard (ed.), Individualism and World Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 44–68.

81. Republic of Korea (ROK), Human Resources Development Strategies for Korea: Human Resources Knowledge New Takeoff (Seoul: ROK, 2001), p. 22.

82. OECD, Knowledge Management in the Learning Society: Education and Skills (Paris: OECD, 2000).

83. UNEVOC, “Restructuring TVET: Current Approaches” (2002), available:<http://www.unevoc.unesco.org/donors/background/restructtvet.htm > (accessed October 2005).

84. Samuel S. Kim, “Korea's Democratisation in the Global–Local Nexus”, in Samuel S. Kim (ed.), Korea's Democratisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 39.

85. Martin Kenney and Richard Florida, Beyond Mass Production: The Japanese System and its Transfer to the U.S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Richard Florida, “Capitalism in an Age of Innovation-mediated Production”, Paper presented at the 4th Annual International Symposium on the Management of Technology: Regional Development in a Global Environment, Montreal, 13–14 October 1993.

86. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 123.

87. This information was gathered from the author's interview conducted with Dr Mee Sook Kim, researcher at KRIVET in Seoul, Korea, 14 August 2002.

88. Nigel Thrift, “Performing Cultures in the New Economy”, in Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke (eds.), op cit., pp. 201–233.

89. Ibid., p. 225.

90. UNEVOC, “Learning for Work, Citizenship and Sustainability”, Web site of the International Experts Meeting on Technical and Vocational Education and Training, Bonn, Germany, 25–28 October 2004, available:<http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php–URL_ID=38169&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html> accessed September 2006.

91. Castells, op. cit.

92. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 3 Vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968).

93. Amoore, Globalisation Contested, op. cit.