Schooling, Work and Subjectivity

Abstract Most analyses of resistance, subjectivity, and identity formation have been developed out of research on predominantly ‘western’ industrialized nations. This research has been full of insight, but it has limited our understanding of the importance of historical specificity, of conjunclural relations, and of the ways class, gender, and race/ethnic histories and experiences take on specific meanings in different contexts. By focusing on one of these ‘different contexts‘—South Korea and its recent moves to institute career education and to have more students identify as manual workers—we wish to show how such specificities work to produce particular forms of resistance, subjectivity, and identity. In the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the dominant faction of the power bloc has tried to reconstitute work subjectivity through education as part of its ongoing hegemonic project. This has been done in order to deal with economic stagnation and to recover the bloc's political and ideological power which was seriously weakened by the democratic and labor movements of the 1980s. This paper examines the ways in which administrators, teachers, and students in Korean commercial high schools responded to the policies and work subjectivities that were newly articulated by the dominant group. Data used in this paper were gathered in an ethnographic study of two commercial high schools in Korea. The paper combines perspectives from both structural and poststructural theories to explore the complexities of these responses.