The corporate killing movement in South Korea: a critical realist analysis of social structure and collective agency

Abstract

ABSTRACT South Korea has one of the highest occupational injury fatalities among the OECD countries over the past decades. It was in this context that the ‘Corporate Killing’ Movement was initiated in the early 2000s with the aim of radically reframing recurring fatal workplace injuries as a social problem by claiming that ‘a worker’s death is a corporate killing’. By drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism in combination with framing literature, this paper aims to trace the emergence and development of collective agency in the Corporate Killing Movement in Korea, paying particular attention to the implications of the formation of a united front of labour and a labour-civic alliance. We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 key informants from multiple sites of action, including civil society, organized labour, political party, and governments, all of whom have engaged in the Corporate Killing Movement over the past years. Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, this study identifies structural constraints affecting the collective agency of workers against fatal workplace injuries, and specifies the emancipatory, liberating power of collective agency to transform the very structures in which they were embedded. The research findings are also expected to inform future public health activism of how collective agency in a relatively narrow area of activism can gain momentum through the formation of an alliance with heterogeneous groups of agents. This is achieved by establishing a shared understanding of a common causal mechanism at the structural level that cuts across different issues.