The Culture of Industrial Relations in Korea: An Alternative Sociological Approach

Abstract

In the social science on development, modernization, and related subject matters, there has been a debate between the so-called culturalists and the structuralists or institutionalists on the relative importance and relevance of cultural factors in explaining social phenomena. Obviously, the culturalist camp places special emphasis on culture, whereas the other camp would rather focus its analysis on the more objective historical elements of structural characteristics and institutional arrangements (Berger, 1988). For a more fruitful understanding of social affairs, however, one should not confine oneself to either of these extreme viewpoints. What is more important is how methodically and rigorously one's position is substanti ated. While my approach in this paper may be called culturalistic in the sense that I shall analyze certain significant phenomena of industrial rela tions in Korea by exploring the cultural background and sources of labour management behaviour, I am not trying to explain them with cultural factors alone. The purpose of such an approach is to bring culture into relief and show how certain cultural factors might affect industrial rela tions in a given structural and institutional context. By doing this, one could gain a fruitful grasp of the very complex dynamics of industrial rela tions in a country like Korea, in which rapid transformations are taking place in almost all sectors of social life. When culture is explored for a better comprehension of some social phenomena, one can benefit more than expected by drawing upon the indigenous cultural cognitions, orientations, and evaluations relative to the subject matter at hand. In recent years, some social scientists in non Western academic circles have endeavoured to establish what is known as alternative discourse in social science through the indigenization of academic disciplines. This is not an easy task, but some useful ideas and experiments have so far emerged (Alatas, 1996; Kim Kyong-Dong, 1996a; 1998). This is an additional consideration that is given here in my approach. When one attempts to provide some meaningful explanations of certain social phenomena, one immediately confronts the fundamental difficulty of