Colloquium in Jan. 2023
Hyunji Kwon (Professor, Department of Sociology at Seoul National University, South Korea)
Over the last 30 years, the labor market structure in South Korea has experienced dramatic changes particularly in the occupational composition and the employment norm. In these changes, an increasing number of young professionals have played a vital role.
The changes in the occupational composition, characterized by the drop in manufacturing jobs and increases in the number of knowledge-economy professions, suggest a different perspective from the conventional discourse on a declining middle class brought on by the recent rapid rise of digital economy. In this perspective, the recent changes in the occupational composition could imply increases in the fraction of those sharing middle-class life styles, the expansion of the middle class.
However, today’s expansion of the professional middle class is in tandem with the expansion of precariousness, unlike in the last century that guaranteed the life security of the middle class. These changes may also bring about increases in the heterogeneity of the middle class. This study examines the heterogeneity of the young middle class and inequalities in the psychological resources such as resilience that are crucial to survival in this precarious era.
