Browsing by Author "Jeong, Da Un"

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A study of Saemaul Undong in South Korea: Making self, memory and development
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Jeong, Da Un; Roy, Srila
Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement) was South Korea’s state-led rural development project, launched in 1970, under Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian regime. Studies of Saemaul Undong have been deeply polarised, especially along ideological lines, either praising the movement for empowering rural communities, or dismissing it as a tool of political propaganda. While Saemaul Undong has received global attention as a development model in the last two decades, the literature on Saemaul is still limited to judging its success or failure alone. Drawing on a Foucauldian analytic of governmentality and memory-work method, this thesis reveals how Saemaul Undong was not simply imposed by the South Korean state, but also embraced and implemented by rural communities. Taking a triangulated approach of complementing an analysis of state archive materials with participants’ life histories and cultural repertoires of the media, this study explores the experiences, memories and emotions of rural villagers in their engagement with Saemaul Undong and its ‘technologies of the self’. It finds that Saemaul Undong, using visual guidelines and discourses of nation building and ideal citizenship, created a space for the constitution of new types of selves and new ways of relating to the selves, in the long shadow of war, famine and colonialism. This thesis contributes to the fields of development, social movements and state-building in the global South by revealing how power and governance in state-led development projects are played out at the micro level of the self.
The Korean path? Corporate social responsibility and Korean transnational corporations in South Africa
(2016) Jeong, Da Un
This research is a conceptual inquiry into the orientation and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Korean transnational corporations (TNCs) in South Africa. Through a case study of Mana Technologies’ CSR programme, the research aims to explore Korean TNCs’ conceptualisation of CSR and their rationale behind the engagement in CSR initiatives. The research found that Korean corporations in South Africa draw on the ‘business case’ for CSR in their conceptualisation of CSR. Therefore, CSR orientation, policies and practice of Korean TNCs, to some extent, align with those of TNCs globally. Notwithstanding some similarities with global CSR practices, a Korean path to CSR seems to exist in South Africa. While the Korean CSR programmes in South Africa are underpinned by rational motivation, they institutionalise individuals with seemingly caring and genuine heart in the implementation of their CSR programmes. Thus, CSR effectively becomes a mechanism to shift the image of Korean corporations from greedy representatives of global capital to a caring corporate citizen genuinely committed to the development of society.