South Korea's Saemaul (New Village) movement

Jung Won Sonn & Dong-Wan Gimm (2013): South Korea's Saemaul (New Village) movement: an organisational technology for the production of developmentalist subjects, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 34:1

This paper uses the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and apparatus (dispositive) to understand how the state can use an organisational technology to penetrate everyday life through hegemonic discourse. With a case study of the Saemaul (New Village) movement, a rural development initiative in South Korea in the 1970s, we analyse how the state used half-civilian, half-bureaucratic agents called Saemaul leaders to inscribe the discourse of developmentalism in the peasants’ bodies and souls. This article claims that organisational technology plays a critical role in the diffusion of hegemonic discourse during rapid structural transformations such as the industrialisation of South Korea.