South Korea's Saemaul (New Village) movement: an organisational technology for the production of developmentalist subjects

Abstract 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. Résumé Ce travail s'appuie sur les notions foucaldiennes de « gouvernementalité » et de « dispositif » pour analyser la façon dont l'Etat emploie les technologies d'organisation pour pénétrer la vie quotidienne des citoyens à travers les discours hégémoniques favorisant le développement. Les auteurs utilisent comme cas d’étude le mouvement Saemaul (mouvement du nouveau village), une initiative créée par le gouvernement sud-coréen pour encourager le développement rural dans les années 1970. Les auteurs analysent, en particulier, le rôle des agents, à la fois civils et politiques, dans la transmission du discours au sein de l'esprit et du corps des paysans. Les auteurs constatent que les technologies d'organisation étudiées dans l'article jouent un rôle essentiel dans la diffusion des discours hégémoniques soutenant le développement et l'industrialisation.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement

• Publication date

  2013-03-01

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/02255189.2013.755921
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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