The time politics of autonomy and governance inside life culture of the 1980s
The prelude to neo-liberalism in which everyone is an agent of self-improvement
Focusing on the fact that in the 1980s the 24-hour day was actively developed and used as a political, economic, and cultural resource, author Kim Hak-seon contemplates the time politics of South Korea in the 1980s through the concepts of governance, time as a resource, and the time system of nation-states. Discourse on South Korea in the 1980s usually focuses on either the political conflicts between opposing political powers or the economic developments that often interacted in complicated ways with those conflicts. This book however revitalizes the competition between nation and citizen, politics and daily life, through the time politics of the decade. In particular, it does a wide survey of the various time systems of the 1980s—the abolishment of the curfew, the media and time monitoring policies of the new military rule, daylight savings, and national holidays—and the public’s reaction to these time systems. At the same time, it also performs concrete analysis of the various aspects of the conflicts surrounding the temporality of multiple agents. And finally, it paints a convincing picture of how the psychology of ‘lack of time’ and ‘time pressure’ came to be so widely spread throughout society today, while offering useful implications and the historical background necessary to conceptual neo-liberal concepts of time.