Search

This article attempts to explore the political economy of Korea's industrial restructuring which has led to a postfordist-like regime of accumulation. To do this, this paper takes the Seoul metropolis as a case study. The underlying assumption is that the postfordism of Korea obtains its specificity through the metropolis of Seoul where a host of enabling conditions for postfordist regulation are concentrated. By looking into the process whereby Seoul is becoming the locale of Korean postfordism, a more serious concern is to examine the consequences which the metropolitanization of postfordism creates for urban society. It is assumed that in the course of postfordist urbanization, Seoul's social and political life has been to a great extent enriched, but at the same time is deeply schizophrenic due to its being exposed to two contrasting ultra modern and premodern socio-economic dynamics simultaneously. This urban schizophrenia derives from the processes in which Korea's postfordism operates within the context of a semi-peripheral capitalist economy. Dualization along a new class line has become a crystallized feature of postfordist Seoul's urban life.