Realities of Generational Cleavages, Representations of Generational Discourse : A Qualitative Discourse Historical Analysis of the Genealogy of Discourses on Inter-Generational Inequalities (세대균열의 현실, 세대담론의 재현: 세대불평등 담론의 유래에 관한 질적 담론사 연구)

Jin-Wook Shin (신진욱); Eun-Hye Cho (조은혜)

Realities of Generational Cleavages, Representations of Generational Discourse : A Qualitative Discourse Historical Analysis of the Genealogy of Discourses on Inter-Generational Inequalities

Civil Society and NGO
2020, 18(1), pp.49~99
Publisher : The Third Sector Institute
Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general > Other Social Science in general
Received : April 12, 2020
Accepted : May 24, 2020
Published : May 31, 2020

Jin-Wook Shin ¹, Eun-Hye Cho ¹

¹중앙대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

As a response to the current trends that the discourses of inter-generational conflict and inequality is overwhelming in the media, this paper, on the other hand, illuminates the reality of generational cleavages in South Korean social structure and politics on the basis of previous studies, and, on the other hand, traced the semantic structures and the discourse historical processes of the generational discourses that have been highlighted in the major daily newspapers. The results of this study are as follows. First, the generational cleavages in the 2000s do not show a consistent feature in diverse aspects including employment, income, welfare, ideology, value orientation, and voting behavior, but have a more complex structure in which the structural positions and the attitudes of different birth cohorts vary at each level. Second, the discourses of ‘386’ generation and ‘youth’ generation in the mass media have spread an image of reality that distorts and oversimplifies the actual generational cleavages in South Korean society. The discourses on the ‘young 386’ elites, which emerged in the late 1990s, transformed into the hate discourses against the ‘progressive 386’ from the era of Roh Moo-hyun administration, and then extended into the hate discourses against the ‘386 generation’ in the sense of an entire birth cohort.

KEYWORDS

generation, cleavage, discourse, inter-generational inequality, discourse history, discourse analysis

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