The Historical Making of Collective Action: The Korean Peasant Uprisings of 1946

Shin, Gi‐Wook

doi:10.1086/230455

Cited by 37 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Whether the movements involve students, women, racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities, and whether they involve peace, ecology, or justice themes, all have important historical predecessors that span at least the twentieth century and sometimes reach much further back into the nineteenth century. Hence, there is more continuity between supposedly old and new social movements than is typically implied (Johnston, Larana, and Gusfield 1994;Johnston 1994;Larana 1994;Shin 1994;Taylor 1989). The term also suggests a false dichotomy between new movements and old forms of labor organization that obscures compelling evidence for the new social movement character of many nineteenth-century labor movements (Calhoun 1993;Tucker 1991).…”

Section: What's New About New Social Movements?mentioning

confidence: 98%

New Social Movement Theories

Buechler

1995

The Sociological Quarterly

371

184

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This article offers an overview and assessment of the utility of new social movement theories for analyzing contemporary forms of collective action. The article begins with a brief overview of the origins of new social movement theory and a description of some of the general tenets of this approach. Next, I consider the contributions of four major theorists (Castells, Touraine, Habermas, and Melucci) to this paradigm. The heart of the article provides a critical discussion of the central debates that have emerged within this paradigm. I then propose a typological distinction between "political" and "cultural" versions of new social movement theory. In the conclusion, I assess new social movement theory as a whole and situate the paradigm with reference to other paradigms for the study of social movements.

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Section: What's New About New Social Movements?mentioning

confidence: 98%

New Social Movement Theories

Buechler

1995

The Sociological Quarterly

371

184

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“…Among the many studies of the 1946 uprisings (Chȏng 1988;Cumings 1981;Kim 1984;Kim 1998;Shin 1994;Sim 1991), Bruce Cumings (1981) provides one of the most thorough historical accounts of the mobilization and of the American occupation period in general. Against the AMG's allegation of the communist influence of the movement, he highlights the voluntary and spontaneous characteristic of the uprisings and claims that the movement arose from below with the help of grassroots associations, especially the people's committees in local regions.…”

Section: Why Korea?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The movement has been referred to in different ways, including autumn harvest uprisings (Cumings 1981), October people's uprisings (Chȏng 1988), Taegu October uprisings (Sim 1991), or peasant uprisings of 1946 (Shin 1994). Throughout this article, the movement is referred to as the uprisings.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonial Legacies and the Struggle for Social Membership in a National Community: The 1946 People's Uprisings in Korea

Kang

2011

Journal of Historical Sociology

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The historical experience of colonialism exerts a profound influence upon emergent postcolonial societies. Yet colonial legacies are not passed on in precisely the same way; rather, they are contingent on particular historical processes. In the case of Korea, Japanese colonialism gave way to a brief liberation phase that was followed by another foreign occupation (the U.S. in the south and the U.S.S.R. in the north) during which efforts were made to rebuild the political community. Focusing on the 1946 people's uprisings, the largest popular social movement during the U.S. occupation period, as a pivotal historical event, this article examines why the primary target of the uprisings was not the foreign military government but fellow Koreans, especially police officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy landlords, thereby revealing how Japanese colonial rule influenced the movement's choice of targets as well as its eventual failure. Through this historical analysis, I demonstrate that internal conflicts among Koreans, which were created and rearticulated through Japanese colonial rule, became critical sources of social and political struggles under the American occupation, the important consequence of which lies in the creation of a pattern of internal exclusion that characterized South Korea's post-war political trajectory.On my way from work, I saw a lot of stuff piled in the street and people surrounding it. It was a high-ranking government employee's house, who'd lost favor with the people during the Japanese colonial period. They searched his house and found a lot of rice, sugar, and cotton fabric. This kind of stuff was really precious back then. People didn't take the stuff for themselves but put it in the street and shouted 'see this, now people are poorly clothed and suffering from hunger, and this son of bitch is living well against the people.' They cursed him and shouted he should be beaten to death.On October 1, 1946, Taegu, a city in the North Kyȏngsang Province in Korea, became a center of protest, where women and children went to the city hall to demand rice, and sympathetic union workers and students gathered at the railroad station. As people took over the police station, attacks against policemen and government officials emerged, and martial law was proclaimed. The statement quoted above (Kang interview with author,

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“…(Graham 1995:123-25) STRIKE LEGACY A legacy of collective action is also important when considering worker activism (Kimeldorf 1985;Wellman 1995). Past insurgency may be particularly meaningful for future action through the establishment of interpersonal and organizational networks (Minkoff 1997;Shin 1994), along with the forging of oppositional frameworks, identity, and abeyance structures that can be explicitly activated at a later point (Taylor 1989;Van Dyke 1998). We use the strike history of a given workplace to examine this potential influence.…”

Section: Unions and Solidaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unions, Solidarity, and Striking

Dixon¹,

Roscigno²,

Hodson³

2004

Social Forces

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Organizationalresources and group solidarityare centralfoci in literatureon social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and theirpotentialinterrelations. In thisarticle, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and workersolidarity relative to strikeaction. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combination of qualitative comparative analysis and more standard statistical techniques. Consistent with expectations, results suggest union presence and worker solidarity, in and of themselves, havelittlemeaningfulassociation with strikes. Rather, it is their co-presence that bolsters strikelikelihood. Conversely, a lack of union presence in combination with a lack of collective mobilization history diminishes overall strike potential. We conclude by discussing the implications ofour argument and findings for more general social movement perspectives as well as prior work dealingspecifically with unions, solidarity, and collective resistance.The relative importance attributed to organizational resources, on the one hand, and collective identity processes and related cultural, emotional, and cognitive dynamics, on the other, represent somewhat distinct approaches to understanding social movement emergence and success (see Jenkins 1983; Polletta & Jasper 2001; Taylor & Whittier 1992). Although few would argue with the point that both organizational resources and internal activist solidarity are necessary, little research explicitly considers their joint impact. This may be a function of theoretical and, thus, empirical prioritization -prioritization, in the case of resource mobilization theorists, on organizational presence and '"We are grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions ofthe editor and anonymous reviewers of Social Forces. Direct correspondence to Marc Dixon,

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The Historical Making of Collective Action: The Korean Peasant Uprisings of 1946

Cited by 37 publications

References 38 publications

New Social Movement Theories

New Social Movement Theories

Colonial Legacies and the Struggle for Social Membership in a National Community: The 1946 People's Uprisings in Korea

Unions, Solidarity, and Striking

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