The dramatic nature of South Korea’s societal transformations on all fronts – beginning with the political departure in 1948 as a highly advanced democracy in form and spanning to the “miracle-paced” capitalist industrialization and economic growth since the mid 1960s and the global cultural ascendance of Korean popular culture (dubbed “the Korean wave”) in the twenty first century – has been substantially derived from the radically extensive and unprecedentedly condensed process of simulating, materializing, and utilizing the modern (reads Western or American) systems of political, economic, and sociocultural life. In finding and justifying the rationale of such compressed Westernization-cum-modernization, professional social sciences, as mechanically partitioned from humanities, have often taken the place of public sociopolitical debates and intellectual philosophical deliberations. However, the overwhelming materiality of “successful” modernization and development – usually measured in terms of the degree of temporal and substantive compression – has sided with social scientists in social influence and technocratic utilities, who thus keep intensifying their self-partitioned practice in research, education, and public advice.

Three decades of work as a social scientist at a South Korean university have induced me to think that local social sciences are no less quite a unique social phenomenon to be explained themselves than an academic task of explaining the supposed real-world social phenomena. This thought is inseparable from a judgment that the extremely compressed nature of South Korea’s modernization and development and its actual conditions, processes, and risks constitute a highly essential scientific subject. Another decisive judgment is that compression in modernization and development has been as much global historical necessitation (or sometimes coercion) as purposive national achievement. In still another related judgment, compressed modernization and development, while South Korea is indeed an exemplary case, have been universal across the postcolonial world whether in reality or aspiration. Given these interrelated thoughts and judgments, reflecting on locally practiced social sciences, including my own scholarship, becomes a very interesting and productive experience, even leading to a wide array of crucial clues in understanding the (real?) social world as well. Every day at work has thus been an interestingly productive experience, and part of its outcome is the current book.

Apparently, this self-reflective sociology of knowledge has long been experienced by numerous scholars around me. In particular, many of my Korean teachers in sociology – including Kim Il-Chul, Kim Kyong-Dong, Han Wan-Sang, Kim Jin-Kyun, Shin Yong-Ha, Kwon Tai-Hwan, Han Sang-Jin, Lim Hyun-Chin, and Hong Doo-Seung – have endeavored to offer earnest realizations about the contested utilities of locally practiced sociology and its desirable innovations in coming to effective grips with South Korea’s historico-social realities. Such valuable realizations, along with their substantive contributions about various social phenomena, have crucially benefitted me in developing many key questions on compressed modernity discussed in this book. In particular, my thesis on internal multiple modernities (presented in Chapter 4) is decisively owing to abundant rich observations and intuitive thoughts available in their scholarship.

In analyzing compressed modernity since the 1990s, I have been engaged in quite close exchanges and collaborations with many of the world’s leading authorities in studying comparative modernities – in particular, Ulrich Beck, Bryan S. Turner, and Göran Therborn. The outcomes of such relationships are fully incorporated in this book as follows: Chapter 3 (“Compressed Modernity in the Universalist Perspective”) drawing on the concurrence between Beck and me on “reflexive cosmopolitization”; Chapter 4 (“Internal Multiple Modernities”) sharing Therborn’s global structuralist perspective on modernities; and Chapter 5 (“Transformative Contributory Rights”) extending Turner’s conception of citizenship to South Korea’s transformative politics. Besides these chapters, a section in Chapter 1 (“Compressed Modernity in Critical Modernity Debates”) discusses details of these scholars’ arguments and their systematic implications for compressed modernity.

Aside from the current book, I have produced numerous other collaborative publications with them. In particular, my association with Bryan S. Turner reached a totally unexpected level of coediting with him a gigantic five-volume set of a social theory encyclopedia in 2017 (The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory), in which I directed the two sections on modernity/coloniality/development and Asian social theory, respectively. I tried to organize both sections in a globally balanced and inclusive way. For the Asian social theory section, I tried very zealously to organize numerous key Asian scholars into selecting and writing many entries on Asian (and Eurasian) theories and realities from properly positioned Asian perspectives. These entries represent various essential components and aspects of Asian modernities, so the current book also reflects them carefully. Besides, I was invited by Ulrich Beck to contribute my work on compressed modernity to the special issues of British Journal of Sociology (2010) and Soziale Welt (2010) that he edited as guest editor. In these contributions, as discussed in this book as well, I tried to explain the common theoretical and analytical ground between compressed modernity and Beck’s “second modernity” and “reflexive modernization.”

On the other hand, a group of highly respectable scholars has awakened me about the potential relevance of compressed modernity in explaining a wide variety of social phenomena beyond my immediate attention. Above all, I feel greatly indebted to many investigators of various genres of Korean popular culture (now often dubbed “the Korean wave”), including Nancy Abelmann and David Martin-Jones in particular. Frankly speaking, until I came to read their analyses of Korean popular culture in terms of compressed modernity, I had not been quite conscious of the reflective analytical potentials of any type of social scientific research as to such deep yet nuanced cultural representations of South Koreans’ life experiences and trajectories. In this regard, those domestic and overseas audiences who eagerly subscribe to the sociocultural forces of masterpiece films, dramas, songs, novels, and other genres from South Korea seem to constitute both a very interesting subject for sociological enquiry and an analytical community themselves engaged in a critical cultural reflection on complicated and contradictory social realities that I have tried to explain as compressed modernity. This awakening has even led me to think that popular culture could be an effective form of reflection on the personal and social conditions of compressed modernity.

A special research program of Chonbuk National University, South Korea, on “Personal Documents and Compressed Modernity” (2001–2017), led by Yi Jeong-Duk, investigated South Koreans’ life trajectories and family relations under condensed societal transformations by examining personal diaries and other valuable forms of private documents. While I was once invited to speak on compressed modernity at an international conference of this research program, I mostly ended up learning greatly from their highly systematic investigation into the private world’s radical transformations in the twentieth century. I am also indebted to Emiko Ochiai as well as Stevi Jackson for awakening me about multifarious manifestations of compressed modernity in the demographic change, family life, and gender relations of many Asian societies. While my inquisition about compressed modernity, from the beginning, has presumed that South Korea is its exemplary, not unique, case, a lack of reallife ethnomethodological acumen to other societies has detained me from internationally extending it as my own research. It was actually Emiko Ochiai at Kyoto University who offered me a decisive impetus by kindly inviting me for a series of collaborations in a major global research and education program on “Reconstruction of the Intimate and Public Spheres in 21st Century Asia” (2008–2012). As this program adopted compressed modernity as a heuristic analytical framework for comparing the temporal trajectories of social and demographic transformations in various Asian countries vis-à-vis Europe and North America, I came to learn critically from Ochiai and her co-investigators, Zsombor Rajkai in particular, on compressed modernity’s global realities and patterns.

Given the experience as an early analyst of post-socialism in the Chinese context, I have increasingly been attracted to recent social changes in the so-called “transition societies” in East Asia and elsewhere. In this regard, I am very grateful to Laurence Roulleau-Berger at the University of Lyon, who has extensively researched Chinese social affairs and intensively interacted with key Chinese scholars and intellectuals, for enlightening me about various specific conditions of post-socialist compressed modernity as manifested in contemporary China. She even edited a special issue of Temporalités in 2017, on “‘Compressed modernity’ and Chinese temporalities,” to which I contributed an article that appraises China as a post-socialist complex risk society. My inquisition to reflect such collaboration with Laurence Roulleau-Berger will continue in the coming years in terms of comparatively analyzing late capitalist versus post-socialist instances of compressed modernity.

I also wish to express my gratitude to many overseas as well as domestic colleagues who have offered encouraging responses and constructive inputs after examining various parts of my work on compressed modernity over many years. Among other overseas colleagues, Takehiko Kariya, D. Hugh Whittaker, Roger Goodman, Sébastien Lechevalier, Lynn Jamieson, Chua Beng Huat, Anthony Woodiwiss, Eui-Hang Shin, Hagen Koo, Seung-Sook Moon, Erik Mobrand, Alvin So, Yong-Chool Ha, Youna Kim, Charles Armstrong, Angie Chung, Gi-Wook Shin, Pieter Boele Van Hensbroek, Kiyomitsu Yui, Brian Yecies, Bruce Cumings, Hiroshi Kojima, Haruka Shibata, Paget Henry, Shirley Hsiao-Li Sun, Teo Youyenn, Raymond Chan, Pei-Chia Lan, Hsiu-hua Shen, Yunxiang Yan, Piao Kuangxing, Do-Young Kim, Rajni Palriwala, and Boris Zizek are warmly acknowledged. It may be impractical to similarly thank all Korean colleagues in the same respect, but I should acknowledge at least the scholarly support and encouragement kindly offered to me by Kwon Hyunji, Kim Baek Yung, Kim Seok-ho, Park Keong-Suk, Bae Eun-Kyung, Suh Yi-Jong, Yee Jaeyeol, Im Dong-Kyun, Chang Dukjin, Jung Keun-Sik, Jeong Il-Gyun, Choo Jihyun, Park Myoung-Kyu, Song Ho-Keun, Chung Chin-Sung, Kim Hong-Jung, Kim Sang-Jun, Eun Ki-Soo, Hong Chan-Sook, Kim Hwan-Suk, Chung Soo-Bok, Lee Cheol-Sung, Kim Kwang-Ki, Lee Seung-Yoon Sophia, Kim Hyun Mee, Han Joon, Chung Moo-Kwoon, Kim Dong-Choon, Chin Meejung, Lee Jae-Rim, Sung Mi-Ai, Lee Chul-Woo, Yoon In-Jin, Kim Tae-Kyoon, Lee Hyun-Ok, Chang Dae-Oup, Shim Doo-Bo, Kong Sukki, Lee Joonkoo, Seol Dong-Hoon, Song Yoo-Jean, Lee Yun-Suk, Eom Han-Jin, Kim Chul-Kyoo, Kim Hung-Ju, Song In-Ha, and many others.

The final stage in completing this book manuscript was generously supported by the University of Cambridge, where I was a visiting fellow of Clare Hall (college) in 2019 and later became the college’s life member. Both Clare Hall and the Department of Sociology at the university kindly arranged my seminars, in which I presented key materials from the current book. I am particularly thankful to Sarah Franklin, the head of Cambridge’s sociology department, for considerately arranging my visit and seminar and even offering keen interest in my work. John B. Thompson, now an emeritus professor of sociology there (and the director of Polity Press), also offered great enthusiasm for this book. During this period, I was also invited by Hubert Knoblauch to Technische Universität Berlin for a special seminar on some key issues of this book. A lengthy discussion with Knoblauch and his colleagues in Berlin was extremely useful in polishing up many parts of the book manuscript. Shortly after my visit to Cambridge, I was invited by the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco for a special lecture on South Korean modernization, in which I reflected on the book’s main substances by discussing South Korea’s compressed modernity, both as achievement and risk. El Mostafa Rezrazi at the Academy kindly arranged my visit and even offered to publish an Arabic version of this book.

These activities and relationships have resulted in numerous publications, some of which are partially incorporated in the current book after revision and updating as follows: Chapter 2 draws on a few sections of my chapter, “Compressed Modernity in South Korea: Constitutive Dimensions, Historical Conditions, and Systemic Mechanisms” in The Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society: A Global Approach, edited by Youna Kim, Routledge (2016). Chapter 3 is revised and updated from parts of my article “The Second Modern Condition? Compressed Modernity as Internalized Reflexive Cosmopolitisation” in the British Journal of Sociology, volume 61, number 3 (2010). Chapter 5 is revised and updated from parts of my chapter, “Transformative Modernity and Citizenship Politics: The South Korean Aperture” in South Korea in Transition: Politics and Culture of Citizenship, edited by Chang Kyung-Sup, Routledge (2014). Chapter 9 draws on a few sections of my article, “From Developmental to Post-Developmental Demographic Changes: A Perspectival Recount on South Korea” in the Korean Journal of Sociology, volume 49, number 6 (2015).

Given the abundant scholarly cooperation, interests, and assistance offered by so many supportive colleagues and institutions from across the world, I am deeply concerned about whether the quality of this arduously completed, though long overdue, book is meaningfully satisfactory to them. In a sense, all such scholarly interactions themselves have been a huge blessing to me, so I feel already rewarded much more than I deserve. The only excuse I can make now is that I am determined to work further on all remaining limits and defects. Since I am also preparing a companion book on “The Risk of Compressed Modernity,” I hope this could help make up for the existing short-comings of the current book.

Finally, I wish to express my sincere gratitude for devoted research assistance by Xu Xuehua and Kim Hee Yun at Seoul National University, and also for considerate and careful editorial support by Susan Beer, Julia Davies, and many other staff at Polity Press.

The research and writing for this book have been supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant (NRF2013S1A6A4016337). Also, Hanmaeum International Medical Foundation kindly offered a generous financial support to help cover some publishing expenses of this book.