SCHOOLING, WORK AND SUBJECTIVITY

Most analyses of resistance, subjectivity, and identity formation have been developed out of research on predominantly 'western' industriali zed nations. This research has been full of insight, but it has limite d our understanding of the importance of historical specificity, of co njunctural relations, and of the ways class, gender, and race/ethnic h istories and experiences take an specific meanings in different contex ts. By focusing on one of these 'different contexts'-South Korea and i ts recent moves to institute career education and to have more student s identify as manual workers-we wish to show how such specificities wo rk to produce particular forms of resistance, subjectivity, and identi ty. In the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the dominant faction of th e power bloc has tried to reconstitute work subjectivity through educa tion as part of its ongoing hegemonic project. This has been done in o rder to deal with economic stagnation and to recover the bloc's politi cal and ideological power which was seriously weakened by the democrat ic and labor movements of the 1980s. This paper examines the ways in w hich administrators, teachers, and students in Korean commercial high schools responded to the policies and work subjectivities that were ne wly articulated by the dominant group. Data used in this paper were ga thered in an ethnographic study of two commercial high schools in Kore a. The paper combines perspectives from both structural and poststruct ural theories to explore the complexities of these responses.