K-pop as a Vocation: Work, Education, and Gendered Pathways to Dreams in the K-pop Industry

• In Event: 30612 - Culture I: On the Infrastructures and Politics of Belief

Abstract

Studies of culture industries in the American social science literature have paid insufficient attention to their nature as workplaces that require a set of hiring, training, mentoring, and contracting practices. While existing scholarship has examined the precarity of cultural and creative work, we still know relatively little about the lived experiences of those who navigate cultural and creative work in more formal settings or those who seek to enter artistic labor markets for the first time. This paper looks at the case of the K-pop industry to examine how vocational training, micro-credentialing, and reskilling go hand in hand with the rapid growth of a music industry in the context of South Korea. The paper draws from ethnographic data of three hagwons (institutionalized private tutoring in Korea) that offer job-specific training and career consulting services to aspiring K-pop producers (broadly defined), along with interviews with those who make up the “art world” of K-pop including music critics, journalists, newsletter editors, start-up owners, and employees at different K-pop companies. Empirically, I focus on 1) how students at such hagwons–who are mostly young women–attempt to credential and “sell” themselves as attractive employees to different K-pop companies, 2) how the hagwons aid them in this process, while themselves becoming a new type of credential that sets certain applicants apart from others in the K-pop industry’s labor market. My data shows the nature of such hagwons as gendered spaces in which aesthetic socialization, fan trajectories, and existing repertoires of education in Korean society intersect. I conclude with a call for more sociological attention to how broader beliefs about education, work, and job seeking affect labor practices and production norms in culture industries.

Author

• So Yoon Lee, University of Chicago