The Impossible Worker: Discursive Fragmentation and the Cultural Foundations of Korea's Work-Family Policy Paradox, 1948–2025

• In Event: Politics and Family Life in the 21st Century

Abstract

Despite unusually expansive work-family policies, South Korea still records among the longest annual work hours in the OECD and the lowest fertility rate on record. Standard accounts attribute this gap to weak enforcement or corporate resistance, but these explanations presuppose that the state genuinely prioritizes work-family concerns. We argue instead that this paradox is rooted in a prior failure: work-family issues have never achieved discursive standing within official state communication, the condition of being treated as an autonomous, semantically coherent policy domain rather than as scattered, incidental references. When discursive standing is absent, the result is discursive impossibility: work-family policy cannot become thinkable as a structural transformation. Drawing on computational analysis of 77 years of Korean presidential speeches (approximately 9,000 speeches, 1948-2025), we show that across 37 LDA topics, no coherent work-family topic emerges, while economic development forms five large, stable topics comprising 22% of all discourse, and family-related terms appear only at low weights in semantically unrelated topics. These findings indicate that developmental state priorities persist at the cultural-cognitive level, naturalizing intensive work as a national imperative while relegating family to the status of object (of protection, nostalgia, and poverty management) rather than subject of policy, helping to explain the persistent gap between generous formal entitlements and minimal behavioral change.

Authors

• So Yun Park, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Yoon Jae Choi, Korea University