Changing Careers and Life Courses across East Asia In Turbulent Times

The institutions and regimes that once stabilized individual careers and life courses have been rapidly changing. This change has been especially pronounced in East Asia, where institutional arrangements such as lifetime employment, seniority wages, and firm- and family-based productivist welfare once enabled core workers and their families to lead stable, predictable lives in Japan, Korea, and beyond. However, since Japan's prolonged downturn from the mid-1990s and Korea's 1997 financial crisis, neoliberal policy has gained ground, exemplified by rising non-regular employment, and these stabilizing institutions have consequently eroded. In the turbulent times that have followed, people's careers and life courses have become both more unstable and more unequal.

This session examines these changes from a comparative East Asian perspective. We are especially interested in how changes in labor markets and skill-formation systems reshape people's employment and careers; how this in turn reshapes family formation, for example by delaying marriage and childbearing; how these changes also affect individual and household reproductive strategies, including investments in children’s education; and how, ultimately, this contributes to the world's lowest fertility.

We welcome contributions from various approaches, but especially quantitative analyses, using panel and similar data, that illuminate careers, life courses, and their transformation. We are especially keen to include research grounded in cross-national comparison. In Gwangju, a city where vital challenges to the prevailing social order once arose, we wish to reconsider how people's careers and life courses, and our societies, are being remade in the present turbulent age.