Toward a Collective Public Sociology of Labor

Third-wave marketization in South Korea has changed the social structure of academic knowledge production, revealing the dilemmas and limitations of both traditional and organic public sociology. The emergence of collective intellectuals during the candlelight movement points to an alternative relationship between the researcher and the researched. The candlelight vigils that recently rocked Korean society have pointed to new possibilities for a public sociology of labor. This article discusses the conditions for public labor sociology as a new paradigm based on collective knowledge and argues that when facing increasing professionalization of public sociology, the “crisis of labor” calls for a collective public sociology.