ABSTRACT
Over the past five years, since we wrote our previous essay on human resource management (HRM) in South Korea (hereafter Korea) in 1997 in the earlier collection, several large events have occurred. These include the 1997 Asian financial crisis, government change, South-North Korean summit talks, labour market turbulence, bankruptcy, restructuring and downsizing, and Korea cohosting (with Japan) the football World Cup. During this period a climate of ‘the only thing unchanged is the fact that everything is changing’ prevailed in Korean society. The ‘changing is good’ mentality also dominated in the process of public and private policy making. Several terminologies have been exposed to, and fixed firmly in the mind of, Korean people, including the IMF, sovereign credit ratings, restructuring, downsizing, early retirement, labour market flexibility, unemployment, workout (that is, a corporate programme for the financial structure improvement), bankruptcy, and so on. All these are closely related to HRM. Up to the 1990s the term `insamansa' (‘people and personnel affairs are everything’) was coined to stress that human resources (HR) were the most critical assets for corporate success. After the 1997 crisis, the term suddenly changed to `insamangsa' (‘people spoil everything’). Indeed, human resources, once the ‘heroes’ of Korea’s successful economic development, now were criticized as the ‘sinners’ of the failure. These political, economic and social changes impacted on the HRM system we had previously outlined.
