Chang Kyung-Sup

Winner of the 24th Korean Sociological Association Book Award Most theories of modernity are based, explicitly or implicitly, on the development of Western societies since the late medieval period. However, these theories are of limited value for understanding the development of societies in Asia and other parts of the world, where the process of modernization took place under different circumstances,...

In many Asian societies, the process of modernisation often took place in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries, as had happened in most Western societies, but in several decades. This enabled Asian societies to achieve high levels of economic growth very quickly, but it also harboured unexpected risks and costs that threatened further development. The very...