Speakers
Description
Elite sporting culture in South Korea has often been likened to ‘Silmi-do’ in the country, a remote island where a military special force was trained to invade Pyongyang in the 1960s, owing to the nature of the system, including its coercive training, cultural isolation and neglect of athletes’ human rights. A sociological edition of this line of public discourse can be sought from Goffman’s total institution (1961) given the degrees of batch living and time-tabled control over athletes’ daily routines. However, this 20th century view of strong institutional control and passive agency seems too outdated to capture the ways in which contemporary athletes engage with the elite sport regime. Informed by Scott’s (2010) contrast between ‘total’ and ‘reinventive’ institutions, this paper aims to offer a (re-)conceptualisation of South Korea’s elite sport development system. Utilising data from interviews with South Korean high-performance athletes, the paper examines the relative balance between institutional coercion and voluntaristic agency manifested within the South Korean elite sporting culture. The findings show that individual athletes are not forced or ‘culturally doped’ to enter the system; they willingly join the regime in pursuit of success in their own ways and make the most of the elite development programmes inherited from the previous military regimes for the benefit of themselves, akin to the members of ‘reinventive institutions’ in which individuals make use of the totalising power of institution to construct an elevated social self and status.
