In this ethnography of how South Korean public assistance services responded to social distress following the 1997 financial crisis, Jesook Song delves into the elements of government policy, citizen participation, and media discourse that, in effect, conspired to inaugurate a new form of governmentality in that country. Song considers several domains: policies dividing homeless people into the worthy and the “rootless,” discourses placing the blame for the nation's woes on “broken families,” and efforts to turn unemployed youth into self-cultivating, creative, or technological entrepreneurs. In each of these domains, she shows how the crisis precipitated a new emphasis on productivity and individual venture capacity, sidelining and delegitimizing the ordinary poor, women who did not conform to the housewifely ideal, and young people without technological or creative skills. In this period, welfare in South Korea was transformed from a form of assistance to marginalized or dependent populations into a technology used to identify and support productive citizens.

There are a number of good studies of the South Korean response to the 1997 crisis and of South Korea's embrace of globalization. Song's contribution is significant in two important ways: first, Song's treatment of neoliberalism is both concrete and complex. “Neo-liberalism” has replaced “globalization” as the buzzword of social analysis, and, like its predecessor, it is too often used as a floating signifier rather than as a tool of analysis. Song, however, engages directly with the literature on neoliberalism, and her aim is to show how this form of governing is created through social and cultural processes carried out on a number of levels. As she writes, “This book is an ethnography of social governing, not of state bureaucracy” (p. xii). Her lens focuses on the agents generating social policy as well as the agents of its implementation: government bureaucrats, intellectuals, social workers, and religious leaders. She points out that the production of perspectives is as important as the policies that are generated in reaction. This multisited approach allows her to illuminate the processes of neoliberal governing as a social ethos, not just as a set of policy effects. In focusing not just on the level of discourse or the level of policy, or even at the level of subaltern lived experiences, but at the mediating point, where policy perspectives are generated and policies are implemented, she demystifies the “neoliberal” bogeyman.

Second, Song was not just an ethnographer, but an active participant in the process of defining and understanding homelessness to inform social policy. Song arrived in Seoul in the spring of 1998 as the effects of the crisis were becoming ever more apparent: thousands of homeless people slept nightly outside the central train station, young college graduates were unable to find employment, and the media were filled with stories of suicides attributed to “broken families” and aberrant behavior on the part of women and youth. Song took a position in a publicly funded, homelessness-focused research group that had been established to provide work to under- and unemployed young intellectuals. Song herself typifies South Korean social progressives: a former student activist, she was accustomed to confronting the government and the dominance of the large corporations in the pursuit of a society in which ordinary people would have fair opportunities. Her subject position allows her insights into the ways in which progressive South Korean intellectuals have been drawn into social activities that have failed to live up to their ideals. The dilemma she points to is that an antistate stance furthers the neoliberal agenda of individual “freedom,” whereas embracing “good liberal” state programs simply obscures the process of labor exploitation in a capitalist democracy.

For example, Song shows how, as the population of homeless men grew, they were divided into “the IMF homeless” (men who had lost their jobs as a result of the crisis, which was blamed in the public imaginary on the International Monetary Fund bailout), who were deemed worthy of assistance because they were considered to be temporarily dependent, and the “rootless,” long-term homeless men who received only the most basic services. Structural homelessness was ignored, and homeless women were erased from this construction of homelessness. When homeless women were acknowledged, they were characterized as deviants who had left their proper places at home. The homeless services provided to women made it difficult for them to be responsible mothers, and policies that defined women's need within the context of family removed independent women from the sphere of constructive assistance. Thus, through discourse and policy, the response to the problem of homelessness divided the population into productive and unproductive citizens, and reconstituted the heteronormative family as the ideal.

Song uses this material to consider the applicability of terms such as “liberal” and “neoliberal,” and concepts such as Foucault's biopower, to contexts outside North America and Europe. The last section of the book, the Coda, situates the ethnographic data in the context of recent South Korean sociopolitical history, and also encapsulates the main argument and the theoretical grounding of Song's analysis. In fact, the central chapters might be easier to grasp if readers go through the Coda first, as some of the material in the body of the book is somewhat uncontextualized and dense.

Finally, Song's footnotes are rich, and she has plumbed a wide range of English- and Korean-language sources (although a few citations were alphabetized oddly, and at least one author source was misspelled). While readers may wish that the voices of the targets of homelessness services were more evident, their near absence is intentional: because “homeless people were not agents in the making of neoliberal subjectification” (p. xiii), they are not central figures in this ethnography of the fashioning of neoliberal productive welfare citizenship.