Beyond Jeffrey Alexander’s Theory of Social Crisis = Focusing on the Discourse of the “Collapse of School”

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to probe into the discursive terrain of civil society in time of system crisis of a non-civil sphere. Alexander’s recent theory of social crisis illuminates the boundary conflicts between civil and non-civil spheres and the intrusion of the former into the latter in terms of “societalization” and civil repair. Whereas Alexander focuses only on the binary codes of civil society in his theory of social crisis, this paper assumes that the binary codes of non-civil spheres facing the functional crisis as a subsystem will be activated to produce the discourse of crisis and repair along with the binary codes of civil society. With this assumption, it will analyze the discourses of the Chosunilbo and the Hankyoreh on the “collapse of school”. The result of research shows that the two dailies, although ideologically opposite, employed both codes of education and civil society in dealing with the system crisis of education, proving the validity of my assumption.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. System Crisis and the Discourse of Civil Society
• Ⅲ. The Background of the “Collapse of School” Discourse
• Ⅳ. Media Discourse on the Crisis of the Educational System
• Ⅴ. Conclusion
• References