한국인의 갈등의식의 특성과 변화：2007년과 2010년 한국인의 갈등의식조사 결과 분석

Abstract

A stage model is regarded useful to analyze trends of social conflict in Korean society because its types and levels of seriousness have changed over time. We can schematize that social conflict has changed from the suppression type to the latency type, the expression type, and to the expansion type from the First Republic (1948~1960) to the Participatory Government (2003~2008). In this study, I try to examine if social conflict has continued to escalate or started deescalating during the Lee Myung-bak Government (2008 to the present). For this study, I compared major findings of the two surveys of Koreans’ perceptions of social conflicts conducted in 2007 and 2010. Main findings are as follows. First, Koreans still perceive that the level of social conflict is serious but they do not think that social conflict escalates. Second, social conflict among different social strata and regions is perceived to get less serious while ideology and generation become more important bases of social conflict. Third, the government and political circles are at the heart of social conflict and the government is both the trigger and mediator of major public conflicts between the government and the private sector. Based on these findings, I make a tentative assessment that the current stage of social conflict is more like a stagnation stage than the expansion stage, and we are at the critical period of conflict resolution from which we can progress to the institutionalization stage if we can develop a rational system of conflict resolution.