Governance by Differentiation: Fragmented Centralization and the Position-Dependent Crisis of Humanities and Social Sciences in Korea

Global discourse on the humanities and social sciences (HSS) crisis has framed the problem primarily as aggregate resource deprivation. This article argues that this framing is insufficient: the HSS crisis is a structurally differentiated set of position-specific experiences generated by a common governance architecture. Drawing on seven focus group interviews with 29 participants across five structural positions in research-active sectors of Korean higher education—research institute directors, precarious instructors, faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students—the study used a multi-position qualitative design to trace how the same governance structures produce qualitatively distinct effects at each position. The analysis develops three concepts and two mechanisms, named and formally defined in the discussion on the basis of the empirical findings. The three concepts identify: the process by which a shared governance architecture produces incommensurable problem worlds at different structural locations; the configuration in which strong central steering operates through mutually incoherent instruments administered by independent agencies; and the resulting reform paradox in which broadly endorsed reforms cannot advance because no single governance pathway traverses the full chain of policy tools. The two mechanisms specify how the current crisis is sustained through the structural silencing of the actors most knowledgeable about the repercussions and anticipatory behavioral cascades that maintain dysfunctional architecture even when direct compliance pressures relax. The findings offer comparative higher education research a transferable framework for diagnosing why well-understood problems persist unresolved in systems where the knowledge required for reform is structurally separated from the authority to act on it.