Abstract

This article offers a narrative and integrative review of social-scientific discussions of precarity and considers their implications for psychology in Korea. Precarity overlaps with inequality, poverty, vulnerability, and job insecurity, but it should not be reduced to a lack of resources or an unequal distribution of opportunities. Rather, it captures a process through which the structural and material conditions that sustain life become weakened, uncertain, and individualized. Drawing on domestic and international literature, this review conceptualizes precarity in Korea as organized across the domains of labor, housing, education, and health and care. It then examines how these conditions may be translated into subjective and psychological experiences, including chronic uncertainty, a narrowed sense of the future, relative deprivation and perceived unfairness, diminished control, self-responsibilization, emotional distress, and weakened relational security. The review further organizes psychosocial responses to precarity into four modes: over-adaptation, resignation and social withdrawal, resistance and solidarity, and hostile attribution and defensive meaning-making. By connecting structural and material conditions with psychological experience and psychosocial responses, this article argues that Korean psychology can better address social suffering without reducing it to individual deficit or maladaptation. The proposed framework is not an empirically verified causal model, but a critical heuristic for future research, measurement, and psychosocial interventions.