A rare glimpse into South Korea's corporate world, Supercorporate looks at the tensions and contradictions in redefining what modern office work means in the twenty-first century.
ABSTRACT
Microsoft PowerPoint is both the bane and banality of contemporary South Korean office work. Corporate workers spend countless hours refining and crafting plans, proposals, and reports in ...PowerPoint that often lead to conflicts with coworkers and overtime work. This article theorizes the excessive attention to documents in modern office contexts. Where scholars have been under the impression that institutional documents align with institutional purposes, I describe a context in which making documents for individual purposes and making them for work exist under a basic tension. Based on fieldwork in corporate Korea between 2013 and 2015, I describe how Korean office workers calibrate documents to the tastes of superiors who populate the managerial chain. These practices leave little trace of real “work” on paper, but they are productive for navigating complex internal labor markets and demonstrating a higher order value of attention toward others. These findings suggest that institutional and individual authorities are not competing projects inside organizations but become entangled in increasingly complex participatory encounters, even as they are channeled through a seemingly simple software like PowerPoint. documents, expertise, authority, technology, South Korea
RESUMEN
Microsoft PowerPoint es tanto la perdición como la banalidad del trabajo de oficina surcoreano contemporáneo. Los trabajadores corporativos gastan incontables horas refinando y elaborando planes, propuestas, y reportes en PowerPoint que a menudo llevan a conflictos con sus compañeros de trabajo y a horas extras de trabajo. Este artículo teoriza la excesiva atención a documentos en los contextos de oficina modernos. Donde los investigadores han estado bajo la impresión que los documentos institucionales se alinean con propósitos institucionales, describo un contexto en el cual crear documentos con propósitos individuales y crearlos por trabajo existen bajo una tensión básica. Basado en trabajo de campo en la Corea corporativa entre 2013 y 2015, describo cómo trabajadores de oficina coreanos calibran documentos a los gustos de los superiores que pueblan la cadena directiva. Estas prácticas dejan poco rastro de “trabajo” real sobre el papel, pero son productivas para navegar los mercados de labor internos complejos y demostrar un valor de más alto orden de atención hacia otros. Estos hallazgos sugieren que autoridades institucionales e individuales no son proyectos competitivos dentro de las organizaciones, pero se llegan a enredar en encuentros participativos cada vez más complejos, aun cuando se canalizan a través de un software aparentemente simple como PowerPoint. documentos, experiencia, autoridad, tecnología, Sur Corea
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This article develops an approach towards managerial expertise as a practice organized around and dependent on what I describe as drafting time. The empirical focus is on an employee satisfaction ...survey at a South Korean conglomerate where I conducted ethnographic research between 2014 and 2015. Departing from approaches that see drafts in service of organizational function or as a production-line model, the article describes how drafting time is a state of work in which claims to expertise, and claims against a lack of expertise, are worked out away from the judgment of others. I describe how high-level human resources managers within the conglomerate Sangdo fashioned themselves as internal consultants through the development of a sophisticated employment survey. When the claims of the survey did not work out as they expected, they were able to re-draft their internal roles vis-a-vis other managers. The article highlights how drafting time is one way for knowledge workers to craft their expertise, particularly through the assemblage of different kinds of genres where their expertise might be properly recognized.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These ...highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how document protection has become a key object of concern for organizations, how the threat of leaks has led to an increase in security ...technologies and policies and how these developments present new and emergent ethnographic challenges for researchers. Through a study of a South Korean organization, the paper aims to demonstrate the ways workplace documents are figured into wider legal, regulatory and cyber security concerns.Design/methodology/approachThe research is based on 12 months of intensive embedded fieldwork in a South Korean firm from 2014 to 2015 and follow-up interviews in 2018. The author followed an immersive and inductive approach to collecting ethnographic data in situ. The author was hired as an intern in a Korean conglomerate known as the Sangdo Group where he worked alongside Human Resources managers to understand their work practices. The present article reflects difficulties in his original research design and an attempt to analyze the barriers themselves. His analysis combines ideas from theories of securitization and document studies to understand how the idea of protection is reshaping workplaces in South Korea and elsewhere.FindingsThe paper highlights three findings first that South Korean workplaces have robust socio-material infrastructures around document protection and security, reflecting that security around document leaks is becoming integrated into normal organizational life. Second, the securitization of document leaks is shifting from treating document leaks as a threat to organizational existence, to a crime by individual actors that organizations track. Third, that even potential document leaks can have transitive effects on teams and managers.Originality/valueOrganizational security practices and their integration into workplace life have rarely been examined together. This paper connects Weber's insights on bureaucratization with the concept of securitization to examine the rise of document security practices and policies in a South Korean organization. The evidence from South Korea is valuable because technological developments around security coupled with organizational complexities portend issues for other organizational environments around the world.
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CEKLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, UL, UM, UPUK
The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people's experiences of social change are articulated ...through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an analytic, and this has often focused on the performative dimensions of economic practice as the most significant dimension: the promulgation of financial models, statements of authority from bank leaders, and the power of numbers. While working within similar traditions, we aim to draw attention to the significant, but often overlooked, role that other kinds of genres and other kinds of genre work play for actors in and out of changing economic contexts.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article analyzes the aging of a figure of labor: the male Korean office manager. In contrast to its normative heyday in late 20th century East Asia, the figure of the older manager has become a ...devalued and deviant figure in contemporary Korea. Based on ethnography of a Korean white-collar workplace, I argue that the older male manager has emerged as a "figure of alterity" that seems to permeate all aspects of Korean company life. By attuning to the ways this figure is observed and discussed in different areas, from narration to policy, I show how their negative presence can be cited to justify new office reforms. Younger managers shape their own office identities in contrast to older figures and formal office policies emerge as the foil of managerial stereotypes. An "old" spirit of capitalism, embodied in a personified figure, is just as central in articulating and differentiating models of capitalist subjectivity and institutional identity as a new one.
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BFBNIB, INZLJ, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SIK, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
This article addresses the social, material, and practical dimensions by which intertextuality is managed in a corporate setting. Managing intertextuality entails more than the circulation of ...entextualized fragments—it involves the everyday ways in which individuals come to negotiate with environments saturated and defined by textual objects. Based on fieldwork at a Korean brand consulting firm, I chart a range of ways that employees took different stances to intertextual practice—from how they defined relationships with their business partners to how they disciplined internal activities, even to how documents became “leaked” from within the office. This article advocates for a broader view of the practical and material dimensions of intertextuality, the diverse ways individuals can engage with texts, and the importance of considering intertextuality in the construction of managerial figures.
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