Culture and Economic Life. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. xv, 226 pp. (Tables.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9781503631878.
Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-Hierarchy South Korea is a study of a human relations (HR) department and its attempts to optimize workplace assessment and performance rewards among white-collar employees at a mid-level South Korean steel conglomerate (pseudonymed as Sangdo), where the author conducted participant observation in 2014 and 2015.
The subtitle will catch the attention of anyone minimally familiar with contemporary South Korea. “Post-hiearchy South Korea?” It surely cannot be the South Korea whose youth call their motherland the “hell Chosun” to condemn its similarities with the hellishly rigid hierarchies of the medieval feudal monarchy, or the South Korea where one quarter of workers report having suffered from workplace harassment and some victims of superiors’ bullying commit suicide (Workplace Harassment Increases as People Return to Office: Survey, Yonhap News Agency, 2022). Yet Michael Prentice provocatively argues that “twenty-first century South Korea … might imagine itself as post-hierarchical” (2), “hierarchy” here being understood as a feature of the military dictatorships of the 1960s to the 1980s. When applied to office dynamics, “post-hierarchical” denotes workplace practices appropriate for democratized South Korea: “supercorporate ideal,” which posits “corporations … [as] sites where fair distinctions can be organized and recognized” (6). This ideal balances the tension between desires for participation and teamwork, on the one hand, and, on the other, individual distinction and thus a form of hierarchy.
Clarifying the entanglements of workplace distinction and participation is the main analytical vector of the book. Chapter 1 introduces the challenges of the holding company managers in negotiating in-group hierarchies between previously autonomous subsidiaries and the holding company itself, from the perspective of public relations, performance management, and HR. Chapter 2 overviews Sangdo’s “infrastructures of distinction,” such as assignment of titles and bonuses. Prentice also surveys various experiments with “flattening” such infrastructures in South Korea—by minimizing explicit gradation among employees and democratizing forms of address—and explains their regular failure by employees’ own investment in corporate distinctions as a marker of social mobility. Chapter 3 zooms in on the figure of the older male manager as a reviled embodiment of stifling office hierarchies. Prentice argues that such figures are productive as contrasts against which the supercorporate ideal is articulated. The chapter details various measures taken to curb the power abuses of status differential (gapeul, which the book explains as an “alpha-beta” relationship), elucidating shifts in South Korean corporate culture. Chapter 4 focuses on an employee satisfaction survey conducted at Sangdo, detailing ambiguities of the numerical reality, their threats to survey designers’ expertise, and strategies to neutralize those threats. Chapter 5 takes the reader to shareholder meetings, whose publicness and ritualized procedures empower disruptive outsiders, such as minority shareholders, and test corporate commitment to democratic governance. The sections dedicated to the tactics of meeting extortionists and corporate attempts to block them are perhaps the liveliest in the book. Chapter 6 sheds light on the notorious part of South Korean work culture, namely after-hours socializing, and Prentice highlights that such activities are also a site of distinction and hierarchy, though employee ranks are amended to recognize nonwork accomplishments, such as being a strong drinker. His ethnography registers a shift toward less burdensome activities, such as picnics, or, a significant theme in the chapter, virtual golf. The conclusion reflects on the persistence of workplace hierarchies despite South Korea of the 2010s having become more democratic and embraced participatory values. Prentice considers explanations offered by Sangdo employees themselves, such as gapeul relations, the influence of the military culture, and of company owners’ Protestant Christianity, but rejects them as reductionist. Over such “grand narratives,” Prentice prefers situational explanations found in “the complex intersections that values like distinction and participation generate on the ground in the strange topography of modern office life” (159). Not to be missed for the important work it does for framing the study, the methodological appendix details the author’s intellectual journey, from approaching office life from a critical stance of control and resistance, to coming to terms with employees’ appreciation for some hierarchies and reinterpreting workplace distinctions more positively.
The book succeeds on its own terms, in detailing the practical and ethical tensions of regulating workplace hierarchies, and the reader gets a nuanced picture of various tactics to “purify” and “manage” corporate distinctions and also of organizational and cultural inertia that impede such efforts in South Korea. For Koreanists, Supercorporate’s contribution might lie in specifying how democratization and its values become translated—or coopted—into the “supercorporate ideal,” which anoints capital as an agent of fairness, deserved distinction, participatory culture, and ultimately progressive change. Supercorporate is a welcome update to Roger Janelli’s Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate (Stanford University Press, 1993) though Supercorporate is less interested in the mechanisms responsible for corporate ideologies at the political, economic, and cultural levels. For example, the book does not address how the supercorporate ideal is remarkably in sync with the needs of postindustrial capitalism, particularly its reliance on immaterial labour, whose extraction from employees is aided by participatory imperatives that encourage those employees to do more than passively follow superiors’ directions. Moreover, Sangdo’s HR interventions evoke the global phenomenon of bureaucratization of work, which as David Graeber argued in Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, facilitates not so much value production as the organizational power of particular managers while breeding new hierarchies (Penguin Books, 2019). Raising these issues could have put the book in an interesting dialogue with prolific scholarship on work regimes of late capitalism in South Korea and beyond.
Overall, Supercorporate delivers on its promises. The book clarifies the nuances involved in incentivizing employees through balancing opportunities for distinction and participation amid hierarchical infrastructures. It is in those office programs where “post-hierarchy” South Korea could be found. Supercorporate thus offers a timely ethnography of South Korean office life and its multifaceted hierarchies.
Olga Fedorenko
Seoul National University, Seoul