Infrastructures of distinction: Rethinking the role of corporate hierarchies and managerial work in South Korea  

When it comes to South Korean organizations, it has been difficult for scholars to think outside of the developmentalist frame of ‘hierarchy.’ While it is not uncommon for office workers to lament hierarchy themselves, they would find nuance between hierarchy as a negative form of sociality and distinction as a fair, technocratic form of individual recognition and interpersonal differentiation. In fact, much of the internal work of South Korean corporations, such as in HR departments, is heavily invested in managing and perfecting distinctions between employees. Led by ethnographic evidence from inside one South Korean conglomerate where I worked and researched for a year, I describe the efforts to manage personnel as ‘infrastructures of distinction.’ Infrastructures refers to the techniques and genres that are embedded or backgrounded in office life to measure interpersonal distinctions of potential and current employees. In many ways these infrastructures are attempts to overcome recognized problems of hierarchy, such as favoritism or interpersonal abuse. Moving beyond situating South Korean management as situated somewhere along a Euro-American developmental trajectory, this presentation suggests ways of making connections with pre-twentieth century traditions of meritocratic advancement in Korea.

Mike Prentice is a Lecturer in Korean Studies in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan and studies issues around work, communication, culture, and change in contemporary South Korea. His monograph, Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-hierarchy South Korea was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.