Mike Prentice

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.

Abstract
Purpose
The 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/approach
The 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.

Findings
The 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/value
Organizational 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.

This article analyzes the aging of a figure of labor: the male Korean office manager. In contrast to its normative heyday in late twentieth 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 how indexes of this figure are marked across different areas of office life, from everyday 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 implicitly target 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.

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.

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 thepractical 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

This dissertation analyzes changing practices of hierarchy and authority within South Korean business conglomerates. Corporations are often imagined as persons or brands driven by a basic economic goal of profit-seeking. Internally, however, managerial corporations are complex sites of competing modes of control. This is a salient issue among the leviathan-like conglomerates of South Korea where their economic clout pervades social and political life but is elusive to pin down internally. South Korean business conglomerates, commonly referred to as chaebol, are depicted as pyramids of control mediated by military-like hierarchies. This dissertation gathers empirical evidence from the headquarters of one conglomerate, the Sangdo Group (a pseudonym), to understand how hierarchy and authority within top-level management operate, through salient political symbols, genres of management, documents, and other office technologies. Taking an ethnographic perspective on managerial practices reveals that ideas about corporate control are changing in contemporary South Korea. Old political symbols of top-down authority from strong leaders are being devalued, new management techniques implemented, and friendlier work places promoted. These changes do not signal the absence of corporate control, however, but changing sites and modalities through which it operates. The dissertation depicts how within one conglomerate, centralized management was not a given state of affairs but something that had to be created. This was done by creating new forms of expertise in human resources, strategy, public relations, and other departments. The dissertation traces how managers sought to establish their own authorities via their professional knowledge while navigating complex political terrains internally. Expert managers attempted to embed this authority in scientific analyses, friendly office policies, modern branding, common values, and standardized processes, efforts that redirected authority from other actors or politely concealed their own intents. Key to these efforts was the need to manage how projects themselves were read as authoritative or not. At the same time, new projects generated unexpected outcomes, subjecting expert managers to their own forms of control, creating awkward office interactions, and inadvertently re-instantiating forms of hierarchy old and new. In the broader landscape of South Korean conglomerates, this study suggests that we see corporate management projects as embedded within complex internal encounters often not visible to outsiders. Ultimately, conglomerate reform remains an elusive goal for regulators, shareholders, owners, employees, and citizens, in South Korea and abroad. Reform is difficult even for managers themselves who often find themselves negotiating their authority within a stream of ongoing discursive activities, from reporting to PowerPointing. Rather than reducing conglomerates to fixed ownership links, organizational structures, or cultural dispositions, this dissertation suggests that manager-based corporations are always marked by concerns over competing sites and modes of control.

What should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation?

As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.