Ranks & Files: Corporate Hierarchies, Genres of Management, and Shifting Control in South Korea's Corporate World

Abstract

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.