Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate

By Roger L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim

This pathbreaking work extends the boundaries of contemporary anthropological research by presenting in one cohesive, meticulously researched work: an original theoretical perspective on the relationships between the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of a large modern business organization; the first anthropological work on South Korean management and its white-collar workers, in a case study of one of South Korea's "big four" conglomerates; and an innovative delineation of how modern business practices are enmeshed in past and present, structure and agency, and local and international systems." "Based largely on the author's nine months of participant-observation in the offices of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates (with annual sales of about $15 billion and approximately 80,000 employees), the book is also enriched by the author's previous fieldwork in rural Korea, where many of the conglomerate's white-collar personnel spent their formative years. These vantage points are used to explore constructions of "traditional" Korean culture and transformations of cultural knowledge prompted by new political-economic conditions, and how both inform practices prevailing in the large conglomerates - and ultimately shape South Korea's capitalism." "The work focuses on South Korea's new middle class. It explains how office workers' identities and often contradictory interests present them with choices between alternative interpretations and actions affecting both themselves and their conglomerates. Much attention is paid to ideological and more coercive means of controlling white-collar employees, to subordinates' strategies of resistance, and to ways in which cultural understandings and moral claims inform the assessment and pursuit of material advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9780804766357

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

Original printing 1993

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 94

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distributed exclusively by Stanford University

Press within the United States, Canada, and

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of the world.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Janelli, Roger L.

Making capitalism : the social and cultural construction of a South Korean conglomerate / Roger L. Janelli with Dawnhee Yim.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804766357

1. Corporate culture—Korea (South) 2. Industrial management—Korea (South) 3. Elite (Social sciences)—Korea (South) 4. Middle classes—Korea (South) 5. Capitalism—Korea (South) I. Janelli, Dawnhee Yim. II. Title. HD58.7.J36 1993

305.5’2’095195—dc20 92-18093

CIP

There is not some glorious theoretical synthesis of capitalism that you can write down in a book and follow, said Robert M. Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics. You have to grope your way.

(New York Times, Sept. 29, 1991, Sect. 4, p. 1)

Acknowledgments

THIS INTERPRETATION of culture and political economy in South Korea has not only been an unseemly long time in preparation but also draws upon discussions and other experiences that extend over two decades. During those years I have been fortunate to encounter several persons with fine minds and generous dispositions. I would like to acknowledge those whose help and encouragement have been especially invaluable without implicating them in my errors or misconceptions. Other acts of generosity are acknowledged in the footnotes. For any contributions that have been inadvertently slighted I beg indulgence.

A key part of the interpretations presented here originated long ago during my brief career in accounting. I am indebted both intellectually and materially to Richard Woods, Samuel Sapienza, and David Solomons, my teachers in the accounting department of the Wharton School. They first alerted me to the problematic nature of representing financial claims and transactions and forced me to reconsider the generally accepted principles of accounting I had unreflectingly accepted as authoritative. They also kindly provided me with employment in teaching even after I went on to pursue graduate studies in anthropology and folklore. I am also obliged to Walter J. Diggles, then of the United States Army, for guiding a year of my accounting practice with frequent reminders that figures don’t lie, but liars figure, thereby further sensitizing me to the constructed and rhetorical nature of quantitative data.

I am also thankful to several anthropologists and folklorists in the United States whose counsel and support have been so helpful over the years. Myron Cohen, Linda Dégh, Laurel Kendall, Choong Soon Kim, Igor Kopytoff, John McDowell, Clark W. Sorensen, James L. Watson, and Arthur P. Wolf have all given much-appreciated advice and encouragement. Clark Sorensen also read the manuscript and offered many valuable comments. To students and other colleagues at Indiana University’s Folklore Department, I am indebted for ongoing discussions over the past several years about the problematic nature of identifying traditions, for offering a congenial environment for research and teaching, and for tolerance of my many research leaves and forbearance of my unorthodox intellectual path.

For my understanding of the South Korean political economy, I am especially obliged to Bruce Cumings and Paul Kuznets, each of whom allowed me to attend their respective courses on Korean politics and the Korean economy. Paul Kuznets further shared his expertise by reading Chapter 2 and providing very helpful suggestions. Two quarters I spent as a visiting faculty member at the Henry Jackson School of International Studies of the University of Washington also aided my understanding of issues in international political economy, and I am grateful to the faculty and students there as well.

I am also indebted to several other scholars of Korea who work in adjacent disciplines. James B. Palais first prompted me to think about conducting anthropological research in a modern Korean institution, impressed on me the importance of historical context, and provided many beneficial conversations about South Korea and its political economy both past and present. Carter Eckert, Karl Moskowitz, and Michael Robinson shared a variety of important insights in several discussions, both while the fieldwork was in progress and in the following years.

To scholars in Korea I have accumulated even more debts. Yoon Suk Bum and Jung Ku-Hyun of Yonsei University’s School of Business and Economics made possible my fieldwork in one of South Korea’s leading firms by kindly lending their support to my research. They also shared with me their understanding of South Korea’s political economy and listened patiently to mine. Park Heung Soo provided a congenial institutional affiliation at Yonsei University’s School of International Education during my fieldwork.

Numerous Korean anthropologists and folklorists have generously encouraged my research and shared their original understandings of Korean culture and society. Even while their own work receives less international recognition than it truly deserves, their support of mine has been unstinting. As a token of my appreciation for their generosity, all royalties from this publication will be paid to the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology. For countless personal acts of kindness over the years, I wish to express special thanks to Ch‘oe Kilsǒng, Choi In-hak, Chun Kyung-Soo, Han Sang-bok, Kang Shin-pyo, Lee Du-Hyun, Lee Kwang-Kyu, and Wang Hahn-Sok. I owe even greater obligations to Yim Suk-jay and his daughter, Dawnhee Yim. Yim Suk-jay has served as my principal mentor in Korean studies for more than twenty years. I have benefited not only from the vast substantive knowledge he has accumulated during more than six decades of research but also from his vision of Korean society and its cultural practices.

To Dawnhee Yim I am indebted for sharing her understanding and knowledge of Korean society and culture, for her skill in pressing an academic argument and responding to mine without shattering my ego, for saving me from numerous blunders, and especially for marrying me and thereby making possible our long-term experiment in multicultural living. She also read several versions of the manuscript and offered incisive comments and criticisms.

I am additionally obligated to several people in South Korea outside academe who liberally provided me with information, tolerated my mistakes and cultural faux pas, answered some silly and sometimes unwittingly offensive questions, and agreed to serve as research subjects by talking about themselves and sharing their knowledge. To the villagers of Twisǒngdwi, and especially to Kwǒn Kŭnsik, I owe an unrepayable debt for allowing me into their lives and for instructing me about South Korea’s rural ways. Without their help I would not have understood the cultural transformations I attempt to present here. The men and women at all levels of the organization where I conducted my more recent fieldwork exhibited uncommon charity in allowing me into their world and confiding in me, particularly during a period of rising anti-Americanism, knowing all the while that the results of my research would do little to advance their own careers. I hope that this book yields a greater awareness of their considerable accomplishments in the face of adversities imposed on them, but even that would hardly constitute adequate repayment.

At Stanford University Press, Muriel Bell offered continual encouragement as interpretations went through several versions and the manuscript was delayed. I am very grateful for her wise counsel and considerable patience. Tom Lacey edited my prose with uncommon skill. And the production of this volume benefited in no small measure from the expert advice of John Feneron.

Portions of this study were presented at the Jackson School of the University of Washington, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies, the Korean Studies Seminar at Harvard University, and Miami University of Ohio. Participants at each of these occasions provided helpful and constructive comments.

The fieldwork for this research was made possible by a year of sabbatical leave from Indiana University. Reflecting on my experiences and writing the manuscript were assisted by a grant from the Joint Committee on Korean Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Table of Figures

List of Tables

Introduction

ONE - Representations of Korean Culture

TWO - Representations of South Korean Political Economy

THREE - The Bourgeoisie and Their Ideology

FOUR - Control from the Top

FIVE - Control at the Middle

SIX - Responses from Below I: International and South Korean Political Economy

SEVEN - Responses from Below II: Working Conditions

Conclusions

Reference Matter

Bibliography

Romanizations

Index

Table of Figures

Fig.I

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

List of Tables

TABLE I

TABLE 2

TABLE 3

TABLE 4

TABLE 5

Introduction

The time now seems ripe for a thorough integration of an ethnographic practice that remains markedly interpretive and interested in problems of meaning with the political-economic and historical implications of any of its projects of research.

Marcus and Fischer (1986: 85)

THIS BOOK examines South Korea’s industrial elite and new middle class as agents of their society’s capitalist industrialization and concomitant cultural transformation. It looks particularly at the managerial and administrative practices of white-collar personnel in one of South Korea’s largest enterprises, to which I have given the pseudonym Taesŏng. And it attempts to combine anthropological and political-economic perspectives by viewing these practices as contingent on culturally informed choices by which the locally privileged have sought to advance their own interests while spearheading the transition to capitalism.

The cultural transformations entailed by the expansion of Western capitalism into the Third World became an established concern of anthropological research in recent years. Building upon concurrent developments in political economy and social theory (E. Thompson 1966; Bourdieu 1977; Wallerstein 1974, 1979; Giddens 1979, 1984; Scott 1985), several anthropologists sought to examine the material motivations and consequences of symbolic practices. The responses of peasants and new proletarians to the spread of capitalism in their societies helped these researchers comprehend how capitalism has been humanly constructed through dialectical relationships between structure and agency on the one hand and local and international systems on the other (e.g., Taussig 1980; E. Wolf 1982; Mintz 1985; Comaroff 1985; Ong 1987; Roseberry 1988, 1989).

Local bourgeoisie and the new middle classes have not been at the center of this research, which has looked to the earlier stages of capitalist industrialization and viewed Western capitalists and local peasants or proletarians as the protagonists in this drama.¹ Difficulties conducting fieldwork among the privileged classes have further induced a primary focus on those who, having the least to gain from this transformation, influence it largely through resistance. This focus has enriched our understanding of capitalist industrialization, but it has left local business magnates and white-collar managers almost silent and invisible, though they themselves are cultural beings (Hamabata 1990; Frykman and Löfgren 1987) also caught up in the contradictions accompanying the social transformation to capitalism.² A major goal of this work is to shed some light on these local elites who have been cast into the shadowy periphery of anthropology.

The practices of those at the forefront of capitalist transformations have received considerable attention in discourses on comparative management, corporate culture, and organization theory.³ This literature, however, has been motivated by its own concerns and articulates with older theoretical concepts in anthropology. It relies on Parsonian conceptions of cultures and social systems as traditional and stable rather than as contingent outcomes of a dialectical interplay between structure and agency (Bhaskar 1979; Giddens 1984; Archer 1988), essentialist dichotomizations into ideal and material causes or into cultural and economic behavior (Tayeb 1988), and the perception of capitalism as a natural system arising out of the congruity between managers’ own interests and the maximization of their firms’ profits (or rate of return ⁴). The problematic nature of these assump- tions has been recognized by more recent developments in anthropology and the other human sciences. Rational choice theory, for example, has raised fundamental questions about the congruity of individual and collective interests (Elster 1986; Arrow 1963; Callinicos 1988); postmodernism and related developments in philosophy have pointed to the deeply problematic nature of representing both the symbolic and material (Foucault 1971,1978; Lyotard 1984; Rorty 1979; Clifford and Marcus 1986); and studies of international political economy have generated alternative and conflicting formulations of economic causality (Gilpin 1987; Gill and Law 1988).

South Korea offers a few advantages for attempting to deal with these issues and as a site for examining local elites. The relative absence there of large, foreign-dominated multinationals after World War II, compared with many Latin American and Southeast Asian societies (Evans 1979; Ong 1987), enabled the indigenous grand bourgeoisie and the new middle class to play an especially important role in South Korea’s capitalist transformation. Background publications with which to articulate anthropological fieldwork in a single enterprise are plentiful. A substantial ethnographic literature on rural Korea, an extremely voluminous body of writings on the South Korean political economy, and a small but growing literature on managerial practices, in both Korean and English, are now available. Economic growth there has been accompanied by many other changes that have been so rapid in the past few decades that the capitalist transformation is all the more salient. South Korea’s new middle class is a new new middle class. Office workers who had spent the earliest years of their lives in rural villages without electricity later graduated universities, drove automobiles to and from work, and operated computers with ease. Affluent older managers spoke of poverty and hunger during their youth. Indeed, my own involvement with South Korea since 1968 has partly inscribed me with the often-expressed perception of South Koreans that the United States is a place where little changes.

Methodological Dialectic

This book emerged out of my grapplings with theoretical concepts and my experiences as a participant-observer in a South Korean organization. Few of the ideas presented here were envisioned by me at the outset of my research. Instead, new experiences led me to a new awareness and hence a questioning of assumptions, and fresh theoretical insights I gleaned from reading prompted my perception of alternative meanings in what I had seen and heard. I started out primarily to examine the role of traditional culture in the practices of white-collar workers at one of South Korea’s modern companies. The initial appeal to me of such an examination was largely a product of my beholding the economic transformation of South Korea, my prior fieldwork in a South Korean village, and my earlier education in business administration. My major theoretical premise was that Korean culture could be viewed as a kind of intangible asset with which practical goals could be achieved. I had no intention of investigating political economy, wider cultural metamorphoses, domination and resistance, or the social construction of capitalism.

A step-by-step recounting of my own transformation would make too long a story. Chapters 6 and 7, which are based primarily on fieldwork, describe how some specific encounters with the men of the enterprise that I call Taesŏng reformulated my understandings. Here I outline the path by which I came to experience those encounters and to reorient my research.

One of the first difficulties I faced was finding a company that would allow me to conduct research. Though I had long ago earned an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and offered to work without salary in return for the opportunity to conduct fieldwork, none of South Korea’s companies seemed willing to accept my offer. Almost in despair I asked for the help of a few Korean scholars I knew. Thanks only to their contacts in the local business community and their willingness to lend credibility to my research, I soon began fieldwork in the headquarters of one of South Korea’s largest and most well-known corporations, my presence sanctioned by its president. That firm, Taesŏng, turned out to be a principal company in one of South Korea’s four largest chaeból, the conglomerates or business groups usually credited with much of its rapid economic growth over the past few decades. With sales of about (U.S.) $15 billion and approximately 80 thousand employees during my fieldwork in 1986—87, Taesŏng was (and still is) a major player in international trade as well as within South Korea. Its combined sales are sizable enough to earn it a listing among the largest 100 of Fortune magazine’s Global 500,: and its products are widely distributed in the United States and many other nations.⁵

Because the major chaebŏl were a frequent topic of public media reports and newspaper editorials, I began paying more attention to the media as alternative sources of information. They continually pointed to the conglomerates’ interrelationships with the national and international political economy and thus led my inquiry beyond the company to the chaebŏl, the national economy, and the world system.

A variety of motivations led to my acceptance into the company and some of its related firms. No evidence indicates that any executive allowed me into his firm or office because he regarded my business training or experience as having any practical value.⁶ At least one of the Taesŏng men who helped me hoped that I would write a book extolling his company’s or South Korea’s management methods that would resemble the many publications about Japanese companies written during the previous decade. It was a hope that my research goals at first implicitly but unintentionally encouraged. Other men seemed pleased with the prospect that I would produce a book that portrayed South Korea as a successfully industrialized society, a possibility tacitly invited by my more informal explanation of the reasons for my fieldwork: My field is Korean studies; and just as rural villages were studied twenty years ago in order to understand Korean society, nowadays one should study a large and modern institution.

Perhaps the owners and upper managers of the organization were glad that someone would be looking at Korean traditions, for they often represented their managerial practices as manifestations of Korean culture. The director who agreed to let me occupy a desk in his division, ostensibly in return for translation and editing services, acknowledged, however, an altogether different motive. He wanted his subordinates to get to know me as a person. Their contacts with Americans were largely limited to formal business transactions, he explained, and it would be helpful for them to have an opportunity to get a fuller understanding of what Americans are like, especially in their emotions and feelings. I relished the irony of becoming an informant.

After beginning fieldwork I was asked to conduct English-conversation classes at four divisions of Taesŏng company, and occasionally personnel from other divisions or affiliated companies asked for help with editing or translation. Some of the men I came to know were later transferred to other divisions or companies within the conglomerate, expanding my network of contacts still further. Most of my translating and editing, however, involved interacting with men of lower ranks (sawŏn and section chiefs) of the headquarters staff, whose comments and actions often jarred with those of older and more senior managers I also met daily. As I struggled to keep my account of the company positive, the younger men kept pointing out the inadequacies of my understanding, and I found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending an ideology and practices that they sought to resist. Sometimes their efforts were as subtle as a choice of words or ambiguous hints, but at other times the disparities between their understandings and those of upper management were more explicit. Thus, despite my original intention to study a group unified by the profit motive, my attention was constantly drawn to domination, resistance, and the opposition of interests.

During this early fieldwork, I tried to keep especially detailed notes, for Ward Goodenough had once taught me that impressions gained during early days of participant-observation can be particularly valuable. Though field-workers at this stage are likely to misunderstand what they see, their impressions are more vivid because they have not yet become inured to practices that differ from those they have encountered elsewhere. My early notes are rich with details about two phenomena, neither of which I encountered in the United States, in rural Korea, or during several years of residence in Seoul: the absence of any visible signs of conflict and the pervasiveness of ranking within the company. These eventually became some of the major themes pursued in the following chapters. Thus I was shifted during the earliest days of fieldwork away from my initial research topic. Instead of attempting to explain practices as arising out of traditional culture, profit orientation, or some combination thereof, I became intrigued with those that could not easily be explained by either. My search for different modes of interpretation involved a few years of reading and reflection after the fieldwork.

I was impressed with attempts to establish cordial relationships partly because of the warmth of my own initial reception in the company. Thirteen years earlier, when Dawnhee Yim and I had begun our research in a rural Korean village,⁷ we (mostly Dawnhee Yim) had taken the initiative to establish rapport; in the company, others were taking steps to establish rapport with me. Managers tried in a variety of ways not only to facilitate my research but also to make me feel like a welcome member of the company and the division to which I had been assigned. One director gave me a company pin to wear on my lapel. When employees received gift packages of company products at holidays, I received one too. I was also given a desk in the last row of one division’s large office, alongside those of the section chiefs and department heads. This choice spot put me right next to the young managers whose actions I wanted to study and commanded a better view of the office than any other location. During my first day at Taesŏng, the director of the division invited me into his office for friendly conversation and a cup of coffee. The deputy director convened a brief meeting of all the division’s department heads (pujang) and section chiefs (kwajang) to introduce us and to explain the nature of my research. It was then that he noted, Well, this is really only a personal matter, but his wife is Korean so that makes him half Korean, a remark that reminded me of a proverb I had once heard in the village to stress the intimacy of in-laws: A son-in-law is half a son.⁸ After the deputy director later led us all out to lunch so we could get better acquainted, I attempted to pay for the check, but the others insisted that he pay, saying that the treat was like that offered to a newly hired worker (sinip sawŏn). Had I been more alert, this comment might have tipped me off that my reception was an activity in which these managers were well practiced and skilled.

The junior managers of the division also went out of their way to be friendly and cooperative, seeming almost to compete with one another to make me feel welcome and build rapport. Especially during my first few days, every section chief and department head of the division came over to my desk to talk about the weather, say a few kind words about my taste in neckties, discuss current news events, or share a cup of coffee. The section chief whose desk was closest to mine graciously agreed to my proposal that our desks adjoin so we could communicate more easily over the surrounding cacophony of clacking typewriters, ringing telephones, and spirited conversations. Another section chief charged with acting as my counterpart equipped me with company name cards for my use (my position being shown ambiguously as researcher), tickets to eat lunch at the conglomerate’s cafeteria, my own telephone, and a full complement of pens, pencils, and other supplies. He also spent a good deal of time explaining the system of ranks and pay grades as well as recounting his own history. I had trouble sleeping when I returned from the office after the first day of fieldwork not because of anxiety but for having drunk so many cups of coffee.

All this behavior was such a contrast to the more guarded reception I had initially received in the village of Twisŏngdwi more than a decade ago that I could not help but reflect on the differences. The earlier fieldwork formed my expectations and understandings of the nature of participant-observation in South Korea and taught me how to negotiate social relationships. My experience at Taesŏng thus contributed to my understanding of the transformations that accompany the transition from village to office life and of the differences between the new middle class and rural villagers. Reflection has in turn also helped to reform my understandings of village life, allowing me to appreciate alternative meanings in some of my earlier fieldwork experiences.

The greatest difference I perceived between Korean office workers and villagers was in the difficulty I encountered establishing closer rapport with many of the men at Taesŏng. I have already shown how several of them were often extremely helpful, and eventually I came to know some as well as I had known anyone in Twisŏngdwi.⁹ But frustration in establishing rapport with others occupied my mind and reshaped my thinking. Dawnhee Yim and I had a similar frustration with one person in Twisŏngdwi, but reserve and reticence were common at Taesŏng. As one man was criticizing his company’s managerial system for leaving no room for subordinates’ initiatives, to cite the most extreme example, we were joined by a co-worker who said precisely the opposite, and the first man then reversed his earlier position without explanation. I could only read this as a sign that his colleague’s remark had led him to think that perhaps he had gone too far in revealing his views.

As the weeks went by, a number of events convinced me, slowly and almost imperceptibly, of the artificiality of much (though by no means all) of the amicable relationships that had so impressed me during the first few weeks. A young manager insisted that many of the signs of comradery were not natural expressions of social solidarity (Chapter 7). And gradually I realized that many managers spoke less frankly in public about their personal circumstances or views than did most villagers, academics, or members of the old middle class I knew. A few men told me of close relatives who were studying or living in the United States, for example, but only when we were alone; and later one manager explained that he and his colleagues generally avoided speaking about their families in the office, lest it seem like bragging and provoke jealousy. More than one manager pointed generally to the difference between what he and his colleagues showed on the outside and what they felt inside.

In retrospect, several reasons can be cited for their reserve, some of which now seem so obvious that it is embarrassing to acknowledge that I had not anticipated them.

Taesŏng workers were unlike the villagers, academics, and old-middle-class shopkeepers and professionals in that they neither owned the resources by which they produced their livelihood, nor had the job security of university professors or alternative career prospects as attractive as their present employment. Their chances for promotion and even permanent employment (Chapter 4) depended heavily on impression management, and their opportunities for advancement on keen competition with each other. As it turned out, my greatest frustrations occurred in the division where, its managers acknowledged, competition was especially rife. A few men of this division also expressed concern about how the publication of my research might affect their careers. One said to me in only a half-joking tone, I don’t think I can continue to work here after your book appears. Another asked, Are you going to write that you studied the [A] company, [B] division, and [C] department head?, using the first letters of his company, division, and own last name to imitate a common style of South Korean publications. In this division, the young sawŏn, the white-collar men who had the least to lose if they changed employers, were often the most vocal critics. I therefore abandoned my plan to use the new pocket-sized tape recorder I had bought for the research, and all of the conversations cited here are from memory, usually entered on a keyboard at the end of the day.

Even had I used the tape recorder, however, I would have obtained few accounts as clear and compelling as those provided by Twisŏngdwi villagers. My linguistic competence, though far from native fluency, had improved, but the statements of office workers were usually more laconic, allusive, and abstract. They also knew I was reading South Korean newspapers and there was little reason to spell out what was common knowledge. Rather than criticize the government at length, for example, they alluded to its repressive nature by making jokes about Chun Doo Hwan. Anti-American sentiments, my comprehension of which was recognized as being a bit retarded, were more forcefully articulated (Chapter 6).

Getting close to many persons proved more difficult in the company than in the village also because Dawnhee Yim was not with me. We had accompanied each other almost everywhere in Twisŏngdwi, and not only had I been able to rely on her native language fluency, interpersonal skills, and social sense to establish rapport with villagers, but we also discussed daily our perceptions and understandings of what we had seen. Her absence from the company particularly precluded easy entree into the world of women workers. I could not socialize with them during lunch or after hours as I could with men, and they were too busy during the workday for extended conversations.¹⁰ Thus my research has unfortunately taken on a male-centered perspective. Graduates of commercial high schools, the women workers were not managerial-track employees, their stay at Taesŏng was intended to be temporary, and thus they were a different and far less advantaged fraction of the new middle class. But they would have added valuable insights. They interacted daily with the men, and their own forms of resistance were constant reminders to their male co-workers. Lower in the system and more disadvantaged by it, women workers could be even more outspoken than the male sawŏn regarding the internal system of ranking. Before I began my fieldwork, for example, they had complained of the terms used to address them and asked for alternative forms. When they learned that I would be teaching English classes to the men, they asked for their own class as well, to which I readily consented. On the too-few occasions when I was able to converse with them, their comments were especially revealing. I have included some of their remarks.

The timing of my research also hampered rapport. It was conducted during a period when South Korean views of the United States were increasingly critical, and some men portrayed (and I assume regarded) me as just