Dr Mike Prentice

I have carried out ethnographic research in and on South Korean workplaces since 2011. My research has focused on the cultural semiotics of office life. I am broadly interested in the way different aspects of office life come to articulate broader problems in society such as hierarchy, fairness, distinction and democracy. In my work, I analyse how linguistic icons, genres, materialities, and platforms of communication, from PowerPoint to job titles, mediate these broader ideas and shape the experience of work.

My book Supercorporate brought together findings from my dissertation for which I spent one year working inside a multinational industrial conglomerate in Seoul. The book, the first in English to document internal dynamics of a South Korean corporation in 30 years, moves beyond the tropes of thinking about South Korea as a site with bad hierarchy or hyper neoliberalism to consider how office places are idealised sites of both technocratic distinction-making and democratic participation. By looking at different sites and events within workaday corporate life, I show how these ideals map onto the ever-expanding genre worlds of office life. 

My new research focuses on a widespread platform called Blind used by office workers in South Korea, and increasingly in Silicon Valley in the US. I am interested theoretically in how versions of organisational life are recreated or reconfigured on platforms outside of organisational spaces proper and how such shadow platforms interact with or have an impact on seemingly powerful figures and genres of authority. This includes impact on management as well as public discourse around workplace life. South Korea is portending a coming social media-isation of once-closed office life. 

My research has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, UKRI, the Korea Foundation, and the Academy of Korean Studies.