Dr Mike Prentice

I have carried out ethnographic research in Korean workplaces since 2011. My research has focused on the cultural role of office life in contemporary Korean life. I am interested in the way different aspects of office life highlight broader problems in society such as hierarchy, control, freedom, and democracy. I analyse how genres and technologies of communication mediate these broader ideas and shape everyday work life.

I have a book manuscript under development based on my doctoral dissertation entitled Supercorporate: Hierarchy and Change in the Korean Office. It addresses the tensions between efforts to democratize and flatten contemporary Korean office cultures and the role of office cultures as spaces of social differentiation. I spent one year working inside a multinational Korean conglomerate in Seoul as part of this research.

For my next research, I plan to expand into issues facing South Korea’s rapidly changing digital economy. I am interested in understanding how new technologies of communication are reshaping, disrupting, or intensifying work relationships. I plan to explore these issues across different areas: the digitisation of taxi work, the rise of anonymous mobile applications for sharing work gossip, and the role of authentication and security mechanisms within digital ecosystems.

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

Publications

Prentice, Michael M. (2020). “Old Spirits of Capitalism: Masculine Alterity in/as the Korean Office.” Anthropological Quarterly 93 (2) 

Prentice, Michael M. (2020) “Resisting flatness: Job titles, identity infrastructures, and semiotics in the office.” In Korean Lingua-Culture edited by Yoon-hee Kang. Published in Korean by Seoul National University Press. (In Korean)

Prentice, Michael M. (2019). “The Powers in PowerPoint: Embedded Authorities, Documentary Tastes, and Institutional (Second) Orders in Corporate Korea.” American Anthropologist 121 (2):350-362. (LINK)

Prentice, Michael M. & Meghanne Barker (2017). “Intertextuality & Interdiscursivity” Oxford Online Bibliographies. (LINK)

Prentice, Michael M. (2015). “Managing Intertextuality: Display and Discipline across Documents at a Korean Firm.” Signs and Society 3 (S1):S70-S94. (LINK)