Category Archives: White-Collar Workers in East Asia

Although scholars have already investigated blue-collar, informal, and other kinds of work in East Asia, there has not been much attention paid by anthropologists to the work and life of white-collar workers in this part of the world. Anthropologists might have assumed that regular white-collar workers, who still constitute the lion share of the workforce in several East Asian societies, lead predictable lives at work and home that might have seemed all too familiar. Economic anthropologists, equipped with methodological toolkits to study the subaltern and the elite, may lack access to conducting ethnographic fieldwork in white-collar settings where they do not necessarily “study up.” Also, concepts such as precarious work and precarity have been applied to analyzing irregular and informal workers in traditional industrial contexts, as well as flexible workers in the growing digital/platform/ “gig” economy, and yet the worlds of white-collar workers seem to remain a black box for economic anthropologists interested in East Asia and beyond.

In recent years, there has emerged a growing number of fascinating ethnographies that focus on the everyday work and life of white-collar workers in China, Japan, and South Korea. This series, supported by the New Media Lab at the Department of Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University, is composed of three episodes, where Xinyan Peng interviews three anthropologists who have conducted research in East Asia. Two episodes delve deep into the physical space, historical context, social form, and cultural meaning of work among management consultants in China and corporate professionals in South Korea. One episode about Japan will take a more holistic perspective to interrogate the intersection between political economy and personal life, more specifically labor and intimacy. Altogether, this series hopes to further our understanding on the political economy of several East Asian societies, as well as everyday work and life of white-collar workers in this part of the world.

Management Consultants in China: A Conversation with Kimberly Chong

In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Kimberly Chong about her book Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Dr. Chong speaks about how management consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. Effective management consultants, Dr. Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of local culture and society, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in the reform era, Dr. Chong explains both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization, and how ‘global’ management consultants perform their expertise in the particular terms of China’s national project of modernization.

References:
Bogdanich, Walt, and Michael Forsythe. (2022). When McKinsey comes to town: The hidden influence of the world’s most powerful consulting firm. Doubleday.

Boyer, Dominic, and George E. Marcus. (2021). Collaborative anthropology today: A Collection of Exceptions. Cornell University Press.

McDonald, D. (2014). The firm: The story of McKinsey and its secret influence on American business. Simon & Schuster.

Ortner, S. B. (2016). “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1), 47-73.

Host: Xinyan Peng
Guest: Dr. Kimberly Chong
Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen
Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (51.2MB)

Navigating the Corporate Paradox: A Conversation with Dr. Mike Prentice

In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Dr. Mike Prentice, who is currently a Lecturer in Korean Studies at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Dr. Prentice has been trained as a linguistic and cultural anthropologist, and his research broadly focuses on genres and technologies of communication, organizations and corporations, and work and labor cultures in contemporary South Korea. Dr. Prentice’s book Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-Hierarchy South Korea, examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in 21st-century South Korea: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Dr. Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today.

03:32 The Study of Supercorporate
08:43 Hierarchy and Distinction
19:31 Powerpoint Cultures
25:10 Infrastructures of Distinction
34:50 Methodology of Corporate Fieldwork
47:57 Socialization, Shareholder Meetings, and Golf

References:

Irvine, J. T. (1989). “When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy.” American ethnologist, 16(2), 248-267.

Janelli, R. L., & Yim, D. (1995). Making capitalism: The social and cultural construction of a South Korean conglomerate. Stanford University Press.

Host: Xinyan Peng
Guest: Dr. Mike Prentice
Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen
Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (79.7MB)