Dr Mike Prentice

I have carried out ethnographic research on the South Korean workplace 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 things like icons, genres, materialities, and platforms of communication mediate broader ideas and shape the experience of work.

My first book, Supercorporate (2022), 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 second book, Reworking the Corporate Age (2026), co-edited with Christiane Berth, retells the narrative of computerization from the point of view of work and the workplace. The volume as a whole addresses how the workplace was an important site of computerization and it was anything but smooth, particularly from the point of view of gender relations. My own chapter revisits newspaper accounts from the 1980s-1990s, examining how alternative platforms of communication were central to the South Korean computer age.

My new research focuses on a digital platform known as Blind. This research explores how versions of organisational life are 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 knowledge of and 'overhearing' of corporate-internal stories.

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.