The Culture of Korean Industry: An Ethnography of Poongsan Corporation (review)

216BOOK REVIEWS Kim is a born storyteller and his life histories comes through with all the vividness one could hope. Faithful Endurance thus reads well and is a wonderful human document. It will be useful in secondary and college classrooms to put a human face on historical events, and on the principles of Korean kinship. Since it brings out both the tragedy and human resilience of the Korean people, it is highly recommended. Clark W. Sorensen University of Washington The Culture ofKorean Industry: An Ethnography ofPoongsan Corporation, by Choong Soon Kim. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. This work is an invaluable addition to the growing body of literature on South Korean industrialization and chaebol. The combination of Kim's insider/outsider knowledge of South Korean society and business, his adeptness in weaving through different theoretical arguments with his anthropological insight, and the fortuitous timing of his research has brought us one of the most exciting books on the South Korean chaebol to date. This is an ethnography of a mid-size chaebol whose founder has strong Confucian roots, but whose industrial organization and labor-management relations stand in the middle-ground between what we know of as typical Japanese and Western business practices. The author spent a total of twelve months of fieldwork in South Korea between 1987 and 1989—a time of great social and political change there, as thousands of students, workers, and members of the middle class joined forces to push for democracy, and as Roh Tae Woo announced the Declaration for Democracy in June 1987, forever changing the course of South Korean democracy. Poongsan, which was founded in 1968 as a manufacturer of copper and copper-alloy products, is the subject of Kim's industrial ethnography, which focuses on its organizational culture. The late 1980s was also a time of change in Poongsan, which experienced difficult labor-management conflicts and negotiations. Kim's study provides an unusual opportunity to examine labor movements up close. In 1988, Poongsan employed 9,430 workers, its total assets were more than $782 million, and its chairman was the eighth-highest payer of personal income taxes (p. 27). These figures identify Poongsan as one of a number of rapidly expanding family-owned and family-managed business groups in South Korea. Poongsan is not one of the ten largest chaebol. It BOOK REVIEWS217 differs from such large chaebol in one important way: Its chairman made a conscious decision not to expand into unrelated businesses, as many large chaebol have done. Partly as a result of this, it remains a mid-size chaebol, and will most likely continue to be in the near future. If Poongsan is not a typical chaebol in that regard, it nonetheless shares many important features with other South Korean businesses. First, it has been owned and managed by Ryu Chan-u and his family since its foundation. Second, the internal industrial organization appears to be analogous to many South Korean businesses discussed in the literature and also to my own observations of many chaebol during my fieldwork in the 1980s and 1990s. The book's merits and contributions are many. Let me list a few. First, it provides a detailed account of Poongsan's industrial organization. Kim is an excellent observer who brings us vivid images of the physical layout of the offices and factories, as well as the interaction patterns among the workers and managers. Although there have been a few books that provide an in-depth analysis of the South Korean chaebol during the Japanese colonial period (such as Eckert 1991 and McNamara 1990), there have been very few on contemporary chaebol that contain the richness and detail of Kim's work on Poongsan. Second, the timing of the research was marvelous. South Korea was undergoing its most tumultuous social movements and democratic transition since it began industrializing in the early 1960s. The whole society was experiencing major changes: relationships among workers, capitalists, and the state were undergoing particularly drastic transformations. Kim's participant observation, including interviews with labor organizers, workers , and managers during one of Poongsan's labor movements—the Bupyung strike—contains valuable information not otherwise readily obtainable. As a result of his...