Microsoft PowerPoint is both the bane and banality of contemporary South Korean office work. Corporate workers spend countless hours refining and crafting plans, proposals, and reports in PowerPoint that often lead to conflicts with coworkers and overtime work. This article theorizes the excessive attention to documents in modern office contexts. Where scholars have been under the impression that institutional documents align with institutional purposes, I describe a context in which making documents for individual purposes and making them for work exist under a basic tension. Based on fieldwork in corporate Korea between 2013 and 2015, I describe how Korean office workers calibrate documents to the tastes of superiors who populate the managerial chain.These practices leave little trace of real "work" on paper, but they are productive for navigating complex internal labor markets and demonstrating a higher order value of attention toward others. These findings suggest that institutional and individual authorities are not competing projects inside organizations but become entangled in increasingly complex participatory encounters, even as they are channeled through a seemingly simple software like PowerPoint. [documents, expertise, authority, technology, South Korea] RESUMEN Microsoft PowerPoint es tanto la perdición como la banalidad del trabajo de oficina surcoreano contemporáneo. Los trabajadores corporativos gastan incontables horas refinando y elaborando planes, propuestas, y reportes en PowerPoint que a menudo llevan a conflictos con sus compañeros de trabajo y a horas extras de trabajo.Este artículo teoriza la excesiva atención a documentos en los contextos de oficina modernos. Donde los investigadores han estado bajo la impresión que los documentos institucionales se alinean con propósitos institucionales, describo un contexto en el cual crear documentos con propósitos individuales y crearlos por trabajo existen bajo una tensión básica. Basado en trabajo de campo en la Corea corporativa entre 2013 y 2015, describo cómo trabajadores de oficina coreanos calibran documentos a los gustos de los superiores que pueblan la cadena directiva. Estas prácticas dejan poco rastro de "trabajo" real sobre el papel, pero son productivas para navegar los mercados de labor internos complejos y demostrar un valor de más alto orden de atención hacia otros. Estos hallazgos sugieren que autoridades institucionales e individuales no son proyectos competitivos dentro de las organizaciones, pero se llegan a enredar en encuentros participativos cada vez más complejos, aun cuando se canalizan a través de un software aparentemente simple como PowerPoint. [documentos, experiencia, autoridad, tecnología, Sur Corea] A ssistant Manager So-yeon leaned over to my desk and doodled a cartoon pig in my field notebook. She was covertly depicting her direct boss, Team Manager Park,
0171.xml and sites of application, including ritual, the law, economy, academic discourse, and media, among others. Scholars wishing to engage the primary sources common to contemporary traditions should refer to the works listed below in *Key Works*. Scholars new to the topic or interested in the most recent applications should see *Current Discussions* and *Monographs, Edited Volumes, Special Issues*. KEY WORKSA number of works serve as important touchstones for current applications and discussions and remain frequently cited. Anthropology's engagement with the idea of intertextuality has largely been through uptake of Bakhtin, especially Bakhtin 1981. Hill 1985 and Hanks 1986 were among the first to draw on Bakhtinian ideas as a method of social discourse analysis. Hanks 1989 offers an early review article on textuality, synthesizing a number of approaches to text, discourse, and genre. The major citations for intertextuality are Bauman and Briggs 1990 and Briggs and Bauman 1992 (see *Genre* for further discussion). In these twin articles, the authors introduce a number of terms--entextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization, as well as intertextual gap--that have remained enduring theoretical resources for ethnographic analysis. For sociolinguistic approaches, Fairclough 1992 provides a
This article analyzes the aging of a figure of labor: the male Korean office manager. In contrast to its normative heyday in late twentieth century East Asia, the figure of the older manager has become a devalued and deviant figure in contemporary Korea. Based on ethnography of a Korean white-collar workplace, I argue that the older male manager has emerged as a "figure of alterity" that seems to permeate all aspects of Korean company life. By attuning to how indexes
This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can also reveal how people are engaging with social and technological transformations. To study this, we advocate turning to four focal points: shifting genre hierarchies, stabilizing genres, cross-genre identities, and empty genres.
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