Presentation at Academy of Korean Studies, Seongnam

I will be giving a presentation this Friday, December 15 at 10.30 in the Academy of Korean Studies in Seongnam in the Korean Studies Colloquium series on the topic "Individual Skills, Social Roles, and Cultural Expectations: Family Members in Korean Small Businesses", based on, surprise surprise, on my dissertation-soon-to-be-approved on small businesskeepers in a Korean residential neighborhood (announcement in Korean at the Academy homepage) • Link to directions to the Academy: By Subway The simplest way to get to AKS from Seoul is to take the subway. There are two main routes. Take the #4 blue subway line heading south. Get off the train at Indeogwon Station (seven stops south of where the blue and green lines meet at Sadang in southern Seoul). Leave the station via exit #2 and walk 25m straight ahead to the bus stop. Take the #303 or #1550-3 bus heading towards Bundang (W1,500) and get off in front of AKS (about 15 mins). Or, you could take a taxi (about W10,000). Take the #3 Orange subway line and change to the Bundang line at Suseo Station. Get off at Seo-hyeon Station or Sunae Station and geta taxi to AKS (about W20,000). What follows is the abstract of my presentation, but I'm afraid it fails to convey the absolute richness and brilliance of my paper. Yes. Individual Skills, Social Roles, and Cultural Expectations: Family Members in Korean Small Businesses Antti Leppänen Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Helsinki ABSTRACT This presentation discusses the position and role of family or household members in Korean small businesses, focusing on the nexus of a married couple so often found behind the operation of small retail or service establishments, but also delineating and analyzing the participation of other household members. The persons who appear in this presentation and who provided its primary ethnographic data were men and women working together with their spouses in small “neighborhood” businesses with varying degrees of technical or commercial expertise and skill, intensity of labor, formal and actual responsibility and time invested, adapting to and utilizing shared cultural assumptions and understandings concerning the roles and spheres of men, women, and offspring of households. First I outline some general contours of keepers of small businesses in comparative material, paying attention to the prominence of married couples in the organization of labor in the operation of establishments. I also note that despite of the commonly used definition of “family business,” comparative material on small businesskeepers suggests that those establishments tend not to be inherited within the family and that the stratum is mostly transitional and reproduced through new entrants. My research and other sources suggest that it is even more pronounced among Korean keepers of small businesses, especially in the cultural milieu favoring salaried and professional employment based on educational credentials. Drawing on my fieldwork, I remark that contributions by family members, while occasionally important in some cases, are by no means very common, and the participation of family members in operating the shops is characterized by its notable absence as much as by its occasional presence. As businesskeeping is not part of the long-time aspirations of the household, its members’ participation is not unconditional and they tend not to be subordinate to the demands of businesskeeping. While the contributions of household members are of occasional and conditional nature, the appropriation of spousal labor is more given and unconditional. Whereas some characteristics of the common gender divisions of labor in small businesses can be seen as extensions of household divisions of labor, in such a work setting a shopkeeper man is not as wholly removed from the domestic sphere as a salaried man is, and women are removed out of the household in a way that they often find uncomfortable and unsatisfying not only due to cultural notions of male and female spheres but also because of awareness that such a condition is likely to be detrimental for the family aspirations and trajectories. Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: anthropology ∙ Koreanstudies ∙ academic