Knowing your place-Hierarchy in modern South Korea.

After living and working in South Korea for a while and observing interactions between the locals one thing I have noticed is the stark difference between the way people communicate with each other here and in the west. Korean people seem to have an acute awareness of hierarchical position.

Any foreigner who has lived here becomes pretty familiar with this early on. Knowing who you can address and how to address them, who to pour a drink for, hold a door for, pander to and (to put it rather crudely) take shit from, depends on a myriad of factors that slot you into a certain position in the structure of the social hierarchy.

Sometimes this can seem refreshing. People undoubtedly appear to respect and take care of the elderly, teenagers generally treat their teachers with a degree of courtesy certainly not present in your average inner city Newcastle stab factory and those who have worked hard and climbed the career ladder are rewarded (eventually and after a bloody exhausting hike) with a comfortable and acknowledged sense of status.

But.... on the negative side old people can be as rude and obnoxious as they please, people need to grit their teeth while bowing to their older peers even if said peers are unbearable tits and those in higher positions in a work place can end up being completely unaware of the long term mental health problems their inaction and ignorance having not been ever challenged in their decision making can cause to the poor buggers cleaning up their mess.

The presence of a pecking order arrived with the neo-confusion doctrine of a Chinese philosopher called Zhu Xi. The rulers of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) made it the official ideology of the land and a Korean fella called Yi Hwang, (1501-70) helped to make it hip and cool and before you knew it (over a period of hundreds of years where loads of  significant things probably happened) everyone knew their place.

The only known photograph of Confucius.

The way it works (in layman's slow minded brothers terms) or at least the way one of the basic ideas works is by defining social relations in all levels of society. The point isn't to create a general feeling of warmth in peoples bellies or to make any  individuals involved happy but rather to treat and regard  the population as a collective each doing their part for the 'harmony of the natural order' (something a bit taoish and buddhisty flavoured emphasizing an alignment with the cosmos.)

By the mid 1500s this Idea had gotten all bloody conservative and relationships had been sliced into 5 different categories that were apparently crucial if the non-existant trains were to run on time and to ensure that the moon doesn't fall out of the sky. The 5 relationships forms were as follows "between father and son there should be affection; between ruler and minister there should be righteousness; between husband and wife there should be attention to their separate functions; between old and young there should be a proper order; and between friends there should be faithfulness."

The thing is, Korea changed. In the 19th century, western brain farts in the form of democratic political values like individualism and sexual equality made their way to Korean shores. They came first in the form of those annoying Christian missionaries who try and hassle you on the bus and then later as the country gingerly opened up it's international relations and trade channels. These ideas became even more influential after Korea did that horrible big fight with itself and split into two bits. Since the war American and European influence in South Korea has reached it's tentacles into every corner. Sometimes in the form of shite fast food restaurants like Lotteria and in repeated use of 'sexy' and 'baby' in ghastly pop music but also, arguably more positively in the guise of social equalities and governmental democracy.

The thing is, Korea may have gobbled up all of this western influence but it is still Korea. The 5 relationships have turned into about fifteen with the introduction of different types of employment and ways to show off how much money you've made. In my humble opinion, these two foreign influences, one ancient and one relatively new, do not chime. They go together like Pizza and candy (a combination that can genuinely be found in pizza places here.)

This is a problem because now that Korea has opened up and continues to open up economically, friction and frustration can arise when foreigners and Koreans are working in the same environment. I am not just speaking about the vast amount of public schools and private hagwons where locals and foreigners work in close contact but also in terms of business. A revealing study was done into the perception of the Korean hierarchical system by people from Finland working in a joint Korean-finnish business venture here. One employee summed up the bafflement we outsiders experience on encountering these hierarchies at work:

'Hierarchy exists between everyone, not just between the boss and the subordinate but everyone and everybody. Promotions are an example. The first one you get after three years and that already makes a difference. And on the lower level just the fact that one has an employment history of one month longer than the other plus age make a difference. So even if a per-son is just a year younger, a politer form of speech has to be used. So everyone is on a slightly different rung of the ladder from everyone else. Not necessarily inside a family or between friends but the situations where hierarchy does not apply are very limited in number.' 

The author also highlights some of the problems that arise within workplaces due to the unquestionable all-powerful superiority of those above. He says that his interviewees thought it was actually beneficial for underlings to actually act dumber than they were!

'Arguing with the boss, especially in front of others, was understood to be impossible also be-cause questioning someone above you in the hierarchy would make him lose face. At worst the employee might even lose his or her job. The interviewees were even skeptical about the possibility of expressing negative feelings in private, face-to-face. This limitation on the free expression of opinion was to the interviewees a very negative characteristic in terms of the efficiency and profitability of work in Korea. In a hierarchical organization unprompted activity was neither expected nor desired. In practice, for example in meetings, it was the superior who spoke and the subordinates who remained quiet unless their opinion was asked for. This ran contrary to Finns’ views about sharing ideas and putting forward different views as a very important factor in developing an organization. In some ways one might have to be careful not to appear too smart even though one was. In some cases you just have to realize you have to shut up and keep to yourself. It would often be much better though, if employees could express their own opinions more. ' 

The study (Finns making sense of Korean Hierarchy) can be found here: http://www.academia.edu/169992/Finns_Making_Sense_of_Korean_Hierarchy_How_Expatriates_from_Finland_Experience_Hierarchy_in_a_Korean_Working_Environment

Korean Hierarchy has even made the news recently  in the form of the Asiana airlines plane crash in Sanfrancisco in July 2013.

There were reports claiming that the authoritarian nature of the cockpit meant that the co-pilots and subordinates didn't feel that they could question the way the captain was operating the plane. This may or may not be true but there is plenty of literature claiming that Korean Hierarchy can interfere with the goings on in the cockpit, even from that clever fellow Malcolm Gladwell who wrote Outliers:

'Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.' 

Link to interview with Malcolm Gadwell : http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/12/04/malcolm-gladwell-on-culture-cockpit-communication-and-plane-crashes/

So some argue that it can be lethal! who knows, it can certainly be an irritant, but then again, like in all these posts I and my fellow emigrés should always be very conscious of the fact that we just don't really understand. And that can be piss boilingly frustrating, but part of our mission while on planet-K bot should be to try our very hardest to do so.