ILPC 2027

   It is one Wednesday morning of July 2009, and the time is 6:30 AM. The place is Seoul, Korea and people are hurriedly flocking in a stately conference room located at the headquarters of POSCO, the world's second largest steelmaker. At 7:00 AM sharp, the lecture begins and about 350 senior managers and executives of the steel company begin to concentrate on what the lecturer says. At the two other locations of the company—two steel mills in Pohang and Gwangyang—another 500 senior managers listen to the same lecture through video-linked teleconference. The lecturer is a famous professor in Korea and the topic this morning is the life and philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This biweekly lecture series, which began in May 2009, is to continue throughout the year 2010 and will cover various humanities and related topics such as ancient history and the thoughts of Socrates, Nietzsche, Goethe, Confucius, Zhuangzi, etc. In addition to this, the company opened spacious entertainment and resting lounges, called "Poreka,” at three of their main business sites. Poreka is a combined word of POSCO and Eureka, the exclamation attributed to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes. Here, POSCO workers can participate in artistic activities like painting, reading or playing musical instruments and thru these activities are expected to boost their creativity.
   Philosophy and ancient history in a steel company? Employees painting and playing musical instruments during their work time? Quite bizarre as they may seem, these developments are not unique to POSCO. In 2006, the Samsung Group Chairman Kun-Hee Lee announced “Creative Management” as the new management paradigm for Samsung. Since then numerous Korean companies have been fervently following this lead, and in a relatively brief space of time creativity management has firmly settled down in Korean society as a dominant workplace discourse that constitutes organizational practices and personal identities.
   However, despite the ostensible enthusiasm and flashy rhetoric, most of the firms pursuing creativity seem to be floundering as to the actual implementation methods. In fact, it would not be a serious distortion to say that almost nothing very substantial has been done other than adopting a few stylish changes or superficial techniques of doubtful origin. Nevertheless, creative management as a discourse seems to have a very profound impact upon the lives and subjectivity of Korean laborers. As Thrift(2002) points out, creativity has become a value in itself. This paper, based on data from various media sources and in-depth interviews conducted at three large Korean firms (with the personnel in charge of creative management and managers and employees of various ranks), attempts to explore the nature and trajectory of creativity discourses in Korean business settings and how these discourses transform the subjectivity of managers and employees. More specifically, by using Foucauldian notions of governmentality and discursive formation, we are going to show that the creativity discourse and practices represent a particular set of power-knowledge relations that constitutes an unstable, neoliberal subjectivity of South Korea’s modern-day employees.