Living in a kkondae world

Much of younger workers’ pushback against kkondae comes from South Korea’s well-established affinity for hierarchy, which can feel constricting to anyone in the workplace. Within any organisation – a company, a school, a social club – members are ranked, and your ranking does more than just determine who you report to and what kind of responsibility you have.

It also mandates who takes notes in a meeting, who calls to make a reservation for the team dinner and who distributes the spoons and chopsticks once you’re in the restaurant (cutlery is usually in a self-serve wooden box in most Korean establishments).

In the kind of work culture in which colleagues are addressed solely by their job titles, the organisational pyramid is a guidebook for navigating a company, giving everyone a clear picture of where they belong in the chain. Kkondae get their power from this pecking order – and juniors are rarely permitted to question authority.

Also frustrating to Korean youth is the generational divide over work-centric values, chiefly the importance placed on company loyalty.

“People my age see our jobs as just one fraction of our life, more a tool to build our lives,” says Dayoung Ahn, 29. “On the contrary, my superiors see their jobs as a critical part of their lives and often don’t understand why we don’t have the same loyalty towards the company as they do.”

Unlike millennials, baby boomers put work first. Theirs was an age of strict authoritarian rule, in which hair length was policed and international travel was restricted. Baby boomers were given few personal choices, and also had to build their careers in a much narrower definition of what it meant to be a good citizen, devoted to building the country. Steady, respectable employment was the foundation of good citizenship. This absolutism may explain why some elders have difficulty adjusting to millennials with freedom they never experienced.

As Professor Byoung-Hoon Lee, professor of sociology at Chung-Ang University explains, for baby boomers, the goals and aims of your unit at work take precedence over personal goals.