The securitized workplace: document protection, insider threats and emerging ethnographic barriers in a South Korean organization
Journal of Organizational Ethnography
ISSN: 2046-6749
Article publication date: 21 May 2021
Issue publication date: 14 December 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how document protection has become a key object of concern for organizations, how the threat of leaks has led to an increase in security technologies and policies and how these developments present new and emergent ethnographic challenges for researchers. Through a study of a South Korean organization, the paper aims to demonstrate the ways workplace documents are figured into wider legal, regulatory and cyber security concerns.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on 12 months of intensive embedded fieldwork in a South Korean firm from 2014 to 2015 and follow-up interviews in 2018. The author followed an immersive and inductive approach to collecting ethnographic data in situ. The author was hired as an intern in a Korean conglomerate known as the Sangdo Group where he worked alongside Human Resources managers to understand their work practices. The present article reflects difficulties in his original research design and an attempt to analyze the barriers themselves. His analysis combines ideas from theories of securitization and document studies to understand how the idea of protection is reshaping workplaces in South Korea and elsewhere.
Findings
The paper highlights three findings first that South Korean workplaces have robust socio-material infrastructures around document protection and security, reflecting that security around document leaks is becoming integrated into normal organizational life. Second, the securitization of document leaks is shifting from treating document leaks as a threat to organizational existence, to a crime by individual actors that organizations track. Third, that even potential document leaks can have transitive effects on teams and managers.
Originality/value
Organizational security practices and their integration into workplace life have rarely been examined together. This paper connects Weber's insights on bureaucratization with the concept of securitization to examine the rise of document security practices and policies in a South Korean organization. The evidence from South Korea is valuable because technological developments around security coupled with organizational complexities portend issues for other organizational environments around the world.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Parts of this paper were first presented at the American Anthropological Association annual conference in San Jose in 2018 and a workshop at Data and Society in New York City in 2019 on “Algorithms on the Shop-Floor.” The paper was developed during my time as a research fellow at the University of Manchester with the Digital Trust and Security group. Emma Barrett, David Buil Gil, Paul Dourish, Gerard Hodgkinson, Jennifer Hough, Jane Kim, Damien O'Doherty, Gaz Shin, Stuart Strange and Chip Zuckerman. Anonymous reviewers also provided critical insights that helped the paper in numerous ways. Original dissertation research was funded by grants from Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-OLU-2240001).
Citation
Prentice, M.M. (2021), "The securitized workplace: document protection, insider threats and emerging ethnographic barriers in a South Korean organization", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 258-273. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-02-2021-0010
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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