HYBRID ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITY IN SOUTH KOREAN STARTUPS

Abstract

As startups hubs emerge around the world in the post-globalization era, the export of American “Silicon Valley” values and practices has dominated the existing discourse on startup organizational culture in entrepreneurial hotspots. This study proposes the application of cultural hybridity in postcolonial studies to organizational sociology as an alternative framework to understand the transnational cultural encounters at Korean startups. I draw on in-depth interviews with 30 members of Korea’s startup community based in Seoul, the “Silicon Valley of Korea.” Illustrated in the accounts of culture-making at startups is a dynamic intermingling of the discourse of the ideal—or American—startup culture, and of the traditional Korean workplace culture. Complicating the narrative of U.S.-centric modernity, in which horizontalness and flat hierarchy are American exports, interviews reveal that Korean startups creatively integrate and reinterpret what is ostensibly perceived to be “traditional” Korean workplace values into a horizontal imagination, constructing a hybrid organizational culture as a form of postcolonial modernity. Lastly, I employ a feminist lens to problematize the reductive valorization of U.S. startup culture and identify the consequent reproduction of gender paradox in Korean startups.