Weber in Korea (on the separation between office and household)

One of Weber's strands of argument, found both toward the beginning of The Protestant Ethic and the essay on Bureaucracy is that modern, rational capitalism will be marked by a distinct separation between office and household. It is only with this separation that adequate rationalization of the capitalist firm is possible, because insofar as the office is integrated into the household, business decisions (or execution of bureaucratic duty, depending on the nature of the office) won't be maximally rational. Blurring between office and household introduces extra-rational influences into the process of decision-making (due to deference to both tradition and status) and partially subordinates capital accumulation to practices of consumption guided by dynamics of the household.

My experiences thus far pose challenges to Weber's thesis. My director's family, including her husband, sister, and mother, clearly share economic resources pertinent to the business (particularly cars), but they also volunteer oversight and care for their children at the school spontaneously and naturally. Moreover, the director often invites employees attend recreational activities, meals, etc., sometimes blending work into play, but sometimes not (clearly, this often enhances extraction of labor's productivity).

There are, however, caveats to my ability to draw conclusions from these experiences, given that I am trying to infer from my experiences with a single business and family. First, it could be that this particular firm (and/or the corresponding director and/or family) is just idiosyncratic. Perhaps in other Hagwons, businesses are more classically bureaucratically rationalized. Second, maybe this trend is specifically adaptive to the Hagwon system. When you have employees who are specifically disoriented after having traveled into a radically unfamiliar cultural context, the provision of a family-like environment can help these employees cope. And third, the Korean case might be born of specific, transient social circumstances rather than suggesting something in particular about which social arrangements are most successful among capitalist firms. Indeed, my director claims that Korea, as a whole, was poor very recently. Regardless of whether this is statistically true (every nearly every 'underdeveloped' area has a wealthy local elite), this suggests that her family went through a rapid, recent transition where their economic activity radically changed in just a few decades. Under such conditions, we would expect some degree of persisting 'economic traditionalism'.