South Korean corporate fictions, leadership role models and Cordial Ethics

Abstract

South Korean television fiction that portrays business life oscillates between soap opera drama, cartoons borrowed from the online cartoon or webtoon of origin, and realistic dramas that may or may not be crossed by other genres such as thrillers or melodrama. In this corporate fiction it is possible to observe models of leadership that may correspond to some of those described in corporate manuals (Pygmalion Competence, Integral Personalist Leadership) and also with proposals that from applied ethics do not renounce a normative ethics that is both minimum and maximum, such as the Ethics of Cordial Reason, Cordial Ethics (Cortina, 2009). Both models of leadership and ethical proposition will serve for the analysis of two recent South Korean television fictions - Night Lights (Bulyaseong, White Nights, 2016) and Search: WWW (Geomsaekeoreul Ibryeokhaseyo, 2019) - that bring to the table the increasing awareness in their society of the situation of the professional women whose lives they project. The moral profiling and increased realism in the characters’ characterisation from CEO Yi-Kiung Seo (Night Lights) to Ta mi Bae (Search) is due to the move from one screenwriter, Ji-hoon Han, to the breakthrough of more screenwriters in the hallyu industry such as Eun Sol Kwon. In addition, Search: WWW acknowledges the social change in the country after the Feminist Reboot that followed the Gagnam station murder, which has led all hallyu industries to rethink their gender equality conditions.