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Leaving Before Belonging: Gendered Temporal Friction and the Early Exit of Entry-Level Civil Servants in South Korea

  • 아시아여성연구
  • 2026, 65(2), pp.273~312
  • DOI : 10.14431/jaw.2026.8.65.2.273
  • Publisher : Research Institute of Asian Women
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Gender Studies
  • Received : July 10, 2026
  • Accepted : August 10, 2026
  • Published : August 30, 2026

Baek, Mi-rok 1

1전북여성가족재단

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines voluntary resignation prior to mandatory retirement among civil servants who entered public service at Grade 9 in South Korea from a gender perspective. Using a grounded theory approach, the study analyzes indepth interviews with 10 participants. The core category is identified as “the transition to a de-organizational bureaucrat through gendered temporal friction between violent organizational time and life-course time.” Long working hours, temporally compressed workloads, and constraints on caregiving time operated as violent organizational time that eroded individual life-course time. This temporal order was structured by “bureaucratic familialism,” which reproduces the hierarchy and role expectations of the heteronormative family within bureaucratic organizations and regulates normative career and life-course temporality and organizational commitment. As temporal friction accumulated, participants became de-organizational bureaucrats who remained within the organization while increasingly perceiving public service as a place to leave. Through strategies such as delaying resignation, preparing for re-examination, and internal mobility, their trajectories diverged into complete exit or continued public service. Gendered temporal friction legitimized the concentration of women in citizen-facing work and men in high-intensity disaster-related work, while marginalizing workers with caregiving responsibilities and older workers. Early exit followed gendered temporal trajectories: a masculinized trajectory of intense temporal compression and relatively immediate exit, and a feminized trajectory of gradual exit through deferral and marginalization. The study conceptualizes “gendered organizational reproductive temporality” as an integrative category explaining how bureaucratic organizations reproduce belonging and non-belonging through gendered temporal norms and how de-organizational bureaucrats are constituted through this process.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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