Reconfiguring the Panopticon? Workers’ Experiences of Labour Discipline Amid Marketisation in North Korean State Enterprises

This article examines how former workers in North Korean state enterprises retrospectively describe labour discipline and organisational life amid the marketisation of the country’s political economy. Using geo-ethnography, it draws on semi-structured individual and focus-group interviews with ten former workers affiliated with enterprises in Pyongyang and Hyesan. Satellite photographs were used as place-based memory prompts, while laws, directives, media reports, and secondary sources provided spatial, institutional, and historical context rather than independent verification of oral testimony. Using Foucault’s Panopticon as a sensitising concept, the article examines reported monitoring, reporting, self-censorship, strategic conformity, and anticipated sanction. The cases suggest that marketisation neither simply replaced state enterprises nor dissolved labour discipline. Workers could pursue market income and, in some cases, negotiate attendance through 8.3 labour, while retaining enterprise affiliation and responding to meetings, mobilisation, reporting, and possible sanction. At the same time, workers and labour discipline remained part of the institutional and everyday terrain through which socialist order continued to be organised. Market livelihoods, labour discipline, and organisational obligations were experienced as interdependent and negotiated in particular workplaces and periods.