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  • Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy
  • Jamie Doucette
Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy by Henry W. C. Yeung. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 312 pp. 27 tables. 4 charts. $89.95 (cloth). 29.95 (paper).
Capitalist Development in Korea: Labour, Capital and the Myth of the Developmental State by Dae-oup Chang. New York: Routledge, 2009. 224 pp. $115 (cloth).
Inequality in the Workplace: Labor Market Reform in Japan and Korea by Jiyeoun Song. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 248 pp. 12 tables. 17 charts. $49.95 (cloth).
South Korean Civil Movement Organisations: Hope, Crisis, and Pragmatism in Democratic Transition by Amy Levine. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016. 176 pp. 5 illustrations. £75 (cloth).

Korean political economy as a field of study is interdisciplinary in nature, comprising research by scholars within development studies, heterodox economics, politics, geography, sociology, anthropology, and beyond. By extension, its boundaries are often disjointed, fuzzy, and overlapping. This situation raises challenges for tracking progress and taking stock of the field in a manner that renders this material coherent for area studies in general and Korean studies in particular. Nonetheless, four recent books provide the rare opportunity to raise a number of salient issues regarding the orientation of this inchoate field for a Korean studies [End Page 173] audience. While by no means representative of the broad swath of work that might fall under the category of Korean political economy, these books nonetheless raise a number of important questions about what has been missing in the study of Korea's political economy, how the field and the phenomenon itself are changing, and where it might go in the future. These are timely questions given recent events such as Korea's recent Candlelight revolution, which led to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the election of a new administration promising to tackle corruption and inequality. Taking stock of the processes that led to these protests, the power of the actors involved in them, and the challenges faced by popular actors who have sought to institutionalize a more egalitarian political economic model in Korea are important concerns for those interested in political and economic transformation on the peninsula. In their own way, these books can help deepen ongoing scholarship on these issues and more.

Doing so, however, requires revision of some past approaches that have inflected much of the work in Korean political economy for decades. Since the early 1990s, Korean political economy has been deeply influenced by developmental state theory in particular, and for which Korea has long been regarded as an exemplar of the paradigm. The continued application of this framework to contemporary Korean political economy since the late 1990s remains problematic in that much of the innovative work on the topic was completed before the Asian Financial Crisis and the paradigm itself lost much of its explanatory potential afterward. And yet, talk of Korea as a developmental state, and many of the assumptions of strong states and autonomous bureaucrats that this terminology signifies, continues to haunt the field. For instance, the idea of a developmental state has recently been revived in the field of emerging donors and development cooperation where it informs discussion of policy models for South-South cooperation, and the search for a post-Washington Consensus. Domestic economic reformers also continue to debate the merits and demerits of the model at the risk of simplifying the complexity of the past authoritarian regimes. As a consequence, Korean political economy remains faced with tracking change and transition in this model as well as debating its shortcomings. Two of the books reviewed here directly take on this challenge, while the two others point to new directions for conceptual and empirical deepening of Korean political economy beyond this approach.

The first book—Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy—was written by the economic geographer Henry Yeung. Yeung picks up on a long-standing criticism from geographers that studies of the developmental state have remained "territorially trapped." That is, they focus too closely on the composition of national bureaucracies and their ability to dictate industrial policy and ignore wider relations...

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