Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

Yong-Chool Ha

South Korea’s rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebŏl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation’s economy. Leader Park Chung Hee’s sense of backwardness and urgency led him to rely on familial, school, and regional ties to expedite the economic transformation. Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea elucidates how a country can progress economically while relying on traditional social structures that usually fragment political and economic vitality. The book proposes a new framework for macro social change under late industrialization by analyzing the specific process of interactions between economic tasks and tradition through the state’s mediation.

Drawing on interviews with bureaucrats in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry as well as workers and others, Yong-Chool Ha demonstrates how the state propelled industrialization by using kinship networks to channel investments and capital into chaebŏl corporations. What Ha calls “neofamilism” was the central force behind South Korea’s economic transformation as the state used preindustrial social patterns to facilitate industrialization. Ha’s account of bureaucracy, democratization, and the middle class challenges assumptions about the universal outcomes of industrialization.

“A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the social dynamics of the state and business in South Korea.” —Uk Heo, coauthor of The Evolution of the South Korea–United States Alliance

“This brilliant study of familial and local ties as the central constituent of statebusiness-society relations is a must-read for anyone interested in development, democratization, and postcolonial politics. It makes a landmark contribution to the comparative studies of industrialization and its spatiotemporal unevenness.”

—Hyun Ok Park, author of The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea february

Yong-Chool Ha is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Social Science at the University of Washington. He is editor of International Impact of Colonial Rule in Korea, 1910–1945.

288 pp., 15 tables, 6 × 9 in.

$105.00x / £84.00 hC / 9780295752266

$32.00s / £24.99 Pb / 9780295752273

$32.00s / £24.99 eb / 9780295752280

Asian Studies / Korea / History / Politics korean studies of the henry m. jackson school of international studies january

214 pp., 5.125 × 8 in.

$25.00s Pb / 9786162151422

Asian Studies / Southeast Asia / Literature / Poetry