SAMSUNG, HYUNDAI, and other South Korean business conglomerates
known as chaebo'l in Korean - exemplify South Korean economic development. While Samsung semiconductors and Hyundai cars are found around
the world and represent South Korean economic dynamism, the same conglomerates are vilified in South Korea for excessive concentration and
extensive corruption. They remain, in other words, central to any discussion of
the South Korean political economy.
Family ownership, centralized control, industrial diversification, and
close ties to the state are some of the defining features of the chaebo'l.
Although there is some colonial-period continuity, the vast majority of them
originated and prospered under the developmental state that has reigned
in South Korea since the 1960s. To discuss the chaebo'l leads analysts, willy
nilly, to discuss the state.
The Korean Business Conglomerate provides a sure-footed survey of the
chaebo'l. After a historical overview and a comparative chapter on the
Japanese zaibatsu, Myung Hun Kang explores the organizational and economic characteristics of the chaeb6l, their relationship to the state, and their
sources of growth. He also investigates their place in, as well as their impact
on, the South Korean economy. The monograph is replete with useful facts
and figures and it can be recommended as a reliable introduction.
In his effort to clarify the chaebol, however, Kang ignores some of their
peculiarities and problems. Reading the monograph, one gains little sense
of what makes the chaebol tick or why so many South Koreans revile them. In
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Pacific Affairs
eschewing a larger argument and an overarching theoretical framework,
Kang purchases evenhandedness at the expense of blandness. In this
regard, Big Business, Strong State, in part because of the theoretically
informed argument, illuminates the dynamic and dialectical relationship
between the state and the chaebo^l, which is rendered as a static one in Kang's
account.
After helpful conceptual discussions of the state and the chaebo^l, Eun
Mee Kim presents the shifting trajectory of collusion and conflict between
them. Although paramount in the 1960s, the strong, developmental state
gradually declines in power vis-a-vis the dynamic chaebo^l by the 1980s. Kim's
historical narrative is persuasive and she adduces a wide range of compelling evidence and case studies.
The two books under review are welcome additions to the growing
Anglophone literature on South Korean business conglomerates. They
present a wide array of information, and Kim in particular proposes a
cogent analytical framework. They should temper excessive celebrations
or denunciations of the chaebo^l found in some popular periodicals.
What is missing in both books, however, is a rich and textured account
of the corruption that characterizes the two key institutions of South
Korean development. Here, let me recommend Mark Clifford's Troubled
Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats, and Generals in South Korea (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1994). More generally, the excessive focus on the state and the
chaeb6l obfuscates the role of civil society (including labor) and of the international political economy, both of which are critical in order to make sense
of the particular contours of chaebo^l structure, conduct, and performance.
Nonetheless, both books do much to advance our understanding of South
Korean business conglomerates in particular and the South Korean economy in general.
University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A. JOHN LIE
CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT AND KOREAN INSTITUTIONS