Polanyian Perspective Meets the Varieties of Capitalism: Inspecting the Consequences of Institutional Changes in South Korea since 1997
Abstract
This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on market societies with an analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) school. It departs from the argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working of modern capitalism, but become entrapped in overt structuralism which considers institutional change as just an interplay within a self ordering institutional structure.
However, the article employs Karl Polanyi's double movement, the dialectic of marketizing dis-embedding and socializing re-embedding, to demonstrate that institutional change must be rather conceived as embedded in social life. One can only then recognize that such change is primarily conditioned by social contests among sentient agents which engage in ideational struggle over its final outcome.
These theoretical reconsiderations are tested on the empirical terrain of Korean capitalism after the Asian Crisis of 1997 and the Global Crisis of 2007. First, double movement is used to demonstrate that the post-crises institutional changes have transformed Korean capitalism's societal and institutional model from developmentalism to embedded neoliberalism.
Second, it is documented that this transformation has been characteristic of ideational struggles which turned into a socially contested, largely contradictory, uneven, and open-ended process.