ABSTRACT
The success of the East Asian economies, particularly Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, since the second half of the twentieth century has been little short of astounding, with few countries matching the pace and intensity of their development. In the past two decades, sociologists and economists have grappled with the need to identify factors contributing to this success. A challenging task has been the search for appropriate theoretical handles on the economic institutions commonly found in these societies, particularly their organizational structures and the relation of these structures to economic rationality and performances. Unlike their Western counterparts, business organizations in East Asia seem to be dominated by horizontally controlled networks of family firms in Chinese settings, clusters of interconnected large firms such as the intermarket groups ( keiretsu and kaisha) in Japan, and the vertically integrated network of firms ( chaebol) in South Korea (Orrù, Biggart, and Hamilton 1991). Their obvious differences notwithstanding, most East Asian business organizations tend to share a characteristic of significant reliance on business networks in coordinating production, distribution, and consumption of products and services. This has prompted some scholars to proclaim network organization to be a unique institutional feature of Asian capitalism, a system that is distinctive from the Western notion of bureaucratization and efficiency (Biggart and Hamilton 1997: 51; Whitley 1992).
