ABSTRACT
This chapter critically assesses institutionalist interpretations of industrialisation in East Asia by examining the key scholars in the fields of politics, sociology and economics, including Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Linda Weiss and Adrian Leftwich as well as Ha-Joon Chang and Byeong-Cheon Lee. These institutionalists, diverse disciplinary backgrounds notwithstanding, share a common recognition that state and market are linked institutionally, and the functioning of the market is in itself already a ‘political’ and ‘historical’ process. This chapter contends that these broadly institutionalist approaches reinforce statism in two ways: first, they conceive of the state-market linkages in terms of the personal relationships between government officials (bureaucrats) and businesses. More crucially, the institutionalist conceptualisation of the developmental state as being linked to and embedded in society makes capitalist social relations appear less contradictory and more harmonious. The chapter then shows how the institutionalist elite-centred analysis manifests itself in its framing of the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98 primarily as a consequence of elite-level interactions in which state elites lost their policy autonomy relative to capitalists, or as a matter of dismantlement or resurrection of institutions that can serve and bring about ‘successful’ national development.
