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Sociological Perspective for Corporate History in Colonial Korea: Analysis Frame of ‘Business Group’ and Lineage of ‘State Corporation’

CHO JUNG WOO 1

1한림대학교 일본학연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article aims to propose new perspectives for corporate history in colonial Korea. The focus is on the ‘business group’ frame which Mark Granovetter has been used for analysing the corporate governance structure of big companies in East Asia. Granovetter argued Zaibatsu in Japan, Jaebol in Korea, and family-owned enterprises in Taiwan to be analyzed as ‘business group’. This unique composition of those companies is very different from the American big corporations such as General Motors, Dupont, Standard Oil com. which were defined as the ideal model of the contemporary capitalist economy system by Alfred Chandler. This model corporations are characterized by ‘vertical integration’ in terms of Oliver Williamson, but the business groups in East Asia are composed of many industrial irrelevant affiliates governed by a particular owner family. The analytic points of this article are (1) historical formation of this corporate structure, (2) relation of state and business corporation which has supported that structure, and (3) the rule of state-corporation carried out in that relationship.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.