2006, Vol.33, No.1

Korean Social Science Journal 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.06

pISSN : 1225-0368 / eISSN : 2196-4424
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kssj

Despite phenomenal growth through the mid 1990s, the1997 foreign exchange crisis led to the collapse of the South Korean economy, which resulted in an In ternational Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. Since then, South Korea has gone through various reform processes. In this paper, we revisit pre- and post-crisis reform efforts in South Korea to draw lessons for other countries. Lessons drawn from the reform processes in the financial, labor, and corporate sectors in South Korea before and after the crisis are two fold. First, economic policy decisions must be made in accordance with economic interests and needs. Second, the government must have a long-term vision and an appropriate policy blueprint while economic restructuring is being implemented. Otherwise, long-term economic consequences may be greater than the short-term costs accompanied by reform policies.

This study is to empirically test the relative importance between class and generation in political orientations, social attitudes and cultural values. Recent social changes occurred in Korea, including the 1997 economic crisis and subsequent neoliberal reform, consolidation of political democracy and ideological freedom, and drastic expansion of information technologies into everyday life, all seem to have contributed to make the generation gap wider and class issues obsolete. Regression analyses of the data drawn from a national sample survey indeed reveal that class is no more a major determinant of virtually all aspects of our lives. Instead, generation turns out to be a more important variable in accounting for political orientations and behavior, attitudes toward work, gender role and marriage, and cultural tastes in Korea, while class is still a major factor for some personal and social issues. The prominence of the generation variable in these analyses seems to pose a serious challenge to the traditional class analysis.

This study aims to examine the mechanisms, and the results of corporatist decision-making arrangements in Korea and Japan, through the lens of the analytical framework provided by the accumulated literature on new corporatism. The following three findings of this study help to expand our understanding of new corporatism. First, new corporatism also requires institutional preconditions to ensure meaningful outcomes. When labor lacks the capacity for collective action and self-regulation, the government usually proceeds with unilateral action without an effort to build a consensus. Second, if the tripartite arrange-ment is crafted by the state with weak social partners, the success of the endeavor by and large depends on the capacity of the state to convince the other partners of the benefits of concertation. Finally, the results of new corporatism need to be explored beyond macroeconomic indicators for unexpected byproducts to be revealed.