Taekyoon Kim

Mixed Governance and Welfare in South Korea

Abstract:This article sets out to tackle three main questions: 1) How did South Korea lift itself out of utter destruction and destitution to affluence?; 2) How could a ruthlessly authoritarian regime be transformed with relative ease into a stable democratic polity?; and 3) What institutions and governance enabled the authoritarian and democratic governments of South Korea to reduce poverty and inequality?

The Social Construction of Welfare Control A Sociological Review on State—Voluntary Sector Links in Korea

This article aims to track and examine the social construction of state—voluntary sector relationships in the mixed economy of welfare in Korea. Against the prevailing perception that welfare contributions of Korean voluntary organizations began with the emergence of civil society in the democratization period of the late 1980s, it is claimed that the Korean welfare system has always contained a mixture of welfare providers, in which the state and the voluntary sector have played different parts at different historical junctures, even if the power balance between the two sectors has been challenged and changed over time. The main analytical tools are based on the historical institutionalist approach with an emphasis on both how the state controlled and regulated the voluntary sector through institutional adaptations, and how the voluntary sector marshalled its collective action in response to state intervention. It is concluded that the historiography of the Korean welfare system can be rewritten by varying but subsequent phases of social control, which are socially constructed by the different combinations of political and economic power between the state and the voluntary sector: legitimization, mobilization, cooptation and accommodation.

The welfare state as an institutional process

Abstract The main objective of this paper is to argue that the origins and formation of the welfare state should be reconsidered as an institutional process embedded in dialectical relations between given historical contingencies and institutional adaptations in response to welfare demands. Such relational processes can be categorized by the three isomorphic convergences of institutional adaptations to the welfare demands: national emergencies, economic challenges and political transitions. Existing accounts for the emergence of the welfare state – universalism, selectivity, and Marxism – are bracketed under a single heading of social control theory for two reasons: first, those three explanations commonly err in believing that an ideological intent is given as predetermined before actual analyses of social policy-making, thereby neglecting the process of institutional reforms; and second, the underlying implication of all three accounts ends in a common target of social policy – how to control welfare demands, and safeguard social stability. By comparing institutional adaptations with social control theory, the paper aims to explain and emphasize the methodological utilities and practical applicability of the institutional process approach in the studies of welfare development.

Learning through Localizing International Transfers: South Korea’s Development Experiences

Many aid-receiving countries have fallen into the dire trap of aiddependent, despite the increasing scale of international aid transfers. The billions of dollars in aid from wealthy countries to developing African nations have effortlessly become ‘dead aid’ as they failed to reduce the escalation of poverty levels and increase growth rates (Moyo 2009). Post-conflict countries, such as Cambodia, unable to refuse aid, are now rife with the pernicious effects of aid dependence and its perversion of Cambodian democracy (Ear 2013). William Easterly (2003), in this regard, argued that the white man’s burden would be reduced only if the West’s donors changed the fundamental identity of development aid from planners to searchers. Indeed, it is a longstanding impasse in the aid industry: the more aid dependent a country, the more distorted its incentive to develop sustainably.

External-Internal Nexus for the Sources of Insecurity in the Third World:

The focal point of this essay aims to challenge the dominant accounts for the origins of insecurity in the Third World, which have mostly rested upon the contingent effects of the external factor, particularly the end of the Cold War. By emphasizing the importance of both external and internal sources of insecurity alike, the essay suggests two fronts of linking the internal and the external in order to depict the whole shape of insecurity that failed states face. The two linkage solutions include (1) the promotion of democratic, economic, and institutional capacities; and (2) the proactive consideration of local conditions and cultural differences, all of which external interventions need to pay more attention to when they proceed in the targeted countries.