Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024. US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9780295752273.
Traditional networks, such as blood, regional, and school ties, have long influenced South Korea’s politics, economy, and society. Yong-Chool Ha’s book examines their persistence and reinforcement in an industrialized, modernized, and democratized nation by tracing Korea’s history from the colonial period in a chronological yet thematically focused manner. Ha’s book offers the first systematic socio-historical explanation of this phenomenon and merits academic attention.
Two keywords to consider while following this unconventional narration of Korea’s history are tradition and industrialization. Ha eloquently weaves the persistent tradition and late industrialization orchestrated by the state that entrenched these ties into Korea’s politics, society, and economy. The “process of reinforcement of social ethos and relations based on primary ties,” defined as neofamilism, results from “the social consequences of the state’s introduction of pre-industrial social patterns reinforced during late industrialization” (5–6).
Ha traces the origin of this unique aspect to Japanese colonialism. The colonial authority’s intentions for social control and resource extraction imposed modern repressive state apparatuses and educational systems. However, the artificial and arbitrary nature of colonialism blurred the boundaries among functional institutions, leading to re-traditionalization in the social space, as seen in the modern educational system, which unintentionally transformed into an arena for upward mobility and resistance. Consequently, a “social solidarity among a narrow school-based elite” (58) emerged.
The subsequent chapters explore the development of neofamilism under state-led industrialization, drawing from rich sources, including numerous interviews with former policymakers, bureaucrats, business managers, and union activists, along with personnel records from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and statistical data. The book compellingly demonstrates that the top political leadership’s sense of urgency and distrust in business resulted in overly ambitious goal setting and protective postures towards business, leading to the “Korean-style economic developmental model” where “the state monitored, assisted, and rewarded business to compete in the international market” (73). This top-down goal imposition created “pragmatism and particularism” in bureaucracy, enforcing “frequent contacts between the state and business” (80). While the state and business shared “the same sense of mission to modernize the country” (75), contributing to rapid industrialization, it inadvertently transformed both entities. The top-down pressure politicized the bureaucracy and made it dependent on businesses’ performance, while businesses found ways to exploit this dependence.
Neofamilism was reinforced and embedded in this process, which is the book’s most insightful observation. Since rapid industrialization demanded competent and loyal bureaucrats, the state subtly combined merit with traditional ties. “Competency was secured by merit-based recruitment and loyalty by recruiting those who shared ties,” Ha explains (104). The book demonstrates that the ministry, filled with exam-passed bureaucrats, staffed its key positions and upper echelons with those from particular regions and/or schools, an intended consequence of the Korean-style industrialization.
Ha further highlights unintended consequences. Neofamilism-based recruitment aimed to stabilize the bureaucracy yet instead fostered “pervasive informal organizations” that weakened “organizational integrity and consistency,” making it “vulnerable to outside efforts to infiltrate” by those exploiting neofamilism (104–105). This is defined as debureaucratization (“hollowing out”), meaning that the bureaucracy lost its bureaucratic nature. Businesses, leveraging the bureaucracy’s dependence on them, used neofamilial networks and external political means to infiltrate the bureaucracy for their own interests and, for this, “adopted mimetic recruitment patterns similar to those of the state” (90), contributing to the spread of neofamilism.
This altered the state-business relationship, another essential contribution of this book. The state’s reliance on business, termed “commanding dependency,” led businesses to manipulate this dependency (“dependent manipulation”). As the bureaucracy hollowed out (“hollowed commanding”), businesses began to bargain with the state while continuing to depend on the state (“bargaining dependency”).
In the final chapters, the book expands on neofamilism’s broader political and social implications. Ha suggests a “state-leading-society model,” where the state pursued late industrialization by engaging with society, thereby stratifying it by “the degree of accessibility to state power” (142). Not only the business sector but also political groups and individuals emulated and exploited neofamilism. In particular, during the democratization process of confrontation and negotiation between state and society, civil society organizations emulated neofamilial practices in recruiting members, achieving policy goals, and pursuing individual interests. The book argues that neofamilism has become the basis of identity, individual survival strategy, and social modes of institutional operation.
These novel and provocative arguments, however, require further substantiation. While late industrialization facilitated state-society interactions, those mobilized by neofamilial ties were mainly the government and social elites. To address the social diffusion of neofamilism, the book draws on the author’s interviews and surveys of career bureaucrats and businessmen, most of whom possess a bachelor’s degree or higher, while the college enrollment rate in the late 1980s was well below 30 percent. It thus remains unclear how chaebols’ and anti-authoritarian political groups’ practices of neofamilism were diffused to the rest of society, making people “take for granted the uses of neofamilial ties to promote their socioeconomic interests” (97). Attributing region-based party politics and voting behaviour to neofamilism should also consider the large body of literature offering political, economic, and historical explanations. To argue that Koreans’ reliance on neofamilial ties is a “critical survival strategy for average Korean people” (167), it would be best to provide a comparative case study, as this reliance could be common in developing nations. The persistence of neofamilism in the neoliberal transformation after the post-1997 crisis also needs additional empirical support.
Nevertheless, these points should not preclude the validity of neofamilism as a key principle in social groupings, hindering individualism and democratic consolidation; rather, they represent a call for further updates and expansion. A revised edition could also address minor issues such as inconsistent romanization and the inclusion of a glossary for readers unfamiliar with Korean language and history.
I would like to offer a disclaimer that this book is not a story of Korea’s economic development. Yet it is germane to the story of Korea’s economic development, since “understanding how [neofamilism] arose and functioned is essential to understanding the development of Korea both socially and economically” (11). The author largely succeeds in this, and in this regards, Ha’s masterful work should receive a wide readership, not only for those interested in contemporary Korea but also for those wanting to understand the “macrosocial implications of the impact of late industrialization” (3). There is no doubt that neofamilism provides “a unique lens to observe the dynamics” of Korea’s industrialization (103).
Sunil Kim
Kyung Hee University, Yongin