Institutions under pressure: East Asian states, global markets and national firms

Abstract

Institutions across East Asia are in flux as a result of market pressures and political shifts. Some changes have been adaptive while others appear to erode institutional capacity. This framework article introduces the Special Issue, developing an analytic synthesis of scholarship on institutional capacity and change. We focus on the role of markets and firms in bringing about different types of institutional change, and the reconfiguration of state roles to meet new challenges. Accounts of institutional change increasingly focus on incremental institutional change and specify different endogenous processes through which it occurs. We show that changes in the way markets are structured, or market shifts, are important sources of institutional change in East Asia. Such market shifts operate in different ways and geographical scales. They can alter actor preferences with regard to institutional form, produce a shift in the relative political influence of different actors, and prompt institutional 'drift'change in the functionality of institutions due to changed circumstances. Both states and firms play a role in these changes. As the case studies in the collection show, states and firms in the region have both reacted to contextual shifts in markets and proactively led institutional change.

Regional worlds: from related variety in regional diversification to strategic coupling in global production networks

“…Strategic coupling can serve as a new mechanism for achieving related variety in regional diversification by enabling firms in regions to diversify into related products or functional segments in similar industries through new production and market opportunities associated with these regional actors participating in GPN. By relating related variety to strategic coupling, this synthetic view can potentially reconcile the coexistence of endogenous and exogenous sources of regional change and transformation, much like in the broader social science debate on the role of domestic political economy versus international processes in engendering industrial transformation at the national scale (Hamilton-Hart & Yeung, 2021;Neilson et al, 2014;. That said and as argued elsewhere (Yeung, 2021), this GPN approach is never meant to represent all the possible uneven geographical development trajectories in contemporary capitalism.…”

New wine in old bottles? Korean state actors’ policy engagement with the online gaming industry

“…The state actors’ presence also varies within national economies. State interventions and roles have been actively refashioned, as political contexts and supporting institutional conditions have changed (Hamilton-Hart and Yeung, 2019; Stubbs, 2011). In line with this point, this study shows that variations of policy engagement on the online gaming industry facilitate the new institutional logics that potentially run counter to the traditional developmental logic of Korean economy.…”

“…As discussed in the debate within the developmental state literature, the policy implementation of state actors has had a large influence on the institutional change of national economies (e.g. Chu, 2009, 2019; Hamilton-Hart and Yeung, 2019). Yet, the developmental state literature has been less interested in the dynamics and processes of policy implementation of state actors thus far.…”

The trouble with global production networks

“…This embedded autonomy is necessary to the state's bureaucratic coherence and policy efficacy. But recent international political economy work on East Asian industrial transformation has illustrated how the state's domestic embedded autonomy is much harder to maintain in an interconnected world of global production networks (Hamilton-Hart et al, 2021;Yeung, 2016). In short, the mere (re)insertion of the state into GPN 2.0 as an "essential outsider" is insufficient analytically; a fuller state-relevant analysis of global production networks must take into account both domestic politics and the international political economy of these cross-border production networks.…”