Korean political economy as a field of study is interdisciplinary in nature, comprising research by scholars within development studies, heterodox economics, politics, geography, sociology, anthropology, and beyond. By extension, its boundaries are often disjointed, fuzzy, and overlapping. This situation raises challenges for tracking progress and taking stock of the field in a manner that renders this material coherent for area studies in general and Korean studies in particular. Nonetheless, four recent books provide the rare opportunity to raise a number of salient issues regarding the orientation of this inchoate field for a Korean studies audience. While by no means representative of the broad swath of work that might fall under the category of Korean political economy, these books nonetheless raise a number of important questions about what has been missing in the study of Korea’s political economy, how the field and the phenomenon itself are changing, and where it might go in the future. These are timely questions given recent events such as Korea’s recent Candlelight revolution, which led to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the election of a new administration promising to tackle corruption and inequality. Taking stock of the processes that led to these protests, the power of the actors involved in them, and the challenges faced by popular actors who have sought to institutionalize a more egalitarian political economic model in Korea are important concerns for those interested in political and economic transformation on the peninsula. In their own way, these books can help deepen ongoing scholarship on these issues and more.Doing so, however, requires revision of some past approaches that have inflected much of the work in Korean political economy for decades. Since the early 1990s, Korean political economy has been deeply influenced by developmental state theory in particular, and for which Korea has long been regarded as an exemplar of the paradigm. The continued application of this framework to contemporary Korean political economy since the late 1990s remains problematic in that much of the innovative work on the topic was completed before the Asian Financial Crisis and the paradigm itself lost much of its explanatory potential afterward. And yet, talk of Korea as a developmental state, and many of the assumptions of strong states and autonomous bureaucrats that this terminology signifies, continues to haunt the field. For instance, the idea of a developmental state has recently been revived in the field of emerging donors and development cooperation where it informs discussion of policy models for South-South cooperation, and the search for a post-Washington Consensus. Domestic economic reformers also continue to debate the merits and demerits of the model at the risk of simplifying the complexity of the past authoritarian regimes. As a consequence, Korean political economy remains faced with tracking change and transition in this model as well as debating its shortcomings. Two of the books reviewed here directly take on this challenge, while the two others point to new directions for conceptual and empirical deepening of Korean political economy beyond this approach.The first book—Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy—was written by the economic geographer Henry Yeung. Yeung picks up on a long-standing criticism from geographers that studies of the developmental state have remained “territorially trapped.” That is, they focus too closely on the composition of national bureaucracies and their ability to dictate industrial policy and ignore wider relations across geographical space that have shaped economic development.1 Yeung provides a long-awaited revision and reworking of developmental state theory by expanding its geographical reach and placing it in conversation with the literature on global production networks (GPNs) in order to examine the dynamics of industrial transformation in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. To do so, Yeung develops the concept of strategic coupling to cast greater analytical significance on firm-specific initiatives and strategies, such as technological innovation, capability building, and international market development and the processes through which national firms “decouple” partially from domestic political economic structures (developmental states) over time and “couple” with lead firms in GPNs (Yeung, 4–5).In a nutshell, Yeung argues that the conditions for growth and development have varied over time and space; they are not isomorphic. While firms may have benefited from the initial industrial policies of the developmental state, their later success was as much dependent on their own efforts to articulate themselves within global production networks through developing strong relationships with global lead firms. This argument is most persuasive in Yeung’s analysis of the electronics industry and firms like Samsung in particular. While he recognizes that the state did play an important initial role in encouraging industrial ecosystems and promoting sectoral capacity, Yeung documents how Samsung’s emergence as a global lead firm occurred after the developmental state had mostly receded from industrial policy and has much to with the firm’s own efforts to deepen capacity, establish an international brand and market presence, and link up to global players like Apple. While this story updates developmental theory to provide a broader picture of industrial evolution in the midst of globalization, it still works closely along the grain of previous developmental state research inasmuch as it retains the strong claims about the role of the national state in at least the initial period of industrial takeoff. Whereas recent work by geographers has emphasized the importance of a form of geopolitical strategic coupling from the get-go in fueling capital accumulation, capacity building and even spatial planning, as in the case of Korean firms and U.S.-oriented Cold War procurement networks.2While Yeung moderates some of the hard claims about state autonomy in East Asian development by noting that not only firm-level initiatives but also dissent from labor and democracy movements restricted the abilities of the developmental state—thus hinting at the need for a more relational framework that can better take into account how development takes place in the context of contestation—a fuller picture of employment dynamics, labor struggle, and the role of democratization in refashioning economic policy could be dealt with in more detail here and, indeed, would help to cast greater light on areas neglected in previous developmental state research. Yeung largely provides an elite-centered focus on industrial upgrading that is concerned with a success story of strategic couplings. But the dark side of strategic coupling might be more explicitly considered here, not to mention critical questions of politics, power, and the social production of value relations, as highlighted by critics of recent trends in GPN research.3The other books reviewed here therefore provide important complements to Yeung’s critique of developmental state research by more thoroughly asking questions of value, power, and the challenges of democratizing Korea’s political economy. The primary contribution of Dae-oup Chang’s Capitalist Development in Korea: Labour, Capital and the Myth of the Developmental State—is its valuable Marxist critique of developmental state theory. Chang argues that to create their narrative of state autonomy, of a state that deliberately steered development by picking winners and allocating scarce resources, developmental state theorists tended to reduce state-society relations to selective sets of inter-elite relations between businesses and the bureaucracy. Here the focus has largely been on policies such as the rationing of export credit or other scarce resources where it can be shown that bureaucrats exercised considerable discretion. “In consequence, the state appears to be class neutral and exist above class relations as long as the state has leadership over private capital” (Chang, 24). However, Chang argues, the approach mystifies class relations by mistaking the relations between businessmen and bureaucrats for state-capital relations in general.In order to provide a more relational and class-sensitive critique of East Asian development, Chang recaps some of the debates from the 1970s and 1980s surrounding the nature of capitalist states from which the developmental state, by extension, emerged. Chang argues that a common weakness of these debates is their separation of politics and economy in a manner that externalizes the relation between state and society rather than seeing these as integrally related. Returning to Marx, Chang argues that we must understand that social relations appear as formal abstractions due to the commodified relations that are socially produced under capitalism and that make the logic of the system appear as a relation among objects: a perspective that obscures an understanding of capital as a relation of value in motion that necessarily involves labor, politics, and the state. Chang is particularly concerned with how labor has been removed from the analytical framework of developmental state theory. The government’s leadership against private businesses through industrial policy and the strategic transfer of resources is equated with state autonomy from capital “as a whole.” But this neglects the fact that the developmental state’s interventions were generally based on extending capital relations not only through industrial policy but also through the active subordination of labor to capital through varied means. Developmental state theory has thus risked mystifying the state by neglecting important class and political dynamics and creating nostalgia for the period of authoritarian developmentalism as one of a virtuous “developmental mindset.”4Chang’s major contribution is his fine-grained reading of state theory and value theory from a Marxist perspective. His empirical chapters complement this work with a concern for how labor struggle has shaped capitalist development both before and after the financial crisis of the late 1990s. Here Chang makes some great comments on how the crisis enabled the “informalization” of labor through the expansion of contract and contingent employment relations. However, after such a detailed theoretical critique and deconstruction of developmental state theory, the reader is left desiring greater detail in terms of the nature, for instance, of labor governance, factory regimes, and other geographically embedded social relations through which value has been extracted and demands for equality sidelined. If Yeung largely neglects the question of the labor relations that undergird developmental states and often travel with GPNs, Chang puts labor back in, so to speak, at least on the theoretical level in terms of how we think about state-capital relations and the developmental state.5 However, a detailed, empirical illustration of how labor relations have been influenced by contemporary changes and transformation, as well as a statistical portrait of the inequality neoliberalism has fueled, is in many ways left unfinished.Such is the focus and contribution of Jiyeoun Song’s Inequality in the Workplace: Labor Market Reform in Japan and Korea. Song is concerned with the politics of labor-market reform in both countries in part because of institutional similarities—both have been considered developmental states or “coordinated market economies” in the terminology of the Varieties of Capitalism school, which Song is in part influenced by—but also divergences in terms of the politics of reform and orientation of labor-market institutions. An example of the latter is that while Japan has a much higher degree of wage coordination among firms and unions, in Korea strategies of wage control have prevailed. The book provides a comprehensive survey of how elements of labor relations such as employment protection legislation, collective bargaining coverage, political partisanship, social protection legislation, and more have changed over the last thirty years. One of Song’s novel findings is that while Japan has pursued a strategy of “liberalization for outsiders”—a liberalization of labor relations that has disproportionally targeted dispatched and temporary workers, as well as other types of contract or non-regular workers who as a result do not enjoy the level of enhanced protections of regular workers at large firms—Korea has pursued a strategy of “liberalization for all, except for chaebol workers.” In the case of Korea, Song shows how despite attempts at comprehensive labor reform, the disruptive power of large enterprise unions has, in ways, allowed most of the effects of neoliberal reforms to be displaced onto irregular workers.Song’s timely analysis is empirically rich and an important reference point for documenting macro-level changes to both the Korean and Japan labor markets and complements recent literature on the politics of labor in East Asia.6 At the same time, her conceptualization of outsiders and insiders might be further expanded to include other markers of social difference such as gender, ethnicity, and migrant status. Indeed, these other “outsiders” have also been excluded from robust social protections in both Korea and Japan. A more robust consideration of social differences and the complexity of class here might complement the work of scholars interested in both feminist political economy and the sociology of work who have been particularly sensitive to these concerns in recent work on Korea and Japan.7 While Song provides a very comprehensive picture of continuity and change in labor markets, the more everyday experiences of workers and social activists, including questions of how they have understood questions of inequality and labor market reform, the challenges of crisis and democratization, and other questions remains beyond the book’s purview but seem important nonetheless.It is this question of experience that best comes to the fore in Amy Levine’s South Korean Civil Movement Organisations: Hope, Crisis, and Pragmatism in Democratic Transition. The substantive contribution of Levine’s book is that it is perhaps the only ethnography of how Korean civil society organizations (CSOs) navigated the turbulent period of change and transformation following the financial crisis in general and during the administration of Roh Moo-hyun in particular. This was a period in which CSOs were faced with a new political moment where former democracy activists experienced a historic opportunity to effect change through the state–civil society nexus. Through ethnographic research at environmental, legal, and social justice–oriented CSOs that Korean studies readers will recognize, Levine paints a vivid profile of an important period of transition. The book is valuable not only for its descriptions of CSO culture but also for its portraits of individuals, some of them now historic figures, and the manner in which Levine shows how activists reworked and reinterpreted the meaning of past ideological commitments in the current moment. There is a fully sensuous appreciation for the discourse, emotions, and meanings through which CSO activists understand their experience and the new challenges and opportunities they encounter. In this sense it resonates with recent work on how CSOs, activists, and public intellectuals have negotiated the democratic transition and sought to engage with the expanded state–civil society nexus facilitated by democratization.8What is particularly interesting in Levine’s book is the manner in which she and the activists she portrays interrogate the “site” or location (hyŏnjang) of their praxis, a concept that has an important prehistory in Korean activist practice and is particularly useful for thinking through not only the activity of individual activists but also of scholarly concepts and ideas.9 While Levine reads her activists’ commitments and self-understandings of their “site” through a pragmatist lens that at times risks marshaling their practice into the service of claims made by thinkers associated with the ontological turn in the social sciences, her highly reflexive approach in general resonates with a variety of other practice-oriented perspectives, particularly the Gramscian tradition and its philosophy of praxis. By extension, Levine raises an important challenge for Korean political economy here in terms of the need for a self-reflexive praxis of scholarship that historicizes its own concepts and ideas—its field—and demonstrates the value of ethnography to political economy. In the context of a field often dominated by the developmental state approach, Levine’s approach raises important questions about how we might then further interrogate the very site of knowledge production or “rescale agency,” as she puts it, in a progressive manner that better highlights the historical, lived experience of developmentalism and democratization.Studies of Korean and East Asian economic growth often miss this deeper task of identifying the practical challenges to which political economic scholarship should seek to address itself in a time of crisis, change, and transition. Instead, they uncritically praise the institutions of high-speed growth and its effects as normative goods in themselves, and/or simply regard them as a local instance of an ideal-type process—a problem that Marxist postcolonial geographers have recently responded to by advocating for greater attention to the importance of relational forms of comparison and conceptual reworking through conjunctural analysis in geographical political economy and beyond.10 Questions about the extent to which concepts and ideas about Korea’s political economy are practically useful for efforts to transform it into a more socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable model, or about how these ideas might be reworked and transformed through the Korean context, are too frequently left neglected. In some ways, Levine’s work helps round out the works described above by not only highlighting the level of lived experience and activist strategy in a turbulent period of democratic transition—one that resembles the current moment after the Candlelight protests—but also by raising important questions about the nature of knowledge production itself. By way of conclusion, her book complements the others reviewed above by providing Korean political economy with some ideas about how to interrogate the legacy of developmental state research, that is, by better foregrounding the experience of the many other “sites” from which both activists and scholars have been working to address the silences and struggles that have shaped that model in both theory and practice.