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Abstract: This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach. The article departs from the argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working of modern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralism which considers institutional change as just an interplay within a self-odering institutional structure. However, the article employs Karl Polanyi's double movement, the dialectic of marketizing dis-embedding and socializing re-embedding, to demonstrate that the institutional change must be rather conceived as embedded in a social life. Only then can one recognize considers that such a change is primarily conditioned by social contests among sentient agents which engage in an ideational struggle over its final outcome. These theoretical reconsiderations are tested on the empirical terrain of Korean capitalism after the Asian Crisis of 1997 and the Global Crisis of 2007. First, the double movement is used to demonstrate that the post-crises institutional changes have transformed Korean capitalism's institutional and societal model from developmentalism to embedded neoliberalism. Second, it is documented that this transformation has been characteristic of certain ideational struggles which turned into a socially contested, largely contradictory, uneven, and open-ended process.
Key words: Karl Polanyi, double movement, Varieties of Capitalism, South Korea, neoliberalism
INTRODUCTION
South Korea (henceforth referred to as Korea) has been recognized as one of the most successful developing economies. Despite the Asian Crisis of 1997 (the Asian Crisis) and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 (the Global Crisis), Korea has managed to continuously catch up with the highest income countries. Indeed the Korean economy has grown faster than most of its OECD counterparts in terms of GDP since 2007 (OECD, 2012: 3). The country's rapid economic recovery has allowed its unemployment rate to resume its pre-crisis state of being at 3.2 percent, again in strong contrast to the unemployment rates in the rest of the OECD countries (OECD, 2013a). Korea has simply been experiencing an economic improvement which was not stopped even by the dire consequences of the Asian and Global Crises. However, the successful attempts to cope with both crises seem to have paradoxically ruptured the fabric of...