The Polanyian Perspective Meets the Varieties of Capitalism: Inspecting the Consequences of the Institutional Changes in South Korea since 1997

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 fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering institutional structure.However, the article employs Karl Polanyi's doublemovement, the dialectic of marketizing dis-embedding and socializing re-embedding, to demonstrate that the institutional changemust 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.