From the publisher’s website: American business folklore is awash with the adventures of successful entrepreneurs. Still, most of these stories are about Americans, neglecting important and courageous entrepreneurs from other countries. Made in Korea recounts the story of how Chung Ju Yung rose from poverty to build one of the world’s largest and most successful … [Read More]
Booklist: 1960-1993 (page 8)
Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea
From the publisher’s website: This book reveals how South Korea was transformed from one of the poorest and most agrarian countries in the world in the 1950’s to one of the richest and most industrialized states by the late 1980’s. The author argues that South Korea’s economic, cultural, and political development was the product of … [Read More]
Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: This analysis of modern Korea includes: the imprisonment and sentencing of two former presidents of South Korea for their role in the Kwangju uprising and on various charges of corruption; the death of Kim II Sung and the resultant North-South standoff; and recent labour and student protests. Originally published in 1994 … [Read More]
Big Business, Strong State: Collusion and Conflict in South Korean Development, 1960-1990
From the publisher’s website: Focuses on the paradox of development in the newly industrializing country of South Korea. This book debunks the rosy success story about South Korean economic development by analyzing how the state and businesses formed an alliance, while excluding labor, in order to attain economic development, and how these three entities were … [Read More]
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement
From the publisher’s website: Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life—a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to … [Read More]
South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence
From the publisher’s website: The minjung (people’s) movement stood at the forefront of the June 1987 nationwide tide that swept away the military in South Korea and opened up space for relatively democratic politics, a more responsible economy, and new directions in culture. This volume is the first in English to grapple specifically with the nature of … [Read More]
Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung
From the publisher’s website: This study focuses on a single Korean “chaebol”, the business conglomerate which dominates the Korean economy. Hyundai, the largest chaebol, is examined in the context of Korean history, ancient and modern, and the Confucian value system that permeates all Korean life. [Read More]
The Transformation of South Korea: Reform and Reconstitution in the Sixth Republic Under Roh Tae Woo, 1987-1992
From the publisher’s website: South Korea underwent rapid economic development under a semi-military, virulently anti-communist government which banned trade unions and kept close checks on the economy. President Roe Tae Woo has, however, since 1987, introduced electoral and social reforms. Strikes and wage rises have followed, leading to a loss of competitive edge, and the … [Read More]
Human Rights in Korea: Historical and Policy Perspectives
From the publisher’s website: These chapters by eight Korea specialists present a new approach to human rights issues in Korea. Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea’s modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of … [Read More]
Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization
From the publisher’s website: Clark Sorensen presents a description of the economic and ecological organization of rural Korean domestic groups and an analysis of their adaption to the changes brought about by Korea’s rapid industrialization. Still one of the only book-length studies of rural, peasant Korean households, Over the Mountains Are Mountains shows how the industrialization of … [Read More]
The Korean Workers’ Party: A Short History
The Korean Workers’ Party is the first in a new Hoover Institution Press series on the histories of the sixteen ruling communist parties from their inception to the present time. Dr. Chong-Sik Lee, a distinguished Asian scholar, accepted an invitation by the Hoover Institution to write a short history of the Korean Communist movement as … [Read More]
A Korean Village: Between Farm and Sea
From the publisher’s website: “Just south of the thirty-seventh parallel in Korea a long, jagged peninsula extends westward far out towards China into the Yellow Sea. At its extreme northwestern tip lies Sŏkp’o, a fishing and farming village of slightly more than a hundred households. This book is an attempt to describe the way of … [Read More]
Never Ending Flower
From the dust jacket: Seven years ago, Susie Younger went to South Korea. She has lived there ever since and hopes to remain for the rest of her life. She paints most vivid pictures of this charming and little-known country and of its gay, patient, hard working and desperately poor people, whose life she shares. … [Read More]