Eclipse or reconfigured? South Korea's developmental state and challenges of the global knowledge economy

Abstract

Globalists and former students of the Asian developmental state maintain that the latter has succumbed to the forces of globalization. They believe that the global knowledge economy involves the thorough integration of the global economy, continuous innovation and networks rather than hierarchies and that these factors are foreign to the operational logic of the developmental state and thus render it obsolete. This article contends that the global economy is not as open as supposed, and that the challenges posed by the knowledge economy, while genuine, tend to be uneven. Focusing on Korea's information technology sector and relying on documentary and interview data, the present article suggests that, while the Korean state no longer relies on its erstwhile finance and regulation strategies, it has continued to articulate development visions and sought to achieve them through deploying public resources to structure the market. Rather than going into eclipse, the Korean developmental state has been reconfigured.     

Pyongyang: Rules of engagement

The article attempts to re-construct the motivation behind the current North Korean policies, especially in the domestic sphere. It is argued tht North Korean leaders have valid political reasons not to imitate the Chinese-style reform, and are likely to limit themselves to moderate changes which would not jeopardize political stability and the domination of the present-day elite. The most critical factor is the maintenance of control over the access to information.     

Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.     

Drifting towards convergence? Motivation and performance management in state and private companies in the provision of telecom services in Ghana

The concept of expectancy on which many of the theories of workplace incentive programmes are based, claims that when employees are given a particular level of motivation, it will result in some level of performance. The general perception in Ghana is that public sector employees do not perform as efficiently as private sector workers because they lack incentives to do so. However, few studies have compared the incentive structures of the two sectors. Using empirical evidence from four telecom companies in Ghana, this article shows that the gaps between ‘state’ and ‘private’ have narrowed. Also, while incentive structures such as salary, fringe benefits and job (in)security are converging, critical performance management processes like employees' participation in decision‐making, performance appraisal, monitoring and credibility of sanctions are drifting apart. This article concludes that differences in performance between state and private companies may be explained by performance management processes and not incentive structures. It cautions that improved salaries and other office perquisites may not by themselves achieve organisational performance. Rather, incentives should be embedded in a broader approach through effective performance management processes. The information in the article is relevant to the ‘borderline’ part of the public sector under a deregulated environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘There is no racism here’: public discourses on racism,immigrants and integration in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Jensen, Weibel and Vitus's article critically discusses contemporary Danish policies aimed at the elimination of ethnoracial discrimination, drawing on policy analyses and qualitative interviews with local and national authorities in Denmark. It illustrates how questions of discrimination and racism are marginalized and de-legitimized within the dominant integration discourse, resulting in the marginalization of anti-racism in policymaking. The side-stepping of racism is being naturalized in public policies through strategies of denial and by addressing discrimination as a product of ignorance and individual prejudice rather than as embedded in social structures. The authors examine how immigration, integration and (anti-)racism as concepts and phenomena are understood and addressed in Danish public policies and discourses. Despite denials of racism in Denmark, Jensen, Weibel and Vitus show that, based on re-definitions of identities and relations, it continues to exist and is evident in public debates and policies on immigration and integration.     

Cheap talk or incredible commitment? (Mis)calculating transparency and anti‐corruption

Why do “tainted” politicians in high‐corruption countries adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies that risk exposing their wrongdoing? Using the cases of freedom of information and public asset disclosure in Romania, we assess three explanations: that these policies are meant to be mere window dressing, facilitate bottom‐up monitoring, or ensure access to information for the ruling party if it loses power. We find that decision makers adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies because they want to signal their integrity and because they underestimate their consequences. Because they assume they will be able to control implementation, decision makers discount the potential costs of damaging information being released. Sustained political competition can keep corruption and lack of transparency on the public and political agenda, shifting attention from policy adoption to implementation and leading to increased compliance. Since politicians miscalculate the consequences of their actions, signals that are intended to be cheap can end up being quite costly.     

Managing Public Finance and Procurement in Fragile and Conflicted Settings

ABSTRACT

Successful transition from conflict and fragility hinges on the quality and legitimacy of public financial management (PFM) systems. This article shows that such systems develop asymmetrically in these settings. Formal aspects of modern systems are adopted, but a layered series of informal arrangements govern resource management. Analysis of data from Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability assessments of 101 countries explores aspects of this asymmetry and different explanations are considered for why elites seem to choose not to invest trust, resources, and capacity in making mainstream PFM systems functional. These explanations focus on the incentives created by three “public” resources: illicit flows, domestic revenues, and strategic or aid flows. Mainstream PFM systems are applied to a small part of these flows. The illustrative case of Cambodia shows how a layered system has emerged to govern such flows, undermining the influence of formal public finance management systems. The article offers suggestions to address these issues.     

Policy Design and Achieving Social Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Social Enterprise Policy

This article compares American, British, and Korean social enterprise policies to explore how government policy design shapes social enterprises and how “social benefit” and “public value” are defined. A social enterprise is defined as the legally structured organizational pursuit of blending social purpose and economic profit through business activities, and examples from each country are presented. Applying Bozeman's publicness theory, the authors demonstrate the wide range of roles that governments play in shaping social enterprises' ownership, funding, and control across the three countries using regulations, subsidies, and procurement policies. These roles may affect the impact of social enterprises in society. The case studies show that the U.S. approach to social enterprise policy is heavily market oriented, while the United Kingdom is in the middle of the market-to-publicness continuum, and South Korea is much closer to the publicness (government-dominated) end of the continuum.     

Public housing and the American dream: Residents’ views on buying into “the projects”

Abstract

This article examines residents’ attitudes toward homeownership in five large inner‐city public housing projects composed of multifamily apartment buildings. Based on 267 interviews with public housing residents in Boston, it contrasts their broad support for homeownership as a concept with their wholly mixed reaction to the idea of owning a public housing apartment. Interest in homeownership in public housing is shown to be independent of residents’ current employment status and closely tied to residents’ social investment in specific housing developments and to their perceptions about the quality of that development's management, maintenance, and security.

The findings cast renewed doubt on policies that would make public housing sales a centerpiece of national policy, but they provide qualified support for more modest efforts to increase homeownership in public housing developments and in low‐income neighborhoods around them.     

Context and Mechanisms in Administrative Reform Processes: Performance Management Within Italian Local Government

ABSTRACT

This article aims to present new research on the politics of public management reform in Napoleonic countries. Drawing on the institutional processualist approach, the empirical analysis tracks and explains the trajectory and outcomes of episodes where performance management has been introduced at the local level in Italy. The comparative case analysis shows that plausible causal explanation of the outcomes of public management reform can occur only if researchers are attentive to the interaction between social mechanisms and contextual features together with their interconnections through time.     

Crafting and dismantling the egalitarian social contract: the changing state-society relations in globalizing Korea

Abstract

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, the Korean developmental state implemented a series of drastic egalitarian educational policies that were primarily geared toward social integration. While promoting social mobility and educational expansion, they provided the basis of the egalitarian social contract in Korea's educational policymaking for decades. Since the 1990s, however, the Korean state has implemented neoliberal education reforms that led to the rapid dismantling of the egalitarian framework for the country's educational policymaking. These neoliberal reforms were strongly supported by the affluent middle class that prefer elitist education and can afford expensive private education. The general direction of change in Korea's educational policymaking suggests both significant change and continuity in the character of the Korean state and its relations to society since the 1990s. The contemporary Korean state still maintains a highly strategic and activist orientation in adopting and implementing policies although its policies are increasingly neoliberal in content. In doing so, the Korean state is gradually abandoning its broad social base and mobilizational capacity, while increasingly connecting with the upper segments of the middle class.     

Policy directions concerning racial discrimination in U.S. housing markets

Abstract

This paper presents a catalog of 34 different proposed research and direct action policies aimed at futhering the two basic goals of public antidiscrimination policies: (1) ending unequal treatment of households in housing transactions because of their race or ethnicity, and (2) counteracting existing racial residential segregation by promoting stable racial integration. These 34 proposals have been derived from the many papers in this volume, plus a few suggestions by the author.

Each proposal is evaluated against five specific criteria of desirability: potential effectiveness, government costs, private‐sector costs, ease of implementation, and political feasibility. A final overall evaluation of each is made, and all policies are divided into three priority categories: high, moderate, and low. Many recommended policies are synergistic. This whole effort should have very high overall priority in American social policy.     

Korean foreign direct investment in Europe: The determining forces

Korea's more complete integration into the world economy has been stunted by past government policies aimed at preserving comprehensive control over the domestic economy. This situation has recently changed owing to prevailing structural weaknesses in the Korean economy and the dictates of the global competitive environment. Consequently, the level of Korean overseas investment has escalated, particularly in Europe — the Triad region which has traditionally attracted limited inward FDI from Korea's large chaebol companies. This paper examines the determining forces that lie behind this trend. It is recognized that early Korean investments in the EU were principally driven by reactionary motives when confronted by actual or anticipated policy threats. While it is argued that the pretext for such investment has not significantly diminished, the imperatives of globalization together with emerging economic conditions in both east and west Europe have provided considerable incentives for more proactive FDI strategies to be adopted. The recent announcements by senior chaebol of intended large‐scale investments in Europe suggest that this new pattern is becoming increasingly apparent.     

Public Service Motivation Research: Lessons for Practice

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons—among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward.     

Diffusion through Democracy

Many argue that international norms influence government behavior, and that policies diffuse from country to country, because of idea exchanges within elite networks. However, politicians are not free to follow their foreign counterparts, because domestic constituencies constrain them. This article examines how electoral concerns shape diffusion patterns and argues that foreign templates and international organization recommendations can shift voters’ policy positions and produce electoral incentives for politicians to mimic certain foreign models. Experimental individual‐level data from the field of family policy illustrates that even U.S. voters shift positions substantially when informed about UN recommendations and foreign countries’ choices. However, voters receive limited information about international developments, biased towards the policy choices of large and proximate countries. Aggregate data on the family policy choices of OECD countries show how voters’ limited information about international models shapes government decisions: governments are disproportionately likely to mimic countries whose news citizens follow, and international organizations are most influential in countries with internationally oriented citizens.     

The Ethical Implications of Altering Public Sector Accountability Models: The Case of the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

ABSTRACT

Outcome based policies promote the use performance accountability models. However, the impact these policies have on the ethical culture of public sector organizations has not been adequately assessed. This research examines performance accountability reforms by examining the City of Atlanta’s implementation of federal and state performance policies. The analysis reveals the use of performance models in vulnerable organizations negatively impact employees’ ethical behavior. Teachers and administrators altered test results, delivered threats, misled parents and students about performance outcomes, and were dishonest with state investigators to give the illusion that performance goals had been met or exceeded.     

Public Sector Organizations and Reputation Management: Five Problems

ABSTRACT

This article discusses five problems that most public organizations will face when adopting a popular, yet largely unexplored management concept: reputation management. The inherently political nature of public organizations constrains their reputation management strategies. Furthermore, they have trouble connecting with their stakeholders on an emotional level, standing out as unique and differentiated organizations, communicating as coherent bodies, and maintaining excellent reputations. In this article, we examine in depth the nature of these problems and seek to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities and limitations of reputation management in a public sector context.     

Incentives in Third‐Party Governance: Management Practices and Accountability Implications

Contract incentives are designed to motivate contractor performance and to provide public managers with a powerful tool to achieve contract accountability. Our knowledge of contract incentives is rooted in contract design, yet as we move beyond contract specification and further into the contract lifecycle, we know little about why and how managers implement incentives. This study assesses public managers’ use of contract incentives in practice and advances theory development. A typology of contract incentives is constructed to capture a comprehensive range of formal and informal incentives, and the factors that influence managerial use of incentives are identified. The findings shed light on the complexities of maintaining accountability in third‐party governance structures and the management techniques aimed at improving the performance of public agencies.     

The Other Type of Performance Information: Nonroutine Feedback,Its Relevance and Use

The literature on performance information use explains how public managers deal with mainly quantitative data that are systematically collected and formally reported. This article argues that such a narrow understanding is incomplete, as it excludes all kinds of nonroutine performance information, including verbal, ad hoc, and qualitative feedback. To understand how responsive public managers are to performance feedback, alternative sources of performance information need to be taken into account. A literature review suggests considering two important sources of nonroutine feedback: organizational insiders and relevant external stakeholders. Using survey data from German local government, this article shows that public managers prefer to use nonroutine feedback over routine data from performance reports. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicates that different sources of performance information require different determinants to trigger their use. This finding is essential because it suggests that explanations of performance information use can covary with the information source studied.