Change with Continuity: Asian Capitalism in Transition

This chapter argues that East Asian business systems are best conceptualized as emergent outcomes of competition in and across capitalist markets. The ways economies become organized and change over time results directly from capitalist economic activities, and only indirectly from institutions that in various ways constitute and frame the economic actors and their activities. Competition in capitalist markets is directly related to technologies that entrepreneurs adapt to making money in an ever-changing economic environment. In East Asia, state officials, as well as the owners and managers of private businesses, are among those entrepreneurs that attempt to channel market economies according to their own interests. These interests are in turn shaped by political and social institutions. We show that, as East Asian economies adapt to global changes in technologies for making money, there is considerable continuity in how national business systems reproduce themselves in a global capitalist economic environment.