Revisiting Regulation Theory for the Analysis of South Korean capitalism

Abstract

Regulation theory became a popular framework for economic geography in the mid-1990s but lost favor before it became prominent in South Korea. This paper revisits regulation theory — in both its original (1990s) and the revised (2000s) forms — to consider its applicability to the case of Korean capitalism. We contend that the difficulties in applying regulation theory to Korea are, on one hand, indicative of certain fundamental limitations in the theoretical approach and, on the other hand, useful for clarifying the distinctiveness of Korean capitalism.