Comparing State Economic Ideologies and Business Ethics in East Asia

Abstract

This special issue deals with modes of ethical persuasion in both public and private sectors of the national economy in East Asia from the periods of the 14th century to the modern era. Authors in this volume ask how and why governments in pre-modern Joseon Korea, modern Korea, and modern Japan used moral persuasions of different kinds in designing national economic institutions. Our case studies demonstrate that the concept of modes of exchange first developed by John Lie (1992) provides a more convincing explanation on the evolution of pre-modern and modern economic institutions compared with Marx's modes of production as historically-specific social relations or Smith's free market as a terminal stage of human economic development. The pre-modern and modern cases presented in this volume reveal that different modes of exchange have coexisted throughout human history, contrary to deterministic and Eurocentric views of economic history. Furthermore, business ethics or corporate social responsibility is not a purely European economic ideology, because manorial, market, entrepreneurial, and mercantilist moral persuasions had widely been used by state rulers and policymakers in East Asia for their programs of advancing dissimilar modes of exchange. In a similar vein, the domination of the market and entrepreneurial modes in the 21st century world is also complemented by other competing modes of exchange, such as state welfarism, public sector economies, and protectionism.