| Over the past four decades, Confucian-influenced South Korea has taken the lead along with other East Asian countries---Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong---in developing a modernized economy with rapid commercial and industrial expansion. The unprecedented economic growth of South Korea has been largely attributed to the Korean version of "guided capitalism," which emphasizes government and bureaucratic intervention, as well as centralized power blocks known as chaebol (family-owned and family-managed large business conglomerates). However, the recent financial crisis (1997--8) has called for a critical examination and a reshaping of the ethical basis of Confucian-influenced Korea's economic structures and strategies.; This dissertation argues that Christian ethics can contribute to the reshaping and strengthening of selected Confucian values, and thus to creating a new economic ethos in Korea, by critically examining these values in light of the Christian ethical concepts of vocation and covenant. To this end, this dissertation focuses on the correlation between the economic growth of Korea during 1960s--90s and the ethological background by highlighting the "functional equivalence" between Protestant and Confucian ethics according to the Neo-Weberian thesis. However, while discussing the undesirable aspects of the Korean "economic culture" and the negative influences of Confucianism on the Korean economy, this dissertation will contend that such undesirable economic aspects as crony capitalism, familistic tendency in the industrial organization, favoritism of the state towards certain selected chaebol, and state intervention in business, have more to do with a "politicized" and/or "imperial" Confucianism than with a "relational" Confucian ethic. Then this dissertation will explore the Christian concepts of vocation and covenant and their Confucian versions. It will show how the former can challenge and help to revitalize the constrained and ideologized Confucian versions as a theoretical framework for a desirable economic ethos in Korean-Confucian society. Lastly, the questions treated in this work will be seen more explicitly in theological terms and in the context of globalization, which Korean-Confucian society and its economic system should take into account in order to realize its successful survival and further development. |
