Intercorporate influence and industrial growth: Business groups in Korea's automobile and semiconductor industries

How do unsuccessfully implemented industrial policies influence corporations and industrial growth? How do firms influence one another in the course of industrial growth? This dissertation discusses these two issues, quite neglected in previous explanations of Korea's industrial growth due to the dominance of statism, utilizing historical and network data on multinational business groups in the automobile and semiconductor industries. It constructs an alternative argument stressing intercorporate influence from economic sociology and network perspectives.;Historical analysis of unsuccessfully implemented industrial policies regarding both industries reveals that corporate initiatives are key in understanding important stages of product development (passenger cars and memory chips) before or without government intervention. To discuss intercorporate influence, my network analysis considers the structure of a multinational business group an intracorporate and inter-subsidiary network, and employs graph theory-based variables. Examinations of business groups, structural globalization find that (1) leaders influence each other in both industries, and; (2) intercorporate influence is more detectable in the semiconductor industry.;Suggestions for future study of Korea's industrial growth are (1) more rigorous discussion of unintended consequences of political intervention, and; (2) adopting industries as the unit of analysis to elaborate on previous research.