alice amsden, third world industrialization: global fordism or a new model?

(6): amount of exports and dollar price were all 'highly politicized outcomes'

(7): they got prices 'deliberately wrong

(9): global Fordism cannot explain how or why mass production came to the Third World--and why it came to some places, and not others. so no explanation for divergence within the Third World

(9): there's also the fact that multinational investment has been a small part of total capital formation--which means the story of core capital driving Third World industrialization is dubious

(10): Amsden alludes to 'failure of dependency theory'--what does she mean? distinct from the failures of 'global fordism' nonsense?

(10): in short, three problems with g. Fordism

1. underconsumption is not the stumbling block, rather raising productivity and becoming internationally competitive: r. wage rate increase is greatest in history in SK (pg. 11)
2. far more political process than Fordism would suggest: it's not just State autonomy that matters, but also long-term commitments and specific State policies; support for business has to be greater than infant industry protection
3. Taylorist nuances don't really explain differences in 'management': they don't just export American Taylorism to factories in E. Asia

(14): you get intensive regimes (relative surplus value) and extensive regimes (absolute surplus value) being employed side-by-side, unlike regulation school predictions

(14): imp--lateness in E. Asia is qualitatively different, insofar as the competitive disadvantages are starker (absence of novel technology)

(15): invention (England) --> innovation (Germany, USA) --> learning (E. Asia)

(16): key--late industrialization is the era of the 'subsidy' -- but the subsidy which incentivizes exports, rewards performance. much stronger than IIP, again.

(17): the central coordination offered by chaebols might be very important

(18): good management is critical [OK -- but why would we ever expect anything else? it seems like good management can be assumed, insofar as the correct incentive structure is in place]

(18): imp--cheap labour is very important (as is the repression of that labour), but it is not itself sufficient to drive growth rates (all late developers have repressed labour)

(18): Korea much, much more educated than Germany or England at analogous times in development history

(20): foreign investment not significant

(20-21): labour-intensity was not sufficient to defeat Japan in the 60s--had to turn to productivity increases

(20): this is exactly how Japan beat Lancashire in the early 1900s--not with lower wages, but with greater efficiency

(21-22): imp--the 'subsidy' has to be the disciplining mechanism (not small firms--there are a couple of enormous chaebols, remember; nor technology, a la Schumpeter--since this is largely a question of learning, not innovation)

(22): there is pervasive corruption, but the key is that it doesn't come at the cost of competitiveness

(23): State's power over investment is critical (suggestion that this can be thought of as 'democratizing') [hmm...]

(24-25): imp-- nor is it the fact of performance standards that matters (this is true in all Third World states). it is the capacity to impose them on producers [here there is a just-so story about how Korea got this capacity; very unsatisfying]

(28): a compact management structure, leading to a relative decline in the number of white-collar workers (different from US)

(29): imp--very rapid wage growth, telescoping advance of the core countries into a couple of decades [question: if the domestic market wasn't the primary driver of growth, what did these workers buy?]

(30): serious gender divide

steinmetz, epistemological unconscious

(111-118): "methodological positivism"

1. ontological assumptions about nature of social reality--empiricism, which is claim that there is no difference between essence and phenomenon. cause and effect at the level of events.
   
2. epistemological precepts concerning way in which facts can be known--positivism, presupposing the invariance of empirical relationships;
   
3. scientistic-naturalist belief in unity of natural and social sciences--militating against recognition of concept-, time-, and space-dependence of social structures and practices (embodied by idea that you consider social facts as 'things')
   
4. assumptions concerning social science methodology-quantitative methods,e tc.

(117, 136, 152): danger of collapsing into particularism, in his call for concept-, time-, and space-dependence ('Hindu categories') and the call to bring back 'meaning' into science/analysis. on p. 136, he speaks of a rejection of multiple causal mechanisms...

(118): absurdity of ASR example

(120, 140): American sociology as epistemically unsettled until 1945 (question of how you measure this--it can be entirely self-confirming, unless you ask this). on p.140 he is being very definite with his periodization--surely this degree of correspondence is ambitious, at the very least.

(124): need to make epochal distinctions within capitalist modernity -- fine, but why 'discrete', epochal distinctions of the sort posited by regulation theory?

(127): why positivism after WWII? association of anti-science irrationalism with Nazism and totalitarianism

(128-131): important--but really, it was because:

1. the sense that economic crises were over--the economy was stable [but this is not the same thing as a sense of economic stasis; or at least, it need not be--this said, to me it is the most plausible of his points]
2. homogenization of consumer-citizens (so no need to think about the specificity of individual consumers, everyone was 'the same')
3. synchronization of scale of activities within the nation-state [this is more difficult--how is the argument about equality across the nation-space borne out? and what is the alleged mechanism: active State intervention in pursuit of this goal? ]

(132): collapse triggered by disappearance of "social regularities" (this is not direct--'methodological positivism' is not displaced, but its hegemony becomes progressively more uncertain). here he lists different challenges, though this is hardly very interesting.

(137): 'domestication' as too simple a notion

(140): anti-systemic movements, Vietnam war, etc., all had effects. the collapse of "patterned regularities" [but here you're starting to assert that you were no longer working with capitalism, for a time, almost. anyway, worth unpacking. too cryptic with his claims. substantiate, for me, the argument that development was more uneven, etc. here's relying on a 'common sense' to make a commonsense-style conclusion]

(145): critique of path-dependence, via a critique of normal/deviant paths. [but this is going too far]

(156): why did post-Fordism do the opposite to economics? surely there's something else to be unpacked.

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1. Major issue with regulation periodization. Why discrete? Isn't the 'rise and fall' of regulated epochs just a proxy of class struggle; otherwise the claims seem exceedingly mystical. In other words, the transition/turn is , rather then explained