Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation by Peter Evans

Review by: Atul Kohli

The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), p. 669
Published by: American Political Science Association
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American Political Science Review

government authorities. This made it possible for union

leaders to expand the scope of their demands beyond wages
and employment issues to issues of national politics. The
interests of the miners were soon torn, however, between
support for overcoming the communist system and the
difficulties-particularly acute in the coal sector- caused
by Yeltsin's economic reforms.
The second case focuses on several of the small number
of enterprises where the trade union Sotsprof emerged as
an important actor. The authors conclude that Sotsprof s
influence was extremely limited (and fading by 1993-94)
and that the organization was actually less a trade union
than a vehicle for political activities by its core leadership.
Even at individual enterprises, the strength of Sotsprof
often depended on its ability to play on divisions among the
competing groups of would-be owners.
The third case represents what the authors consider to be
perhaps the most successful of the independent trade
unions, one which joined Russia's air traffic controllers. It
differed from the other movements discussed in that it was
a outgrowth of an official Soviet-era trade union. Strikes in
the post-Soviet period were followed by repressive government measures, but the union was able to use its contacts
and a fortuitous change in the organization of the air
control system to establish a role for itself.
In their conclusion, Clarke, Fairbrother, and Borisov find
that while the independent organizations produced some
localized successes, no genuine national leadership of independent trade unions ever emerged. Most local branches of
independent unions have been reduced to fighting rearguard actions against the onslaught of privatization that
clearly favors management's rights over those of workers.
Meanwhile, the official trade unions have retained their
status and continue to be subservient to enterprise management.
The two books reviewed here at least implicitly place
labor in a central role in recent events. Yet, there is no
serious effort to weigh the relative importance of worker
behavior against other sources of system instability and
weakness. Both books make no secret of the authors'
ideological sympathies with the workers' movement and the
cause of workplace democratization. In the case of Clarke,
Fairbrother, and Borisov, these sympathies apparently facilitated close personal contacts with independent union
leaders, which proved to be the source of an impressive
amount of detailed information about the inner workings of
these movements.
Certainly, the weakness of the independent labor movement and its inability to mobilize Soviet workers in more
than a few sectors demonstrated the success of the Soviet
system in preventing this element of civil society from
emerging, in marked contrast with the Polish case. Needless
to say, no Soviet or Russian equivalent of the Solidarity
trade union ever emerged to threaten the state.
Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. By Peter Evans. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1995. 323p. $49.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Atul Kohli, Princeton University
This is a wonderful book, a real tour de force. It is essential
reading for students of the political economy of development. It is also highly recommended to all those trying to
understand the relationship of state and markets in the
second half of the twentieth century, especially students of
comparative politics.

Vol. 90, No. 3

The book seeks to analyze the role of states in both

facilitating and hindering industrialization in contemporary
developing countries. Moving away from the neo-utilitarian
view that the best states are those that govern the least,
Evans focuses instead on types of state intervention. To his
mind, some states are better at facilitating industrialization
than others. Why is this so? Evans develops his answer by
undertaking a comparative analysis of three countriesKorea, Brazil, and India-that is focused on one sector of
the economy, namely, computer industries.
Evans argues that states tend to be most successful as
agents of economic transformation-as, for example, in
Korea-when they exhibit the characteristic of "embedded
autonomy," that is, a well-developed Weberian bureaucracy
that gives the state a degree of corporate autonomy from
social groups, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an
embeddedness in society, especially a good working relationship between bureaucrats and capitalists. Instead of
hostile regulation or appropriation of private capital, states
in such a setting prefer to facilitate the emergence and
maturation of private firms; or stated in the new vocabulary
Evans creates, successful economic states prefer the roles of
"midwifery"and "husbandry"over those of "custodian" or
"demiurge."
Working in the grand intellectual tradition of comparative political sociology that stretches from Max Weber to
Barrington Moore, Peter Evans moves the study of states
and economic development a giant step forward. This giant
step consists of a persuasive demonstration that the neoliberal orthodoxy on states and economic development is
simply not borne out by historical evidence and that
when comparative evidence is examined closely, it turns
out that states have played both positive and negative
economic roles. Instead of ideological simplemindedness
(some even mistake such simplemindedness for parsimonious theory), therefore, this more complex view provides a
much better frame for discussing both successes and failures in post-World War II experience with deliberate
development.
This is not to suggest that all that Peter Evans argues is
persuasive or that he does not leave some important
questions unanswered. For example, he focuses on the
relationship of the state to private capital to explain successful state intervention. The explicit argument is that,
instead of undertaking direct production, states do best
when they nurture and cajole private entrepreneurs. Fine,
but one does wonder how he would explain the relative
success of Korea's steel industry, say, vis-a-vis that of India;
both have after all been largely run as public enterprises.
More important, questions of why states undertake different roles are not addressed directly. Why, for example, did
the Korean state prefer facilitating the success of private
entrepreneurs, whereas the state in India viewed its own
capitalists with suspicion, preferring instead to control their
activities? No single book can answer all the important
questions. Nevertheless, attention to such questions would
have forced Evans to take the political and historical
context within which the states in these countries operate
even more seriously.
Such questions aside, it is important to reiterate to all
students of comparative political sociology and of political
economy of development that a major new book has been

published.Order it, read it, arguewith it, and teach it in

your classes.

669

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