This study explores why South Korea’s top leadership combined a merit-based principle with region-based particularistic elements in the recruitment and promotion of career bureaucrats of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) during its industrial takeoff in the 1960s and 1970s. It also investigates how this recruitment and promotion style was emulated by business sectors as a way of securing means to penetrate into the MCI. The authors argue that (a) South Korea’s top leadership utilized region-based particularistic elements to secure loyalty to the authoritarian leader and (b) state bureaucrats fell back on the readily available social resources of the time—informal social ties—to reduce the uncertainty innate to policy implementation and to achieve short-term policy goals, and this practice bred the organizational foundation that might undermine the bureaucratic character of the state—legalism and impersonalism—at the later stage of economic development.
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