Hahn - Been Lee . Korea : Time , Change and Administration , Honolulu , East - West Press , 1968

Abstract

This is a suggestive and informative work by a man distinguished as both a scholar and practitioner of the arts of government and politics. Hahn-Been Lee is currently professor and dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul University. He has also served the Korean government as budget director, vice minister of finance, ambassador to Switzerland, Austria, and the European Economic Community, and minister to the Vatican. In this work he demonstrates his acuity as a participant-observer of Korean development and his creativity as a theorizer. Korea: Time, Change and Administration has two related facets. One is a general conceptual scheme for taking account of time as a facet of social change and development. The other is a case study of the political-administrative aspects of development in Korea in the post-World WarⅡ period up to 1963. The Korean case is intrinsically interesting, for the nation's thrusting growth has been both impressive and improbable. Dean Lee helps explain what happened, using his general theoretical perspective as one dimension of a framework for ordering and assessing data about Korean development between the latter 1940's and the early 1960's. As observer-commentator, he contributes cogent and substantial insights into the evolution of Korean government and administration, and these are valuable. The Korean case-as a case-will interest Korean scholars and anyone else looking for particular descriptions and explanation-sketches of national development. Dean Lee's provocative conceptual scheme for trying to take account of time as a facet of social change should attract the same audience, and others as well. The significance of time in practically any worldly endeavor is obvious. But the difficulties of handling time as a variable, or as a perspective, are not equally obvious-at first. The source of this difficulty is the elemental fact that time is a ubiquitous hen omen on. Everything in the realm of social concerns has a time dimension, and quite possibly many such dimensions. Thus it is hard to isolate time as a factor and then to link it with other factors in statements about what goes on in the world, despite the fact that there are interesting and important questions to be asked about time whenever one is concerned with social change and development.