Dr Nahee Kang

Dr Kang is an associate editor of Asian Business & Management.

She also regularly reviews for academic journals, including the Oxford Development Studies, Socio-Economic Review, New Political Economy, Economy & Society, and Journal of East Asian Studies to name a few.

She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the Cambridge Overseas Trust, and a long standing member of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

Dr Kang is an economic sociologist working in the field of political economy of development. Her research focuses on the institutional dynamics of late capitalist development and catch-up industrialisation. Drawing on comparative institutional analysis, she investigates how institutions in different domains of the national economy, such as the financial and corporate governance systems and labour relations (including industrial relations, labour market and education and skills training) enable nationally distinct trajectories of capitalist development, and the implication this has for industrial firms in building their dynamic capabilities (what is increasingly referred to as the institutional theory of the firm). Her work has been published in a number of key journals in the fields of political economy, economic sociology, and development studies (see 'publications').

She is working on a book project on pathways of industrial growth, drawing on the recent theoretical and methodological developments to re-examine the East Asian model and its current standing. The book identifies multiple institutional and path-dependent trajectories of industrial development and upgrading in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It corrects the over-emphasis placed on institutions governing state-business relations in the conventional literature to show how those governing labour relations have had profound influence in shaping industrial trajectories. Taking 'temporality' - time related factors - seriously, it derives useful insights for today’s emerging economies undergoing industrial development and renewal in the era of compressed development.