The DNS in Ireland is distinctly different from the classic cases of the DBSs in Japan and South Korea. This conceptual distinction also casts light on important differences between cases of state developmentalism that have typically been homogenized under the category of “the developmental state” (Woo-Cumings, 1999). If the developmental state is posed against strategies relying on foreign investment, how can we make sense of Singapore, which combines a heavy reliance on foreign investment with extensive state control of the economy? If state developmentalism rests on close relationships between the state and the indigenous business class, how do we interpret the Taiwanese developmental state, promoting an indigenous capitalist class with which it had distant and often tense relations? What do we make of the Israeli case, where state developmentalism reemerged in the 1990s after liberalization, although in a profoundly different form than in the 1960s?

Although the great variation among the Asian Tigers is widely recognized, the dominant theoretical debates still center on categories that cannot make systematic sense of this variation. Debates regarding state, market, culture, world-system position, and related concepts have failed to disentangle the critical similarities and differences among the Tiger economies. Analysts who emphasize the variation within the Asian Tigers have tended to focus on significant differences in business organization and turn primarily to cultural explanations based on family structure and inheritance patterns (Biggart and Guillen, 1999; Biggart, Hamilton, and Orrú, 1997; Guillen, 2001; Hamilton, Feenstra, and Lim, 2000).