Industrial espionage revisited: Host country–foreign multinational corporation legal disputes and the postcolonial imagery

Abstract

In this article, we take a postcolonial management approach to exploring the lingering significance of postcolonial imagery in shaping legal disputes between host country and foreign multinational corporations. We apply a critical discourse analysis to the Korea versus Orbotech industrial espionage lawsuit, in which the Korean government accused a foreign multinational corporation of leaking its ‘national core technology’. Through this analysis we demonstrate how industrial espionage discourse was used to fight Korea’s negative reputation as a technological imitator, associate Korea with global technological leaders, and disassociate itself from other ‘imitators’. In response, Orbotech’s industrial espionage discourse has aimed to reproduce Korea’s imitator stigma. Our findings highlight the continual role of the imagined North/South and West/rest symbolic boundaries in constructing global business hierarchies even when the marginalized party—Korea—has already moved to the elite economies club. While international management studies rarely address industrial espionage beyond its technical meaning, we underline the embeddedness of industrial espionage as a discourse in maintaining and disrupting the geopolitical business landscape.

Introduction

As the recent trade war between the United States and the Chinese conglomerate Huawei demonstrates, legal disputes between home countries and foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) operating within their institutional environments constitute an integral part of today’s global business collaborations. However, while the global public media and the business world have commonly viewed these disputes as part of a broader geopolitical struggle for domination in the rapidly changing global economic landscape, international business and management studies (IBMS) rarely discuss or theorize these loaded legal encounters, which are critical to the understanding of the role of geopolitical changes in host country–MNC relations.

Moreover, a systematic review of the literature that discusses the legal disputes between host countries and foreign MNCs reveals a consistent pattern wherein both host countries and the MNCs located in the Global South and usually categorized as developing economies are commonly framed as the violating parties when legal disputes involve North–South business collaborations. Thus, IBMS often portray the business environment in the Global South as characterized by institutional voids, making the rational conduct of business uncertain at best (Hooker, 2009; Meyer et al., 2009; Wright et al., 2005; Young et al., 2008). Local businesses in these countries are believed to locate themselves in close geographic proximity to successful ‘Northern’ MNCs’ subsidiaries to allow both ‘Southern’ firms and host countries to ‘catch up’ by imitating their foreign rivals or straightforwardly stealing their secrets (e.g. Lamin and Livanis, 2013).

Despite a growing recognition on the part of international financial institutions and IBMS literature itself of the changing landscape of the global economy and the growing significance of previously marginalized economies (Casanova and Miroux, 2018), when dealing with international legal disputes, IBMS discourse continues to contribute to the reproduction of a postcolonial imagery that visualizes the world in binary and interchangeable terms of North–South, developed–developing, and technologically advanced versus weak intellectual property (IP) protection economies (Berry, 2017; Hagedoorn et al., 2005). This persistent discrepancy between countries’ prestigious positions in the economic world system and their continual debasement in the geopolitical and symbolic spheres lies at the core of this article.

Postcolonial imagery, we suggest, is a cognitive global map that is rooted in the historical colonial order and makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy across North–South binaries in today’s world. Inspired by Taylor’s (2007) notion of ‘social imagery’, postcolonial imagery likewise does not necessarily reflect a social reality and is not always tangible or internally consistent. However, ‘social imageries are quite “real” in the sense of enabling common practices and deep-seated communal attachments. Though capable of facilitating collective fantasies andeflections, they should not be dismissed as phantasms or mental fabrications’ (Steger, 2008: 7). It is this postcolonial imagery, we argue, that, despite the disparity between the cognitive global map it draws and the recent economic shift, still leads IBMS practitioners and scholars to see the world in an either-North-or-South binary way.

Importantly, recognizing the centrality of postcolonial imagery in shaping IBMS’ worldview entails the recognition that any binary opposition used to depict global inequality—Global North/South opposition included—is inherently political and always reflects historically power-laden processes (Clarke, 2018; Dados and Connell, 2012; Mahler, 2018). While other distinctions normally reflect the colonizers’ understanding of global inequality, the Global South perspective originated in the historically marginalized parts of the world. We use these binary distinctions as heuristic devices to reflect actors’ understandings of their realities and to allow for some level of generalization. We focus on the Global North/South distinction to allude to the constantly changing and geopolitically negotiated hierarchical distinction.

To examine the role of postcolonial imagery in shaping legal disputes in IBMS, this article analyzes the revelatory case study of the reversed legal dispute, wherein the Korean government accused an internationally acclaimed Israeli MNC, Orbotech, and its local subsidiary of leaking Korea’s ‘national core technologies’ developed by Samsung and LG Electronics and transferring them to their rivals in China and Taiwan. Eighteen months later, the suit ended with a whimper when Orbotech and its five Korean employees were acquitted.

While postcolonial IBMS usually refer to the Global South when it overlaps with less-developed countries or regions and, therefore, enhances the link between these categories, our study demonstrates that even when such a link is absent, as in the case of the economic ‘latecomers’, the postcolonial imagery continues to link them to the previous binary picture. The mismatch between development and Global North–South categories in Korea’s case highlights the lingering presence of postcolonial imagery. In economic terms, following its rapid development in the 1990s, South Korea ¹ has moved to the Global North, yet both international institutions and academic literature continue to categorize it as a part of the Global South (e.g. Kim and Gray, 2016; Löfgren and Williams, 2016), including its common portrayal in official US reports and in legal studies as one of the countries most frequently involved in industrial espionage (IE; Brenner and Crescenzi, 2006; Nasheri, 2005; Tucker, 1997).

Inspired by postcolonial scholars seeking to understand IBMS as embedded in geopolitical power relations (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Frenkel, 2008; Mir et al., 2008; Westwood et al., 2014), the current article analyzes the public discursive practices employed by the parties in the dispute to understand it as part of Korea’s efforts to establish a newly acquired status of domination, not only at the economic, but also at the symbolic level. Applying critical discourse analysis (CDA)—that is, looking at the ‘way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Van Dijk, 2015: 466)—to the IE discourse emerging in Korea and Israel, our article demonstrates how Korea’s position in the postcolonial imagery affects both its framing of the legal dispute and the way it has been perceived internationally. Using a postcolonial lens to examine the geopolitical landscape as part of an ongoing struggle to establish, reestablish, and challenge global economic hierarchies (McKenna, 2011), we ask what images of self and other each party’s IE discourse (re)constructs and how these images reflect upon Korea’s global reputation and standing in the world economy.

The contribution of this article is twofold. First, to the mainstream IBMS literature, it adds a geopolitical understanding of legal disputes in general and disputes over IE in particular. Rather than a pragmatic attempt to achieve justice, we suggest viewing IE as a strategic discourse that shapes the geopolitical environment within host country–MNC relations. Second, by highlighting the growing inconsistency between (a) the economic sphere, in which the formerly developing countries from the Global South have been able to rise to technological leadership and (b) the symbolic sphere, in which they are still marginalized and presented as inherently inferior and ‘catching up’, the article illuminates the lingering significance of postcolonial imagery in shaping international business relations and the reproduction of global hierarchies and inequalities in a world where economic hierarchies have shifted.

Theoretical background

Postcolonial IBMS

The embeddedness of international business collaboration and academic discourse in the broader matrix of geopolitical power relations has long been recognized by postcolonial IBMS (e.g. Alcadipani et al., 2012; Frenkel, 2008; Jack and Westwood, 2009; Mir et al., 2008; Mir and Mir, 2009). Despite much internal diversity, these studies share an interest in both the symbolic and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, especially in their focus on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands as having shaped past and present geopolitical relations worldwide. In the IBMS context, this literature has pointed, first, to the roots of management knowledge in Western epistemology and the circular relations between discourse, knowledge, and socially constructed reality in management and organizational conduct; second, to the role of organizational practices and theories in the reproduction of the hierarchic West–rest, North–South, and developed–developing binary oppositions and the continuous marginalization and othering—that is, ‘the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the “other” and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this Other’ (Stokes and Gabriel, 2010: 468)—in management discourse; and third, to the ways in which the historical global relations of domination, including those between metropoles and colonies, and the lingering effect of these historical power relations continue to shape the dynamics within and around MNCs.

The way in which postcolonial IBMS have treated the cognitive global map that has emerged from the colonial order and that is still shaping organizations is complex and ambivalent. On one hand, they have pointed to the ways in which this cognitive map, which portrays the world as divided into opposite hemispheres, creates rather than reflects the very reality it appears to resist. In other words, and possibly as a part of what Guatary Spivak (1996 [1985]) has termed ‘strategic essentialism’, postcolonial scholars have often reproduced these binary global maps, confining their studies to cases in which local power relations reflect the historical colonial hierarchy. Thus, in looking at processes of othering and marginalization, these studies focus, for the most part, on the ways in which actors commonly affiliated with subaltern groups in the postcolonial imagery are stigmatized and marginalized by individuals, organizational processes, or a management epistemology associated with the Global North, overlooking alternative cases that do not fit the either-North-or-South binary scheme.

From a postcolonial management perspective, the from-North-to-South knowledge flow is commonly understood as part of the ‘civilizing mission’, operating through processes of imposed mimicry (Frenkel, 2008; Westwood et al., 2014), leading to the reproduction of orientalizing discourse and geopolitical hierarchies in organizations. With few exceptions, the knowledge produced within Southern societies is framed as a ‘traditional’, even inferior one, which bears little relevance for Northern MNCs (Frenkel, 2014). An exception to this rule may be found in Mir and Mir’s (2009) case study of technological transfer from an Indian subsidiary to its American headquarters, in which innovative knowledge was stolen (according to the Indian side) or legally obtained (according to the American side) by the US-based MNC. Yet even this case highlights the structural weakness and limited agency of the Southern economic actors. Thus, as several prominent postcolonial scholars, among them Homi Bhabha (1994), have already pointed out, despite its intention to challenge binaries, postcolonial scholarship has not sidestepped the reproduction of postcolonial imagery.

This persistent confinement of postcolonial IBMS to the congruence between economic and symbolic marginalization may be responsible for the limited interest in the alternative cases of Asian economies, which are often considered the ‘latecomers’ and, apparently, escape the common postcolonial binary schema. However, despite the swift economic and technological prosperity of East Asian ‘tigers’ and ‘dragons’ and their allegedly successful integration into the global business landscape, the way these countries are presented in the IMBS literature attests to the lingering effect of postcolonial imagery in shaping their marginalized global image (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006).

In this article, we apply a postcolonial lens to the discourse surrounding the Korea versus Orbotech case to explore the significance of the broadening gap between countries’ economic advancement and symbolic ‘backwardness’. As it bridges economic, technological, cultural, and symbolic spheres, the field of legal disputes in international business collaborations provides fertile ground for examining the postcolonial imagery and the use of resistant discursive strategies against it within and around organizations.

International legal disputes: from justice to power

Studies of organizations and management have begun to acknowledge the significance of unlawful and deviant practices not only as widespread occurrences, but also as central building blocks in the making of organizations and their environments. While important, these studies rarely link organizational misconduct to the geopolitical environment within which they are embedded. At the same time, in their attempt to identify the prior cross-national conditions that increase the probability of inter-organizational legal conflict, IBMS often associate high risk for misconduct with developing and emerging economies due to their ‘institutional voids’ characterized by ‘the absence of specialist intermediaries, regulatory systems, and contract-enforcing mechanisms’ (Khanna and Palepu, 2006: 62). Such ‘institutional voids’ increase the probability of illegal behavior on the part of the business partner from the less-developed economy due to its ‘lacking or ineffective’ legal institutions that are unable to produce the trust necessary for the sharing of sensitive information in international business collaborations (Hooker, 2009; Young et al., 2008: 201). They suffer from corrupt business practices and bribery (Meyer et al., 2009), and ‘[o]verall, emerging economies present a powerful challenge to the traditional “global strategy” engaged by many MNEs from developed economies’ (Wright et al., 2005: 6).

Tainted by the controversial practices of compromised international labor standards, environmental disasters, impacts on indigenous populations, and involvement in bribery and corruption, the flawed reputation of firms from less-developed countries as business collaborators (Brammer and Jackson, 2012) contributes to their stigmatization as potential wrongdoers and, therefore, adds financial, technological, and social ‘price tags’. This linkage fuels the higher uncertainty that derives from a lack of reliability and trust in local regulatory institutions and may in turn influence core organizational decisions, such as partner choice, entry mode, and work division.

According to postcolonial IBMS, this uneven representation serves, in its turn, to expand the influence of Northern MNCs worldwide, strengthening geopolitical hierarchies between firms and countries worthy or unworthy of doing business with (Frenkel, 2008; Mir and Mir, 2013; Westwood et al., 2014). In this view, legal disputes—supported in large part by contracts and regulations designed and imposed by the Global North—are embedded in geopolitical relations that, despite the seeming universality, favor stronger economies. For instance, the use of cheap labor and the weakening of local labor associations in ‘less-developed’ economies are legitimized as fair for international collaboration with developed ones, whereas catching up and using knowledge transfer as an unintended consequence of such collaboration by ‘less-developed’ countries is perceived as knowledge theft. The understanding of organizational misconduct in postcolonial imagery requires us to rethink it as part of a geopolitical struggle over power and domination. For this purpose, we offer to view IE as a salient example of the embeddedness of the international legal disputes in the broader web of geopolitical power relations.

IE: from practice to discourse

Defined by the US Office of National Counterintelligence as ‘the unlawful or clandestine targeting or acquisition of sensitive financial, trade, or economic policy information; proprietary economic information, or critical technologies’ (1998), IE is commonly presented as an illegal, unethical, and illegitimate practice that allows firms and nations to obtain knowledge rather than purchasing or developing it independently. From this viewpoint, by acquiring innovative knowledge through IE, actors can narrow the technological gap and thus improve their competitive advantage. However, as is often the case with deviant behaviors, the conceptualization of one’s action as unlawful is socially constructed and often embedded in a matrix of power relations in which one party is more likely to be able to stigmatize the other as deviant. Being blamed for gaining their competitive advantage through technological imitation constructs an ‘imitation stigma’ that may impact firms and their home countries’ reputations. This, in turn, may lead to reluctance on the part of foreign investors to collaborate, raising the financial, technological, and social ‘price tags’ that accompany the weak reputation of a given corporation or nation (Brammer and Jackson, 2012; Newburry, 2012).

In a postcolonial imagery, technological imitation, or ‘catching up’, has contributed to the marginalization and stigmatization, first of all, of the Global South (Chakrabarty, 2007). As this imitation has begun to threaten developed economies’ monopoly on the high-technology market, the latter have begun to invest in legislative protection for the innovative technologies produced by their firms and governments (Brenner and Crescenzi, 2006; Lewis, 2008; Van Arnam, 2001). In addition to the abovementioned US–China warfare, another sensational case from 2014 alleging that the Chinese government’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Unit 61398 engaged in economic espionage against the United States indicates that IE ‘victimhood’ has become a symbolic signifier of developed economies’ claim to inherent superiority owing to their ability to innovate rather than imitate knowledge illegally.

In general, the understanding of IE in the context of the struggle over global economic leadership is not new. Since the end of the Cold War, both economic espionage (conducted between governments) and IE (conducted between corporations) have become widespread practices. Intelligence services, freed from their previous engagement in the Cold War, turned their resources to rebuilding their national economies through espionage targeting foreign governments and corporations (Hannas et al., 2013; Nasheri, 2005; Van Arnam, 2001). While often presented as a practice responsible for the ‘greatest transfer of wealth in history’ (Foreign Policy, July 9, 2012), and sometimes recognized as a form of inter-organizational knowledge transfer (e.g. Macdonald, 1993; Seely, 2003), IE seems to be excluded from theoretical and empirical discussions in IBMS. Most studies of IE and IP in general have adopted a depoliticized view advocated by law and an economics approach to produce a clear-cut definition of this method of infringement and to seek effective ways to prevent and punish firms and states engaged in IE practice.

While not explicitly analyzing IE cases as manifestations of geopolitical relations, critical studies have already addressed the imbalance of an IP global regime that prioritizes the economic interests of the developed economies over the public welfare of the developing societies in the Global South. Using the case of the Northern pharmaceutical industry as the most prominent example, these studies address the US’s imposition of its own IP standards on the rest of the world as a precondition for international collaboration, in such a way that this so-called ‘harmonization’ of the global IP regime deprives the Global South of innovative technologies and knowledge that could have could have advanced local welfare and well-being (May and Sell, 2006). Governments’ and MNCs’ promotion of a rhetoric of danger, threat, and fear of ‘pirated’ counterfeits produced by Global South firms to enforce IP rights is said to serve the economic interests of the global elites and thereby deepens North–South disparities (May and Sell, 2006; Sell, 2009).

Despite being a common form of organizational misconduct, such division into ‘victims’ and ‘violators’ links IE to less-developed economies that supposedly attempt to gain an unfair competitive advantage in the global market by stealing knowledge from developed economies. For instance, Riad et al. (2012) demonstrated how the acquisition of IBM by the Chinese company Lenovo was framed by US media as a covert IE threat to American national security against the background of the US–China geopolitical Cold War. In general, the North American media often accuse China and India for ‘not “playing by the rules”’ and for rejecting ‘the “rule of law” as created by the West’, a situation that leads to media paranoia regarding these countries’ ‘threat’, reproducing a neocolonial discourse (McKenna, 2011).

In similar fashion, our content analysis of the 39 most-cited Google Scholar items on IE ² in 2017 reveals a clear pattern of dividing the economic landscape between the developed world (the IE ‘victim’) and the rest (the IE ‘violator’). Ten of the 39 items deal exclusively with the US Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which aims to protect the American economy from both foreign governments and firms. Twenty-nine items portray American companies located in Silicon Valley as the principal victims of IE because of their technological leadership and portray IE violators as ‘sitting on the tail’ of the innovators, thereby creating a threat to the economic security of American citizens (e.g. Carr et al., 2000; Richardson and Luchsinger, 2007). As for potential IE trespassers, examples of such activity on the part of the Chinese government, companies, and individuals (including Chinese Americans) dominate the IE literature (e.g. Hannas et al., 2013; Lewis, 2008). While 28 items mention less-developed economies, 8 of the 39 items focus exclusively on China, India, and the former Soviet Union.

As a review of the legal literature demonstrates, the categorization of countries that are most engaged in IE misconduct itself is embedded in postcolonial imagery by reproducing overlapping binaries of North–South and IE victims–violators. While we acknowledge the importance of this common postcolonial critique of North-to-South (illegal) knowledge transfer, this article aims to highlight the alternative case of reversed IE to understand the continuing role of postcolonial imagery that still overshadows host country–MNC relations.

Methodology

Critical discourse analysis

We regard the Korea versus Orbotech legal dispute as a ‘moment of crisis’ that problematizes discourse, revealing change, or a power struggle (Fairclough, 1995). By focusing on IE-as-discourse, we can see how public texts regarding the case both reproduce and challenge the IE ‘victim–violator’ binary. Fairclough (2013) defines discourse as

(a) meaning-making as an element of the social process; (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g., ‘political discourse’); [or] (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a particular social perspective (e.g., a ‘neo-liberal discourse of globalization’) (p. 177).

While these definitions overlap and are sometimes confused with one another, hegemonic or political discourses are the closest to the postcolonial approach. Toward this end, we employed a CDA that explores ‘the relations between discourse, power, dominance, [and] social inequality’ as manifested in language (Van Dijk, 1993: 283).

Drawing on poststructuralist traditions, according to which public discourses are understood as political sites wherein various actors struggle to determine a certain meaning aligned with their worldviews or priorities, to privilege some actors at the expense of other marginalized actors, and to normalize hierarchical relations (Phillips and Hardy, 2002), postcolonial discourse focuses on the social reproduction and complexity of post/neo/colonial relations. The postcolonial discourse can be traced back to the early days of the colonial project, when the colonial power’s superiority over the colonized nation was taken for granted and allowed the former to portray its occupation as a benevolent mission aimed at improving and civilizing the colonized nation and better the lives of its residents (McKenna, 2011; Prasad, 2003).

The goal of CDA is to discover how discourse unfixes and destabilizes the taken-for-granted meanings, while uncovering the ways in which dominant discourse excludes, marginalizes, and stifles realities and actors by determining what can be said, who can speak, and from what position (Mumby, 2004). By taking a context-sensitive approach, discourse analysis is especially useful in cross-cultural comparisons in which social actors ‘discursively position themselves, their companies and their country’ in relation to others by drawing upon their own understandings of individual and organizational identities as ‘nested’ within national identity (Ellis et al., 2012: 410), which in the present study can be further ‘nested’ in wider social, economic, and political contexts, thus bridging the gap between texts and contexts (Fairclough, 1995). While the Korean case did not require the use of sophisticated ‘fake news’ technologies to manipulate public opinion, it should be understood as part of the wider context of strategic and political uses of information to serve national and organizational actors both at home and abroad.

Data collection

Our empirical data comprise official records, include the following legal documents, internal reports, news releases, and media items covering the 2012–2014 period: the press release by the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office on the investigation; Orbotech’s response to the allegations; and its six annual reports for the 2012–2017 period that refer to the investigation as one of the potential threats to the company’s value. In addition, we tracked 13 Israeli media items (e.g. Globes, TheMarker, Calcalist, and Techtime), 48 Korean items (e.g. Chosun, Yonhap News, The Korea Herald, Korea Times, Korea Daily, The Dong-a Ilbo, and Korea JoongAng Daily), and five additional items that appeared in English-language international media (e.g. Bloomberg, IBTimes, and Oled Info), yielding a total of 66 articles relevant to the Korea versus Orbotech case.

In 2014, the first author conducted 58 semi-structured interviews with Israeli and Korean figures in the field who participated in joint collaborative projects, including CEOs; R&D, project, and sales/marketing managers; Israeli engineers working in Korean firms and vice versa; consultants to Israeli–Korean businesses; local representatives of Israeli or Korean firms; NGO executives; diplomats; and government officials. All interviewees were asked to provide a self- and company introductions, the background of Israeli–Korean collaboration, stories of cross-cultural experiences, and general conclusions about the collaboration. These interviews serve as a background to understanding business collaborations between the two countries and the from-Israel-to-Korea common direction of technological knowledge transfer, including IE. Three interviews were conducted with Orbotech’s Israeli managers, who were questioned directly about the case.

Data analysis

In a preliminary phase, we searched through all available data on IE-related topics, themes, and patterns, paying close attention to repeated words, metaphors, stories, contradictions, conflicts, and emotions. More specifically, we searched for data that identified how different actors on both sides made sense of the IE crisis in terms of power relations. In addition, we examined the use of pictures in the visual representation of the case that were copied from the filing to Korean newspapers but were almost absent from Israeli ones. After we reached an agreement that certain binaries—such as IE ‘victims’ and ‘violators’, innovation and imitation, and the need for national security and corporate risk management—were associated, disassociated, or re-associated with IE misconduct, we proceeded with our analysis in three stages.

In the first stage, we moved from identification of themes toward their categorization. We defined IE association as any claim that connects a party or an action to IE misconduct, and we identified IE violators. We defined IE disassociation as any claim that detaches and distances a party from the IE misconduct, and we identified its victims. This category also includes those discursive practices that are presented as the opposite of IE misconduct—for example, innovation. Finally, we defined IE re-association as a party’s attempt to reconstruct a pre-existing association with the IE misconduct. The question guiding this stage of analysis was: What is associated, disassociated, and re-associated with IE misconduct?

In the second stage, this question led to the identification of three main discursive practices that characterized the Korea versus Orbotech discourse: (1) an association of IE with Orbotech, China, and Taiwan; (2) the disassociation of IE from Korea and its conglomerates, together with a strengthening of their own link to innovation; and (3) the re-association of IE with the Korean side by distancing it from innovative economies while bringing it closer to China. Although these themes overlap, the analytical division allows us to better understand the discursive strategies employed by each side in response to the investigation.

In the final stage, we separated these three discursive practices of association, disassociation, and re-association with IE misconduct while comparing the Korean narrative with the Israeli counter-narrative. The comparative CDA of the Israeli and Korean stories constructed by the disputing parties enabled us to problematize each party’s claim to truth, thereby revealing the power struggle between them. Cross-national CDA identifies what can be considered legitimate or illegitimate and what is shifted from established legitimacy by discursive practices that challenge it as illegitimacy (Halsall, 2008; Vaara et al., 2006).

In a postcolonial management approach, an association with IE can be viewed as a postcolonial discourse through which actors marginalize each other as IE ‘violators’ from less-developed economies, while framing themselves as IE ‘victims’ from developed nations. By paying close attention to both reproduction and challenge of postcolonial imagery through this discourse, our article underlines the importance of the analysis of national and organizational responses to the legal disputes in the broader context of the North–South struggle over technological domination, legitimacy, and market share.

The case study: Korea versus Orbotech (2012–2018)

Korea’s meteoric rise in the 1980s from a mostly agricultural and technologically backward nation to its current status as the twelfth strongest economy in the world by the real GDP growth rate in 2019 (IMF, 2020) is often associated with its conglomerates’ engagement in catching-up practices—specifically, imitating and improving overseas technology, products, knowledge, and policies (Choung et al., 2014; Hemmert, 2018; Larson and Park, 2014). Moreover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) annual reports, which list the countries most engaged in espionage against American firms, placed Korea seventh on that list (Brenner and Crescenzi, 2006; Nasheri, 2005; Tucker, 1997). In other words, despite Korea’s outstanding economic success and top ranking in innovation indexes, the extensive media coverage of accusations against Korea for its involvement in technological imitation—including, for example, the Apple Inc. versus Samsung IP lawsuit (2011–2018)—has further served to stigmatize Korea and its business groups as technological copycats.

Since the late 1990s, studies have commonly portrayed the Korean economy as undergoing an extended process of transformation from ‘imitation to innovation’ (Kim, 1997), paralleling its transition from the developing world to the developed one (Choung et al., 2014; Hemmert, 2018). Indicative of this shift, since the 2000s, the Korean government has begun to invest in its IP legal protection, due largely to the increase in overseas technological leakage, mostly from China (Chun and Lee, 2014). In 2006, the Korean government passed the Act on the Prevention of Divulgence and Protection of Industrial Technology to identify and protect ‘national core technologies’ that can affect Korea’s national security and economy (Kim, 2009). Due to the importance of these technologies (developed primarily by the leading family-run, government-supported conglomerates known as chaebols), the law forbids their divulgence beyond Korean borders. Since the top ten chaebols own more than 27% of all business assets in Korea (Bloomberg, August 29, 2019), the loss of their competitive advantage has an impact on the whole country. The passage of the aforementioned Act strengthens the ‘national mission’ of the Korean government to make Korea a nation of innovation, adopting technological innovation, and its legal protection as a norm of developed economies (Chun and Lee, 2014).

Under the Act’s terms, three Korean employees of an Orbotech subsidiary were arrested on June 27, 2012, and three were detained and charged with divulging ‘national core technologies’ using USB cards disguised as credit cards and hidden in their belts, wallets, and shoes. According to the accusation, Korean employees transferred the divulged technologies to Samsung’s and LG’s rivals in China and Taiwan via Orbotech’s regional office in Hong Kong. On 10 December 2013, Orbotech and its five Korean employees were acquitted. One employee was fined US$10,000 for divulging technological information to external experts, though with no intention of engaging in espionage. On 12 July 2018, the ‘Supreme Court of Korea dismissed the prosecutor’s appeal of the Seoul Central District Court’s 2014 decision acquitting the Company’s Korean subsidiary and five of its employees’ (Orbotech website). The case attracted little media attention after 2012 in either Israel or Korea, while in 2014 and 2018, the Israeli media celebrated Orbotech’s victory.

Orbotech is an Israeli-based global technology company employing about 3000 people in 50 offices around the globe, with reported annual revenue of US$900.9 million in 2017. Introducing itself as ‘an innovator of enabling technologies used in manufacture of the world’s most sophisticated consumer and industrial products, for over 30 years’ (Orbotech website), Orbotech is one of the largest technology companies in Israel and one of the world’s leading producers of inspection equipment. Founded in 2006, the Orbotech–Korea subsidiary employs more than 100 people, predominantly Korean nationals, and accounts for 19% of Orbotech’s overall revenues, mostly by providing inspection equipment to Samsung and LG. In 2019, Orbotech was acquired by the KLA-Tencor Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based MNC in the semiconductor industry.

It is within these wider contexts that the Korea versus Orbotech case should be analyzed. A closer and more systematic examination of the ‘reversed’ Korea versus Orbotech IE discourse enables us to advance a postcolonial management approach to the complex relations between IE discourse and countries that struggle to (re)position themselves in the global business landscape. By bringing forth geopolitical associations of organizational misconduct, we focus on the reversed IE discourse employed by the Korean government to disassociate itself from IE misconduct by means of its legal dispute with the foreign MNC.

Findings

The article focuses on discursive practices that associate, disassociate, and re-associate Korea with/from IE misconduct. Overall, to link other parties with IE misconduct, the Korean side distances itself from Orbotech, a foreign supplier, and from China and Taiwan, its technological rivals, to identify them as IE ‘violators’. To disassociate itself from IE misconduct, the Korean side nationalizes Samsung’s and LG’s innovation and correlates it with a sense of national victimhood to identify itself as an IE ‘victim’. This leads to the theme of the need for security from IE threats and the urging of the Korean government and corporations to enforce tighter controls to prevent future IE. Finally, it is the Israeli counter-narrative that re-associates Korea and its conglomerates with IE misconduct. Orbotech is represented as a victim of unfounded accusations of IE, leading to its need for risk management in dealing with East Asian countries, including Korea. Security issues take the shape of a broader risk management strategy aimed at navigating the troubled waters of the inherently problematic institutional environment of East Asia.

Association

The Korean narrative: Orbotech as a foreign supplier

The filing introduces Orbotech as a foreign supplier ‘with the main customer of Samsung in Korea, BOE and CSCT in China, and AUO in Taiwan’ that

took advantage of such position, stole the national core technologies in breach of the trust of the victim companies and Korea, and divulged the foregoing to the headquarters in Israel and marketing employees of the subsidiaries providing services to foreign competitors [of Samsung and LG].

The association with IE discourse tags ‘companies and Korea’ as IE victims, while casting the ‘foreign supplier’ and ‘foreign competitors’ in the role of IE ‘violators’.

The Korean media picked up the story and swiftly diffused these allegations, promoting the national message. They also stressed that Orbotech is a foreign supplier by citing a prosecutorial official who stated that ‘it is very likely that rival foreign companies have obtained the technologies through the supplier’ (e.g. Korea Times, 27 June 2012; Korea Herald, 28 June 2012). The Dong-a Ilbo (28 June 2012) reinforced this liability of foreignness with the following conspiracy interpretation: ‘Prosecutor said their investigation into the incident will not be easy since the mastermind is outside Korea. This means the Orbotech headquarters ordered the leak and shared leaked technologies with its branch offices’.

To problematize the MNC’s foreignness, Etnews (14 February 2012) labeled overseas manufacturers ‘distrustful’ and cited industry officials’ opinion that ‘LG Display is strengthening security for advanced panel manufacturing technologies by making inspection equipment Korean’, since ‘replacing Orbotech’s equipment with LG Electronics will save us 15 to 20 percent on costs, secure competitive price, and avoid leaking technology’. Orbotech appears here as the Other that monopolized the inspection equipment market, thereby endangering the success of advanced Korean technologies and the future of the Korean economy at large.

Five news items further amplified this anti-foreign message: Orbotech had not only monopolized the market, stolen Korean technologies, and transferred them to Samsung’s and LG’s technological rivals in China and Taiwan, but also misused Korean national assets by receiving tax breaks from the provincial Gyeonggi government (Chosun, 28 June 2012). By publicizing the story about tax cuts for Orbotech on the part of the Gyeonggi government, the media further fortified the self–Other or antagonist–protagonist structure between the nation-state and a foreign supplier.

The Korean narrative: distancing from China and Taiwan

The prosecutor’s filing accused not only Orbotech, but also Samsung’s and LG’s Chinese and Taiwanese competitors. This accusation was accompanied by a visual distancing demonstrated in the two exhibits added at the end of the filing: ‘Current global display market’ distanced Samsung and LG as leading conglomerates followed by Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese companies; and ‘Flow of Divulgence of National Core Technologies’ demonstrated the direction of knowledge flow from Samsung and LG to Orbotech Korea and to Chinese and Taiwanese companies. Both exhibits were copied by 15 Korean newspapers to demonstrate the technological gap with other East Asian countries and to express concern about its possible closure through IE.

Of 48 Korean items, 22 warned of the narrowing technological gap between Korea and its competitors. For instance, The Dong-a Ilbo (28 June 2012) stated,

The Chinese and Taiwanese industries, which have the third to ninth largest market share in the global display market, are known to have more than three years of technology gap from their Korean counterparts. ‘The technology that was leaked was the circuit that our researchers found after many trials and errors’, said an SMD official. ‘By doing so, our competitors were concerned about narrowing the technology gap. There is no way to recover the technology once it is leaked, so we need to punish the officials who attempted to evacuate and their allies inside the company’.

By associating IE with Chinese and Taiwanese rivals, the Korean narrative distances Korea and its conglomerates from IE, juxtaposing Korean innovation with Chinese and Taiwanese unlawful imitation. This discursive distancing is achieved by numerical indexes (‘the third to ninth largest market share in the global display market’) as well as the temporal technology gap of 3 years, bringing to mind the metaphor of technological evolution.

In addition to discursive and visual distancing, of 48 Korean items, ten newspaper articles used indirect methods to enhance it by offering additional examples of Chinese IE (The Dong-a Ilbo, 29 June 2012). These examples, often supported by statistical data and specific cases, serve to contrast Korean innovation with its imitation-based technological rivals. Moreover, they not only reveal Korea’s attempt to rid itself of imitation stigma and to reaffirm its own innovativeness, but also to pass this stigma on to other ‘latecomers’. For instance, Hankyung (9 July 2012) described this shift in the following way:

Two or three decades ago, Korea did not have what it has today . . . . But now, South Korea has moved from a ‘chaser’ to a ‘pursued’. It is because it has gained world-class technology in semiconductor, display, cars, and shipbuilding. That is why foreign competitors have their eye on Korean companies.

By relying on othering metaphors of hunting (‘chaser’, ‘pursued’), a war rhetoric of a battle between rivals, or comparisons to a sport-like race toward technological leadership, the item further implied the evolutionary development of Korean technology, which shifted from imitation to innovation and, consequently, to today’s IE victim.

Disassociation

The Korean distancing narrative: nationalization of innovation

To disassociate itself from IE misconduct, the Korean side nationalizes the innovation of its conglomerates. Based on the abovementioned Act, it was the Korean government rather than Samsung or LG that became the plaintiff against Orbotech. Both in the claim itself and in its presentation to the public, the technology was repeatedly described as a stolen ‘national treasure’. The following dramatic statements from the prosecutor’s filing were cited and further echoed in the Korean media:

[The leakage will] lead to substantial national damages and could cause a shift of power in the relevant global market [as well as] . . . serious damages to the national interest and significant shift in the world market power . . . . Substantial impact on the society and significant economic damages to Korea as a whole is foreseeable, and further there is a risk of shift in power in the display panel market . . . . Considering the nature of stealing national core technologies, very critical national assets for the survival of Korea, like above, which tantamount to selling of the nation, we will conduct further investigation intensively.

By using emotion-packed adjectives, such as ‘substantial’, ‘serious’, and ‘critical’, the filing alluded to the metaphor of a national disaster. In the media interview, the prosecutorial official even used the metaphor of an earthquake-like or seismic shift in the global display market (CBS TV News, 27 June 2012). The Hanguk News (28 June 2012) underlined the fact that the filing had a ‘catastrophic impact not only on the company but also on the entire national industry’. This, in turn, further legitimized the government’s intervention and its hero-like role. All 48 Korean media outlets reacted to the filing with more than simple repetition: they offered responsive engagement to resonate with national ‘concern’ and ‘shock’. The nation-state was referred to as both an IE ‘victim’ and a legislative institution responsible for protecting national technologies and avoiding future national ‘catastrophes’.

Of 48 Korean items, 45 correlated victimhood with statements celebrating the innovativeness of Korea and its conglomerates. This correlation began with the citing from the filing in the Korean media to underline both Korean leadership in innovation and victimhood following its possible loss. Beyond directly referencing the filing, the Korean media amplified this glorified victimization of Samsung, LG, and the entire Korean nation. Headlines of major Korean newspapers blared: ‘Samsung, LG lose secret panel knowhow’ (Korea Times, 27 June 2012), ‘Samsung, LG’s key display leaked by Israeli firm’ (The Korea Herald, 27 June 2012), and ‘Multi-trillion won [worth] national core technology leaked through a 10.000 won [worth] USB’ (Yonhap, 27 June 2012). Furthermore, the high financial value of the innovative technology was underlined alongside its possible loss:

The stolen AMOLED display technology has been designated a national core technology . . . . The industry expects global AMOLED demand will reach 90 trillion won ($78.6 billion) over a five-year period starting from 2013 . . . . And Samsung and LG will suffer heavily if their rivals gain such an advantage. (Korean JoongAng Daily, 30 June 2012)

On one hand, the connection between national innovation and victimhood evoked negative emotional responses to the possible loss of national treasures (‘heavy competition’, ‘suffer heavily’). On the other hand, however, the Korean side also glorified the stolen technologies as ‘priceless’ and capable of ‘reap[ing] huge profits’. This ambiguous representation of glorified victimhood demonstrates Korea’s attempt to fight its own imitation stigma and to reaffirm its own innovativeness by shedding its imitation stigma as an IE violator.

The Korean distancing narrative: need in technological security

To disassociate itself from IE, the Korean side employed an additional discursive practice by demanding better protection of ‘national core technologies’. The need for technological security further separated the national ‘self’ from foreign rivals. As the Korea JoongAng Daily (June 30, 2012) reported in its shaming article ‘Security fortresses to rout moles’, ‘The two electronics giants not only lost enormous pools of research funds due to the leaks, but also lost face for having been easy prey by amateur spies’. Another item in the Korea JoongAng Daily (August 21, 2012) shamed the Korean government for its failure to protect ‘national treasures’:

Under the [Act], a judge can hand down a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine equivalent to between two and 10 times the value of the perpetrator’s illicit gains. But data from the National Intelligence Service show that of almost 927 people charged between 2006 and 2010, only 42, or 4.5 percent, were given prison terms. Some 34 percent were fined and 33 percent granted probation.

The need for national security fueled by the shaming rhetoric resulted from the unsatisfactory and insufficient distancing between Korea and its competitors in a technological race. For instance, the Korea JoongAng Daily (21 August 2012) directly blamed a government official, Gyeonggi Governor Kim Mon-Soo, who announced that he would immediately expel Orbotech ‘from an industrial complex after its employees were found guilty of stealing corporate secrets’. The governor was publicly shamed by the writer of the newspaper article, since ‘it later came across as mere hot air and bluster, followed by little of substance’. The author pessimistically stated that ‘increasingly, crime does pay for industrial spies’, implying that the government does not do enough to stop IE ‘villains’.

Re-association

The Israeli counter-narrative: recalling the Korean stigma

The explosion of the Korea versus Orbotech case surprised and shocked both the Israeli media and the high-technology business community. The accusation shook local actors’ belief in the value of the entire collaboration between the two nations as a complementary, win–win situation between Israeli innovation and Korean productivity (Frenkel et al., 2015). As one of the Israeli businessmen wrote in his blog (28 June 2012):

I hope it’s untrue. As a result [of the investigation], now every Korean company will be more suspicious of Israelis. This is in spite of the fact that Koreans are looking for the Israeli technology rather than the opposite direction.

Following this common refrain of from-North-to-South knowledge transfer, Orbotech’s Israeli managers attempted to distance Orbotech from the accusation through the re-association of Korea with IE by bringing to the fore an abundance of counter-cases in which Korean conglomerates imitated or attempted to steal Israeli and other developed countries’ technologies. For instance, one of Orbotech’s managers compared Korean development with a ‘sandwich’ containing its developed (Japanese) future and its underdeveloped (Chinese) past. When asked about the investigation, he began at an earlier point in time:

Today the most famous competition is between Samsung and Apple, but in the past the main competition was between Korean companies and Japanese companies such as Sony, Panasonic, and others . . . . It’s almost certain that Koreans saw in Japan the winning model and copied it to a great extent—and, even more, copied actual technologies and products. It’s almost common knowledge . . . it’s like today the Chinese are accused of copying Koreans . . . . Korean electronics are better than Japanese. The same happened in the car industry. With such a reputation, [Korean] companies that achieved by copying, it’s strange that suddenly they accuse us.

The manager explained the historical context of the high quality of Korean goods as a product that was ‘achieved by copying’ from Apple and Japan and is being copied by China today. In light of this evolutionary development, he dismissed the accusation as ‘strange’. While Orbotech, alongside Apple and Japan, stands on the innovation side, Korea and China are united under the imitation stigma.

Another Orbotech Israeli manager recalled the Apple–Samsung patent war in an effort to contextualize Korea’s accusation:

One needs to remember that the biggest success of Samsung, of its products’ big success is in the software, android, American software. Without this software, they didn’t have a chance. When you open Galaxy or Samsung’s tab, you actually use American software. They have great hardware, but the user interface is an American one.

By underlining the American origins of Samsung’s technology, the interviewee undermined its success, which he attributed to unlawful technological imitation. Moreover, he used the East–West binary to oppose Orbotech’s innovation to Samsung’s reverse engineering:

When Samsung started to rise as a company they decided . . . that is a Korean characteristic, like juche in North Korea, ³ but in Korean business culture, meaning: ‘We don’t want to be dependent on the West. I want to develop the same equipment as Orbotech. Now, I can’t do it inside the company; they will accuse me of stealing the knowledge and also we aren’t an R&D company’. So a few Samsung engineers establish an R&D company ‘X’ subsidized indirectly by Samsung . . . . Actually, they do reverse engineering of Orbotech’s equipment. This is the sophisticated Korean way to compete with Western companies.

The comparison with North Korea’s juche ideology deepens the binary between the ‘Korean way’ and Western companies, including Orbotech. Another interviewee tried to normalize the ‘Koreanization’ of technology from a historical perspective by aligning China’s and Korea’s rationales for their copycatting:

From the Korean point of view, it’s OK: the second side gave them information and they took it; they don’t see a problem. Although today they have begun to protect themselves because the Chinese do the same to them. What they do to others, others do to them. They didn’t invent this; the model began originally in Japan. The Japanese—their entire economic growth model was to Japanize. They took Western technology in general and Japanized it or Koreanized it. The Korean growth model is very similar to the Japanese: they took Japanese technology and made upgraded copy—both copying and improving.

By returning to the evolution metaphor, the interviewee re-associated Korea with the imitation stigma by positioning the Korean ‘copying and improving’ model from the West and Japan and near the Chinese, who ‘do the same to them’ today. Juxtaposing the Korean copying experience from developed economies with that of Israeli or American innovation recreates the crude division that is an outcome of a colonial past—that is, the East–West binary between innovative thinkers and hierarchical imitators (authors, 2015). Particularly, because the two countries involved in the disputes were Israel and Korea, imagined West and East, the Israeli side draws on a wider stereotyping of Korea as a part of East Asia in general regarding technological imitation.

The Israeli counter-narrative: need in risk management

An additional discursive practice designed to re-associate Korea with IE misconduct is to emphasize the need for risk management while working with Asia in general and with Korea in particular. For instance, the Korean side depicted the state as the ‘hero’ for uncovering the espionage scheme in the course of protecting ‘national core technologies’, whereas the Israeli side accused it of governmental overprotection. For example, Orbotech’s CEO, in an interview with Calcalist (30 December 2013), explained the situation by blaming the Korean state for confusing legitimate knowledge transfer with IE:

In South Korea, historically and traditionally, efforts have been made to localize all technologies and patents. At the beginning of 2012, the South Korean government declared that all OLED technologies measuring 55 inches or more are national technology that cannot be taken outside the country. But at this stage we already had the monitors that had been sent to us by Samsung and LG.

Following the quote, the author of this item added his own interpretation in parentheses: ‘So Orbotech allegedly and unwillingly has become a law breaker’. In his attempt to make sense of the case, Orbotech’s CEO labeled ‘traditional’ state intervention as inappropriate—even irrational—when compared with the ‘modern’ or ‘normative’ way of doing business. In line with his statement, Orbotech spent about US$9 million in trial expenses to prove to the Korean government that Samsung and LG willingly shared their technologies before they were classified as ‘national core technologies’. The CEO, echoed by the item’s author, reversed the victim/violator roles by shifting the blame to the ‘traditional’ Korean government, framing Korean efforts to protect innovation as outdated.

Understanding such overprotection as a risk, all of Orbotech’s annual reports from 2012 to 2017 have called for better risk management in East Asian countries, singling out China, Taiwan, and Korea for their ‘political, economic and other uncertainties’, including:

regulatory reform and changes in reimbursement rates, tariffs and taxes and their applications; difficulty in protecting intellectual property; longer payment cycles usually characteristic of international sales; and the general difficulties associated with administering business overseas, as well as overall economic conditions. (Orbotech Annual Report, 2012: 11)

As for the IE allegations, Orbotech blames the Korean government: ‘The Korean Matter has highlighted the singular difficulties and complexities, in particular those associated with government classification of technology that can arise when doing business in Korea’ (Orbotech Annual Report, 2012: 11). A risk associated with ‘doing business in Korea’ further distances Orbotech from IE misconduct, while re-associating it with Korea and East Asia in general, under the category of risky countries to work with.

In all, re-association with IE misconduct challenges previous practices of association and disassociation by returning to the from-North-to-South knowledge transfer discourse, redefining IE victims and violators. Like othering and distancing discursive practices, it serves as an inclusion/exclusion strategy that falls into the categories of innovative and imitative economies while highlighting the persistence of postcolonial imagery.

Concluding discussion: postcolonial imagery and IE discourse

In this article, we have explored the use of a legal dispute over IE as a tool in a geopolitical struggle over postcolonial imagery that continues to play out in representations of former developing economies. This revelatory case highlights that despite their rapid economic and technological development, the ‘latecomers’ continue to fight for international recognition for being, rather than becoming, developed economies from the Global North (Frenkel, 2014). As for technological innovation, it demonstrates that economic development has not earned these countries membership into the prestigious club of innovative economies, which, according to postcolonial imagery, are supposed to be imitated by, caught up with, or plundered by the Global South binaries. The ambiguous position of Korea between economic North and symbolic South, as well as the continuing boundary work aimed at drawing or erasing the line between Korea and other ‘Southern’ countries, such as China and Taiwan, underlines the continuing importance of postcolonial imagery in (re)producing the growing inconsistency between economic achievements of recently developed countries and their marginal image on a geopolitical map.

Through a CDA of the discursive practices of othering and distancing employed by both parties, we have established how association, disassociation, and re-association with IE misconduct both reproduces and challenges Korea’s standing in the technological global hierarchy. Acting as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, these discursive practices have (re)defined what it means to be a developed nation of innovation. Our findings demonstrate how, in response to its symbolic gap between economic leadership and an ambivalent reputation as a technological imitator, the Korean side enacts ‘reversed’ IE discourse to minimize this gap by glorifying its national innovation and disassociating itself from the imitation stigma. For example, by disassociating itself from IE misconduct by linking it to IE violators, the Korean side challenges its own imitation stigma as a catching-up economy by presenting itself as a technological leader and a victim of others’ illegal misconduct. This positioning, in turn, demarcates the symbolic boundaries of the geopolitical world map by ascribing to Korea the status of an IE ‘victim’ (inclusion) rather than an IE ‘violator’ (exclusion)—a strategy strongly associated with developed economies.

The discursive practice of re-association underscores former developing economies’ struggles to rid themselves of the imitation stigma against continuous external attempts to reinforce the historical binaries upon them. In addition to re-association of IE misconduct with Korean conglomerates, the Israeli counter-narrative blames the ‘traditional’ Korean government for irrational overprotection. The Israeli side also positions Korea and its companies close to China as catching-up and institutionally weak economies by employing IE discourse to stigmatize Korea as a part of the East Asia region associated with the Global South.

Importantly, while struggling to reposition itself on the North–South, developed–developing axes, Korea does not challenge the global hierarchy at large. By trying to rid itself of its own imitation stigma while transferring it to its rivals, Korea positions itself on the same continuum, judging itself on the same terms. As long as Korea stands on the same axis in the evolution of technological development from imitation to innovation, it remains trapped within the binary categories of North–South, developed–developing, and IE victims–violators. The Korea versus Orbotech case thus demonstrates the negotiation dynamics involved in the symbolic defining and distancing of South from North, developing from developed, and imitation from innovation.

As we have argued, despite being theoretically conscious of the internal diversity and potential disputes, history of animosity, and competition within the Global South or the previously colonized camp, postcolonial IBMS often overlook the othering and marginalization practices employed by and between Southern countries. Our study demonstrates the ways in which countries suffering from the imitation stigma imitate not only the knowledge that is essential to their economic and technological prosperity, but also those strategic practices of stigmatization and marginalization that have been directed at them, thus reproducing the postcolonial imagery with a slight change in its contours. The similarity between the ‘South-against-South’ discursive strategies used in Korea toward China and Taiwan and those applied by the Israelis toward Korea or the United States toward China may attest to this great chain of postcolonial discursive othering in which countries rely upon the marginalization of other countries to secure their own path toward the center.

In conclusion, even though the borders of the north–south hemispheres and the categories of development have become more blurred as more nations change their economic status, postcolonial imagery continues to influence the way in which we re-imagine a nation-state or region on a geopolitical world map. Framing IE as one of the most common examples of organizational wrongdoing negatively associated with the Global South, involving illegal acquisition of valuable knowledge, represents a salient yet understudied example of the lingering influence of postcolonial imagery. Its power to visualize changes in national image, international relations, and geopolitical hierarchies through discursive practices to symbolically include or exclude countries from the elite club of innovative economies should be further researched. While this article focuses solely on the case of Korea, future studies would do well to further examine the attempts of stigma management in the national rebranding of other newcomers by mimicking the inclusion/exclusion discursive strategies of innovative economies. By distancing themselves from IE misconduct and from other countries stained by it, the latecomers may minimize the gap between economic success and an ambivalent reputation to re-imagine their position in postcolonial imagery.