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

Abstract

<jats:p> 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. </jats:p>

“Start-up Nation” vs “the Republic of Samsung”: power and politics in the partner choice discourse in Israeli–Korean business collaboration

“…By answering the uneasy questions as to why Korea is perceived as less innovative in relation to Israel or to western economies in general and why their partner choice discourse is narrated in postcolonial vocabulary, one can witness how historical patterns of asymmetric representations continue to play out. Firms and countries are not simply perceived as more innovative than others because, historically, innovation has been unevenly associated with the western Europe and the USA, despite the existence of non-western innovative technologies (Chang, 2002; Mir et al , 2008; Lyan and Frenkel, 2020). Thus, the lingering presence of postcolonial imagery manifests itself as firms from former developing economies continue to be stigmatized and marginalized as capable only of manufacture or of imitation of superior western knowledge.…”

“…These development indexes are taken for granted as fixed economic “realities” covering mostly non-western economies, and, replicated by the academic literature, standardize and rationalize inter-organizational practices such as partner choice. While the manifest rhetoric of economic indexes and their usage is technical, neutral and objective, its subtext is embedded in geopolitical relations by mapping, distancing and keeping economic elites away from emerging, transitional, industrialized or still developing other (Escobar, 1995; McKenna, 2011), which continues despite the dynamic changes and shifts within these economies (Lyan and Frenkel, 2020).…”

“Distance” in intellectual property protection and MNEs’ foreign subsidiary innovation performance

“…Firms originating in weak IP protection regimes also develop specific competencies around dealing with the idiosyncrasies associated with weak IP protection regimes, such as by employing informal internal safeguarding mechanisms to protect their innovations or focusing on certain types of innovations/practices that enable them to appropriate the value from their own innovations vis-à-vis imitators. Such imitative practices and informal competencies in protecting their IP are less likely to add much value in the upward direction, due to the effective formal legal procedures in patenting and copyrighting, as well as due to the stigmatization of such informal practices and their association with wrongdoing (Lyan & Frenkel, 2020). As such, with greater IP protection distance in the upward direction, a foreign subsidiary will find it difficult to innovate in an environment where knowledge is well-protected and there are limited opportunities to utilize know-how from other firms as a basis for innovation (Hurmelinna et al, 2007).…”

Dazed and Confused: The Impact of Multinational Firms on Local Labor Markets

“…MNCs were attracted by governments of developing countries, seeking investments both in terms of capital and resources, aiming to receive a spillover effect in their economies [18] . However, when a country is trying to attract foreign companies, the presence of the company can reduce or even eliminate the power and role of the state government itself, due to the capacity of imposing contracts, which in the practice means the control of social interactions [19] . There is an expected, thus, convergence worldwide brought by globalization and its main actors, the MNCs.…”