Interpreting South Korean Competitiveness: From Domestic Rivalry to Global Competitiveness

This paper attempts to expand the understanding of globalization. The gaining of global competitiveness has been understood as a result of global forces of capital, labor, and technology that shape domestic forms of production. Especially in the cases of relatively smaller countries (South Korea, in this case), the processes of “adopting” globalization have been highlighted in order to understand the process of gaining global competitiveness. However, the process of accumulating competitiveness domestically has been largely ignored. This paper argues that South Korea’s global competitiveness resulted from domestic rivalry. It reveals two paths of domestic rivalry that resulted in this global competitiveness. The first path is a rivalry that created endogenous knowhow. In the case study, the rivalry between Korean TV stations - KBS, MBC, and SBS - ultimately resulted in viewer-capturing dramas that attracted many fans in Asian countries. Interestingly, the authoritarian regime also pushed TV viewers away from watching TV news toward watching dramas. The second path was a rivalry that galvanized the best global practices. The second case demonstrates that Korean electronic products benefited from the rivalry between Samsung and LG, in which each adopted “best practices” already determined by the developed world market and vigorously elaborated on them. Thus, the process of globalization is not only one based on a unilateral outside-in approach, but based on an inside-out, or at least interactive, approach.