Varieties of Regional Cultural Flow and Strategy: Revisiting South Korea's Experience from a Global Value Chain Perspective*

Abstract

This article examines regional cultural flow from a global value chain (GVC) perspective, focusing on South Korea's engagement in cultural flow in East Asia. The article argues that the regional flow of cultural and media content has been complicated as a result of the growing fragmentation of value chain activities and rising emphasis on localization. It allows for varieties of corporate strategic options for regional engagement beyond the traditional mode of exporting finished products. This article presents an analytic framework to examine such varieties, based on the GVC approach. Three emerging modes of regional cultural flow that depart from the export model—the new international division of cultural labor, format trade and international coproduction—are illustrated with the examples of Korean firms' engagement in regional cultural flow, mainly with China. The implications of the framework and the case illustrations are discussed in relation to regional cultural flow in East Asia.