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Transforming into Fashion Firms or Multi-Country Suppliers? Accounting for Varied Firm Trajectories in the Deindustrialising Korean Apparel Industry

Abstract This paper compares across two groups of Korean garment firms’ varied development and patterns of integration into the global economy in the deindustrialising Korean apparel industry. Although each group, both with histories as export suppliers, developed into fashion lead-firms or multi-country suppliers, current literature on firm upgrading provides little help in explaining the varied post-industrial trajectories of these firms. This paper bridges global value chains/global production networks (GVC/GPN) literature with institutionalist literature to highlight the importance of differential market embeddedness and organising logics in patterning how firms respond to changing global conditions.