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Hybrid guest lecture by Irina Lyan.

Time: Apr. 12, 2024 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM (CET),

Location: Seminar room 6, P.A Munchs hus, UiO

Zoom link above, otherwise Zoom Meeting ID: 622 5447 8061

About the lecture:

This project focuses on the role, implications, and context of organizational misconduct using an example of the legal battle between Apple and Samsung Electronics (2011-2018) over violation of intellectual property. For this purpose, it develops an analytical framework for exploring how such misconduct is closely related to organizational and national reputations, geopolitical relations, and legitimacy. Rather than looking at industrial espionage as another manifestation of organizational misbehavior that requires legal action, I take a critical knowledge perspective that views any knowledge transfer between organizations, as well as the very definition of its legal status, as embedded in geopolitical relations. More specifically, I suggest viewing the Apple v. Samsung case as part of a broader geopolitical struggle for domination in the rapidly changing global economic landscape. Employing a critical discourse analysis, I envision this loaded legal encounter as a “legitimacy crisis” during which actors build legitimacy or delegitimize each other as thieves of innovative knowledge and use the courts, academic circles, and the media as “legitimizing arenas”—public sites of struggles, contentions, and counter-contentions. I seek to understand how the texts produced by academia, media, and the courts build legitimacy not only of Apple and Samsung themselves, but also of the nation-states and the national institutions they represent and are embedded in—redefining what innovation is.

About the Speaker:

Irina Lyan is an Assistant Professor and the Head of the Korean Studies Program at the Department of Asian Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a sociologist who explores South Korea’s national images, imagery, and imagination, and their impact on its economic miracle, also known as the "Miracle on the River Han," and its cultural miracle, also known as "the Korean Wave" or Hallyu. Irina is the recipient of prestigious scholarships and awards, including the Principles of Cultural Dynamics’ fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin, the World Association of Hallyu Studies’ paper award, and St Antony’s College Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Organizer East Asian Lunch seminar