Samer Abdelnour

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Business School

Agency and institutions are essential concepts within institutional theory. In this Perspectives issue, we draw on a select group of Organization Studies articles to provide an overview of the topic of agency and institutions. We first consider different ways of defining agency and institutions and examine their implications for institutional theor...

Digital technologies pervade modern social life. As a result, organizational ethnographers must contend with informants interacting through face-to-face as well as through digitally-mediated encounters (e.g., via email, Facebook Messenger, Skype). This overlap of informants’ digital and physical interactions challenges an ethnographer’s ability to...

Violent contexts are not “normal” research settings; they involve abuses, power disparities, and collective histories of violence that researchers should be alert to. Researchers unreflexive about these risk causing harm in the form of objectifying people and context, normalizing violence, or silencing voices. Political reflexivity can equip resear...

Starting with the case of Israel, this essay explores how military-innovation ecosystems facilitate the development, testing and sale of new weapons and military tech, globalizing violence and global complicity with violence. While we tend to look at violence from political, legal or cultural perspectives, this essay implicates entrepreneurial and...

The debris from destroyed and damaged buildings is a material representation of the unprecedented human, infrastructural, and environmental devastation resulting from the bombardment of Gaza. Removing, transporting, and processing the immense quantity of building debris will have a significant impact on Gaza’s physical infrastructure and environmen...

COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our cris...

Provision of household energy is a major global challenge, and realizing the health, environmental, convenience and economic benefits that can come from improved energy services requires altering a complex situation. We describe a Conceptual Framework to guide stakeholders and consumers of information in evaluating performance of interventions. Pro...

Provision of household energy is a major global challenge, and realizing the health, environmental, convenience and economic benefits that can come from improved energy services requires altering a complex situation. We describe a Conceptual Framework to guide stakeholders and consumers of information in evaluating performance of interventions. Pro...

Clean cookstove interventions largely fail to achieve their stated aims. In our view, the underlying flaw of many cooking interventions is a systemic lack of attention to users’ rank ordering of product features and contexts of use during the product design process. Drawing on examples of cookstove and product design, together with our experience i...

This is the text of our sub-theme for the 2019 EGOS colloquium in Edinburgh. We encourage submissions that address the core themes and questions of the call, broadly defined. For submission information follow: https://www.egosnet.org/

Improved cookstoves are widely promoted as a health and climate improving technology, yet there remains a wide gap between their reputed benefits and the inconclusive outcomes of most interventions. An increasing number of scientists suggest that the popular lab protocols used to test, rate and model the benefits of improved cookstoves are at least...

This Campbell systematic review assesses the effects of business support services in low‐ and middle‐income countries on firm performance and economic development. The review summarizes findings from 40 studies. Included studies examine interventions targeted at SMEs (two to 250 employees) involving tax simplification, exports and access to externa...

The field of humanitarian technology is rife with techno-saviorism—the promotion of technology as a panacea and not simply a technique of intervention. Humanitarian technology advocates, designers, and promoters uphold technological objects and interventions as having an incredible agency to solve complex social and environmental problems. A preval...

We examine how an unassuming domestic technology—the fuel-efficient stove—came to be construed as an effective tool for reducing sexual violence globally. Highlighting the process of problematization, the linking of problems with actionable solutions, we show how US-based humanitarian advocacy organizations drew upon spatial, gender, perpetrator, r...

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague will use the 2013 Presidency of the G8 to draw attention to the pervasive problem of sexual violence in global conflict zones. On 25 March, he announced a plan to provide £180m in new funding to support health services in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as increased efforts to bring perpetrators to justic...

Samer Abdelnour is a PhD candidate in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. Using organisational and entrepreneurial theories, his research explores NGOs and humanitarian response, community and collective enterprise, and the reintegration of former combatants in Sudan.

In response to increasing attacks on displaced women and girls when collecting fuelwood, advocacy and development organisations began to promote fuel-efficient stoves (FES) as a means to reduce the need for fuel and hence the risk of rape. Although it became clear that the promotion of stoves did little to reduce GBV, the language of sexual violenc...

The blacksmiths of El-Fashir are among the most socially excluded castes in Darfur. Only a few generations ago they were still congregating at the outskirts of towns and villages, practicing their trade in an isolated, subsistence manner. In addition to existing on Darfur's marginalized social periphery, the blacksmiths faced the added vulnerabilit...

This paper explores the development of market roles and transactions in fuel-efficient stoves in Darfur from 1997 to 2008 as a grounded example of how subsistence markets are socially constructed in post-conflict settings. Using a combination of archival texts, interviews, and real-time discourses by protagonists, this study explains the who, what,...

This study extends the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries by offering a two-stage explanation for the paradoxical observation that enterprise activities often flourish under extreme adversity. Our findings complement the base-of-pyramid and peace-through-commerce attention to the growing role of business in international develop...

This study is a component of a larger project, titled 'Conflict Transformation: Promoting Sustainable Livelihoods and Grassroots Enterprise Development in Darfur and Southern Sudan', which aims to foster self-reliant sustainable livelihoods in post-war Sudan. The project and study are a collaborative partnership between Ahfad University for Women (...

Overview Politically-motivated aid for the occupied Palestinian territories has ostensibly promoted "development" and "reconstruction" while indirectly supporting Israel's policies of occupation and Palestinian de-development. The result: a steady increase in Palestinian poverty rates, ongoing Israeli expropriation of Palestinian lands and resource...