Cookstove advocates must place gender and violence at the centre of research designs

LSE alumnus Samer Abdelnour examines the false causality in the gender-based violence and improved cook stoves agenda

War, Civil Unrest, Failed States, and Other Extreme Threats to Marketing Systems

Well-functioning markets and marketing systems are intended to enhance and to sustain the survivability and security of societies and the people who comprise them (e.g., Fisk 1967; Layton 2007; McMillen 2002; Shultz 2007; Wilkie and Moore 1999; World Bank 2014). For myriad reasons – natural or human-induced cataclysms and resource scarcity to list a few examples – marketing systems sometimes are disrupted or fracture (e.g., Shultz 1997; in press). This can have profound and often horrific effects on individuals, families, communities, countries, regions, and occasionally – at least twice in the form of two World Wars – global upheaval. The costs to human well-being are almost unfathomable and difficult to calculate (e.g., UNDP 2015, UNHCR 2015). By some accounts, various forms of violence cost $9.46 trillion per year, about 11% of Gross World Product (Institute for Economics and Peace 2014); the Iraq debacle alone has been estimated to cost trillions of dollars, when calculating the systemic ripple-effects, over time (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008; Three Trillion Dollar War 2015). This special session assembles scholars conducting research in countries and regions suffering the effects of devastation or pronounced disruption from war, civil unrest, and other forms of persistent or acute violence, poor governance, natural disasters, extreme environmental conditions, or combinations of all or some of these existential and societal threats. Perhaps, through greater discussion and understanding, engagement and provisioning technologies, we macromarketers can be catalysts to better-functioning and safer marketing systems, to the benefit of the local and global stakeholders of them

Researching violent contexts:A call for political reflexivity

Violent contexts are not “normal” research settings; they involve abuses, power disparities, and collective histories of violence that researchers should be alert to. Being unreflexive to these risks can cause harm in the form of objectifying people and context, normalizing violence, or silencing voices. Political reflexivity can equip researchers to better identify, understand and mitigate these harms, and where possible, challenge structures that do the marginalizing. We articulate political reflexivity through feminist standpoint theory, which asks researchers to critically examine their positionality and privilege in relation to the geopolitics of the research setting, epistemic privilege of marginalized participants, and political implications of their work. Practicing political reflexivity can help researchers situate their work along a “decoloniality continuum,” which includes research complicit with the maintenance of violence, a hybridity approach that aims to understand and challenge the (colonial) underpinnings of violence by centering marginalized knowledge, and research that seeks reparation or liberation, meaning redress and radical equality for marginalized peoples, ideas and histories. We conclude with a call for researchers to identify methods and paths to strengthen our understanding of political reflexivity, and to support efforts to decolonize knowledge

Actorhood and institutions: three studies of social intervention in the Sudan

This thesis consists of three studies of social intervention in Sudan. The first offers a critique of institutional voids, a concept used to describe contexts lacking neoliberal market institutions, intermediaries, and practices.Notions of voids underpin much liberal peace thinking and justify postwar interventions that seek to build institutions to support peace and recovery. Similarly, the concept of voids is increasingly used in management and organization studies to describe emerging market and poverty contexts.The question 'What institutional arrangements exist in institutional voids?' motivates an in-depth examination of a state-led intervention to remobilize thousands of fighters through agricultural cooperatives in the Blue Nile. The analysis suggests settings conceptualized as 'voids'are in fact rich in state institutions, bureaucracy, and disinterested agency.' The second study employs the institutional theory notion of actorhood—templates of social identities, roles, and practices—in a thematic analysis of a postwar intervention to reintegrate thousands of fighters using agricultural cooperatives in the Blue Nile. The analysis points to a postwar professions narrative, where formerly warring actors adopt new roles as agents of development and former combatants are reclassified as beneficiaries. Postwar intervention resources, such as tractors, finance, and the cooperative enterprise model are theorized to be institutional anchors, or techniques for organizing specific practices. Findings also point to a postwar intervention paradox: though institutional anchors may be effective for promoting new social practices, they risk reproducing institutional inequalities in intervention settings. The third study critically deconstructs how a simple domestic technology—fuel-efficient stoves—came to be promoted a global solution to sexual violence in conflict zones. Using the concept of problematization—the process linking problems with solutions—as an analytic tool in combination with a discourse analysis of humanitarian advocacy documents. The analysis reveals a set of racial, spatial, gendered, and interventionist frames that enable stoves to emerge a viable intervention to reduce sexual attacks against displaced women and girls, first in Darfur then globally. This study postulates a significant role for advocacy and discourse-infused technology in the emergence of humanitarian 'solutions' and the unintended consequences for beneficiaries

Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape-Stove Panacea 1

We examine how an unassuming domestic technology-the fuelefficient 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, racial, and interventionist representations to advance the notion that "stoves reduce rape" in Darfur. Though their effectiveness in Darfur remains questionable, efficient stoves were consequently adopted as a universal technical panacea for sexual violence in any conflict or refugee camp context. By examining the emergence and global diffusion of the rape-stove problematization, our study documents an important example of the technologizing of humanitarian space. We postulate fuel-efficient stoves to be a technology of Othering able to simplify, combine, decontextualize, and transform problematizations from their originating contexts elsewhere. When humanitarian advocates construe immensely complex crises as "manageable problems," the promotion of simple technical panaceas may inadvertently increase the burden of poverty for user-beneficiaries and silence the voices of those they claim to champion and serve. Material things have magic powers only in the contexts of the narratives in which they are embedded. (Harr e 2002:25

Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape-Stove Panacea 1

We examine how an unassuming domestic technology-the fuelefficient 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, racial, and interventionist representations to advance the notion that "stoves reduce rape" in Darfur. Though their effectiveness in Darfur remains questionable, efficient stoves were consequently adopted as a universal technical panacea for sexual violence in any conflict or refugee camp context. By examining the emergence and global diffusion of the rape-stove problematization, our study documents an important example of the technologizing of humanitarian space. We postulate fuel-efficient stoves to be a technology of Othering able to simplify, combine, decontextualize, and transform problematizations from their originating contexts elsewhere. When humanitarian advocates construe immensely complex crises as "manageable problems," the promotion of simple technical panaceas may inadvertently increase the burden of poverty for user-beneficiaries and silence the voices of those they claim to champion and serve. Material things have magic powers only in the contexts of the narratives in which they are embedded. (Harr e 2002:25

A conceptual framework for evaluating cooking systems

PUBLISHED 7 March 2022Tami C Bond, Christian L, Orange, Paul R Medwell, George Sizoomu, Samer Abdelnour, Verena Brinkmann, Philip Lloyd and Crispin Pemberton-Pigot

Agency and institutions in organization studies

textabstractAgency 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 theory. We then analyse the relationship of actors and institutions through four lenses – the wilful actor, collective intentionality, patchwork institutions and modular individuals. Our analysis leads us to dissociate agency from individuals and view it as a capacity or quality that stems from resources, rights and obligations tied to the roles and social positions actors occupy. Roles and social positions are institutionally engineered. It is social actors qua occupants of roles and positions (not individuals) that enter the social ‘stage’ and exercise agency