Award-Winning Research: How Businesses Can Address Overlapping Social Challenges

In this Q&A, Ambreen Ben-Shmuel describes her award-winning research, including her research questions, methods, and key findings. She also shares what motivates her to do this important work.

1. What is your research question?

My research asks: how do organizations navigate institutional complexity in deeply divided contexts?

I am interested in organizations that work where multiple social challenges overlap. In particular, I study organizations operating at the intersection of peacebuilding and environmental sustainability, where addressing one challenge often requires addressing the other as well, and where working on either requires confronting entrenched structures of power and division.

To theorize this, I developed the concept of institutional edgework. Drawing on the ecological idea of an “edge”—the space where two ecosystems meet—I use the term institutional edges to describe places where different fields, priorities, and ways of working collide. Institutional edgework refers to the ongoing work organizations do to navigate these tensions.

Rather than resolving competing demands, organizations often have to learn how to work through them. My dissertation explores how this happens across three dimensions: political, professional, and temporal. Together, these dimensions help explain how organizations operate at field intersections while pursuing complex social goals.

2. How did you study that question?

I conducted a multi-year organizational ethnography of an environmental peacebuilding organization that brings together Israeli and Palestinian communities around shared environmental challenges.

Between 2020 and 2025, I attended meetings, project site visits, conferences, training sessions, and informal gatherings. I also conducted interviews and analyzed organizational documents to understand how the organization navigated the challenges of working across multiple fields and communities.

My fieldwork continued, though more sporadically, after the outbreak of war in October 2023. This provided a unique opportunity to observe how the organization adapted its work during a period of acute crisis.

Throughout the project, I moved between observations from the field and existing organizational theories, allowing the empirical realities of the organization to shape the development of my ideas about institutional edgework.

3. What are your most interesting findings?

The research I presented at the PhD Sustainability Academy focuses on the professional dimension of institutional edgework.

One of the most surprising findings was that the organization developed two very different internal cultures around gender, depending on whether staff were working in peacebuilding or environmental management.

Within the peacebuilding side of the organization, gender analysis, relationship-building, and community-based knowledge were widely recognized as legitimate and important forms of professional practice. This reflects decades of institutional development in the peacebuilding field, including initiatives such as the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

The environmental side operated differently. Professional expertise was often defined through technical and scientific knowledge, while community-oriented and socially embedded approaches were less likely to be recognized as core environmental work.

The most striking finding was what I call intelligibility barriers. Staff members who attempted to introduce gender-inclusive practices from the peacebuilding side into environmental programs often found that their work was simply not recognized as legitimate environmental practice. Even when these efforts were led by influential and well-resourced individuals, they frequently struggled to gain traction. When those individuals left the organization, many of the initiatives disappeared.

This finding shifted how I think about organizational change. Individual champions matter, but lasting change also depends on broader field-level norms, leadership support, and professional frameworks that make new approaches visible, legitimate, and necessary.

4. Who outside academia needs to know this? What should they do differently?

These findings are particularly relevant for environmental funders, nonprofit leaders, and professional associations.

Funders play an important role because they help shape organizational priorities. The research suggests that when funding programs include meaningful gender requirements and accountability mechanisms, organizations are more likely to integrate gender considerations into their work. When these expectations are optional, gender initiatives are often treated as secondary priorities.

Leaders of environmental organizations should also recognize that individual staff members cannot drive change on their own. Asking employees to champion more inclusive approaches without changing how projects are evaluated, what expertise is valued, or how success is measured often leaves those efforts vulnerable.

Professional associations have an important role to play as well. The peacebuilding field has increasingly embedded gender analysis into professional standards and training. Environmental organizations and professional bodies could take similar steps by incorporating gender-responsive approaches into certification programs, training curricula, and industry standards.

5. What motivated you to pursue a PhD in this area?

The question that has always motivated me is: how do we organize for peace?

Over time, that question expanded to include another challenge: how do we organize for peace and environmental sustainability at the same time, particularly in places where both issues are urgent and contested, and where working on either requires confronting deep structural division?

Having lived and worked across different national, cultural, and linguistic contexts, and having spent time in and around environmental and peacebuilding organizations, I was repeatedly struck by the gap between these organizations’ aspirations and the realities they faced. Many sought to build cooperation across deep divisions and create meaningful social change, but they also encountered powerful organizational and institutional constraints.

I wanted to better understand that gap using the tools of organizational theory. My research examines the political, professional, and temporal tensions that organizations must navigate when working across multiple fields and communities. These challenges are difficult, but they are also central to some of the most important work being done today. Understanding how organizations navigate them is what motivates my research.