African Empirical Settings

NetprosAfrica Online Webinar:

27th October 2026 1pm BST

Speakers

Ralph Hamann, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Laurent Beduneau-Wang, African Business School.

Majda Soumane, African Business School.

Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham

Online

Teams link will be shared with registered participants.

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Join us for webinar by Network for Practice and Process Management Studies Drawing on African Empirical Settings (www.netprosafrica.orgLink opens in a new window ) with Laurent Beduneau-Wang and Majda Soumane from Africa Business School in Morocco. They work towards the Business History Research Programme at Africa Business School.

Please read the paperLink opens in a new window in advance and share your questions and comments! We are looking to enable sophisticated understandings, to stimulate dialogue, to allow for African points of view to be articulated and to shape future directions for research. Therefore, we will not be following traditional paper presentation formats and reading the article in advance is essential.

Ralph Hamann (University of Cape Town, South Africa) will introduce sustainable resource management practices in Africa as an area of study and Ostrom’s theory as a challenge to the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Laurent Beduneau-Wang and Majda Soumane (Africa Business School, Morocco) will reflect on their work on historic water management practices in Berber communities in Southern Morocco. Stephanie Decker (University of Birmingham, UK) will discuss the paper from the point of view of business history and its methods.

The session is intended to last 1 hour and 30 minutes with timings as follows:

20 min- Introduction: sustainable resource management practices in Africa (Ralph Hamann)

20 min- Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact: Organizations, Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya (Anna Kim)

20 min- Discussant questions

20 min- Open discussion

10 min- Reflection

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Beduneau-Wang, L., & Soumane, M. (2026). The quest to explore ancestral Berber management practices: Inventing sources and reimagining business history. Business History, 68(4), 885–912.

Abstract:

While archives are common in developed countries, it is generally recognised that they are lacking in developing countries. To cope with the challenges faced by a 500-year-old water irrigation system in a semi-arid region in the south of Morocco, we demonstrate that the absence of archives invites methodological exploration, making the invention of new sources, especially visuals, inevitable. They serve as mnemonic devices for keeping track of community water management infrastructures. Documenting actors’ reconstruction of organisational memory reveals new memory categories: communal, community-based, common, and historicised memory. Inspired by the eight principles of Ostrom’s theory on the commons, our case study also shows that the governance of commons cannot last beyond one generation without a process of organisational re-membering. Organisational re-membering, as the ninth principle of the commons theory, induces memory as well as a renewed community membership.