Dr Amal El-Sawad is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The daughter of a British mother and an Iraqi father, she was born in Kuwait, moving back and forth between England and Kuwait throughout her childhood. Before moving into academia, Amal worked in the UK as a HRM practitioner in both the public and private sectors including, for some years, at IBM. Prior to her current appointment in Abu Dhabi she was a Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Loughborough University in the UK. She is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Central to Amal’s research work to date has been the study of career and career contexts. Using qualitative research methods, she has explored the disciplinary functions of career and career contexts as well as the functions served by a variety of discursive features (e.g. contradiction) and forms (e.g. metaphor, cliché, and songs). More recently Amal has published work from a research project exploring the comparative experiences of call centre workers in both India and the UK. She is currently engaged in fieldwork on 3 new research projects: a) an ethnographic study of a multi-cultural Anglo-Arab organization in Kuwait; b) a study of the life histories of bi-cultural individuals(primarily Anglo-Arab and American-Arab); and c) HRM challenges in the Arabian Gulf. Amal’s work has been published in numerous books and journals including Human Relations, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Group and Organization Management.

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