Annual reports are crucial for corporate accountability, and for firms to obtain their social licence to operate. Although research has identified the internal company drivers of annual reporting, we know less about the way Australian annual reports developed as a long-term, collective practice. Through a historical, cross-sectional content analysis, this article examines the impact of external institutional pressures on the annual reports of large Australian corporations. Interpreting the results with new institutional theory (NIT), I find that coercive pressure from company regulations and societal expectations, and normative pressures from the accounting profession, have improved standards of corporate accountability. Simultaneously, normative pressures encouraged companies to use annual reports for corporate public relations. This has contributed to annual reports that are homogenous in content but with conflicting audiences and objectives. The analysis highlights the institutionalisation and historical path dependencies of annual reports and contextualises current concerns over disclosure quality and transparency.

This special issue examines women and Australian business history. Contributions explore women’s entrepreneurship in small urban businesses, side hustles, agriculture, and family companies. Articles highlight the importance of women’s businesses, as a financial necessity for women, their families, and their communities. Authors examine the barriers for women in business, including legislation, licensing, societal expectations, and discrimination. Articles also explore women’s intersections with other demographic characteristics, with access to enterprise mediated by class and the rural-urban divide. Finally, contributions examine the way traditional archives have obscured histories of businesswomen, and the opportunities offered by feminist historical methodologies for studying business history.

This article examines gendered succession of Australia’s large family companies between 1910 and 2018. It finds that female family members were not prepared to succeed, and their role in family companies was restricted by expectations of gender and class, and ideals of male lineage. As such, women were expected to perform social, domestic and philanthropic labour in service of the company, but were consistently overlooked for succession. This highlights the way family companies conferred both wealth and inequality to women, as well as the intersection between gendered succession decisions and the structures of Australian society.

Improving the representation of women in corporate leadership is a key postfeminist project. Postfeminism—or the integration of women’s empowerment and neoliberalism in the decades following the Women’s Movement—has shaped the experience of Australian women in corporate leadership roles since the 1990s. As such, while efforts to improve the number of women in leadership have yielded admirable progress, achieving sustainable improvements in corporate diversity requires attending to collective postfeminist scripts. In order to better understand the global and local features of Australian postfeminism, this article analyses “Corporate Woman,” a mainstream newspaper column published regularly by the Australian Financial Review between 1988 and 1998. It finds that similar political and economic systems, and feminist histories, encouraged Australian postfeminism to adopt many core transnational tenets. At the same time, aspects of Australia’s national history and identity, including egalitarianism, emphasis on nuclear families, and context of major economic change, contributed to localism in postfeminism’s expression. This expands our understanding of postfeminism, and can help empower corporate women by uncovering the collective cognitive maps that have guided policy interventions, and women’s lived experiences in corporate leadership roles.

The study of corporate elites is crucial for understanding power in society. This article uses prosopography to examine the gender, race, class and social composition of Australia’s top interlocked directors between 1910 and 2018. Applying institutional theory, it analyses the way the consolidation of managerial capitalism influenced the board appointment procedures of large Australian companies. Institutional isomorphisms have increased both the dominance of professionals in company leadership, and the professional standards of board members, meaning those with the necessary education, accreditation, experience and time to dedicate to company directorships came from an increasingly narrow set of life histories. At the same time, the ‘destructuration’ of the elite’s gender norms has increased the appointment of women in recent decades. This highlights the way institutional pressures can simultaneously encourage and stagnate change, and the importance of considering business elites – and the appointment procedures of their companies – holistically.

How have social movements influenced the diversity of Australian corporate leadership? Although board diversity is crucial for corporate governance, the research in this topic is bifurcated between studies examining interlocking directorates and the presence of boardroom gender diversity. In this study, we use a novel dataset and method to understand board diversity. We integrate the analysis of social diversity (structural connections) and demographic diversity among ASX50 boards in 2019 and 2023. Social network analysis (SNA) reveals a closely connected corporate community, with prosopography data identifying a narrow range of “acceptable” demographic characteristics. We extend institutional theory by examining the role of global social movements (GSMs) for the destructuration of board appointment practices and the resulting uneven progress on equality. Activism from the global feminist movement has applied multi-dimensional coercive and normative pressures to develop a “pipeline” and “catalyst” for women’s board appointments. Simultaneously, the absence of targeted action on other diversities and the intensification of directors’ professional requirements have institutionalized the group’s social and demographic profile. These findings are relevant to policymakers and corporations, highlighting the role of social movements for disrupting the status quo and the multidimensional institutional pressures needed to destructure entrenched appointment practices.

Diversity of company leadership is an important governance issue for corporations globally, yet the uneven treatment of diversity priorities remains a major challenge. We explore the extent and change over time of both gender and ethnic diversity in leadership and disclosure for Australia’s largest firms from 2005 to 2021. Using institutional theory, we compare the isomorphisms driving change, and examine the extent to which there is rhetorical decoupling between diversity disclosure and practice. Our analysis reveals a significant improvement in gender diversity over time but very little progress in the ethnic diversity of corporate leaders. We find a connection between diversity reporting and the appointment of female corporate leaders. However, there is a disconnection between public commitment to diversity and the appointment of non-white corporate leaders. A lack of regulation for diversity reporting contributes to this imbalance with different outcomes for gender and ethnic diversity as the result of different institutional isomorphisms. Our findings can inform policymakers and corporations, highlighting the importance of a range of institutional pressures that encourage the disclosure and practice of ethnic diversity in corporate leadership. 

The first systematic, longitudinal analysis of the antecedents of interlocking directorates in Australia. Argues that the network has been characterized by a relatively consistent long-run level of connection but substantial variation in the causes of interlocks. Interlocks have responded to the pragmatics of the board member occupation, with corporate governance regulations, the progress of the professions, banking and prudential practices, and the form of large organizations encouraging ties that were built on professional expertise and geographic proximity.

The 1980s were an outrageous time in Australia’s business history. This paper re-examines this era of misconduct, assessing the role of interlocking directorates for corporate governance of diversified business groups. Professional interlocked executives—those with professional training, executive status and mobility between member firms—enabled the takeover culture of the time, and allowed managers to ignore promised strategic benefits and redirect associated firms towards speculative share ownership. These results demonstrate the importance of board independence for corporate governance, and the way that expertise has been weaponised within managerial capitalism to encourage trust in risky and exploitative corporate structures.

Policy-oriented book chapter on what we can learn from the history of women in corporate leadership. History has important lessons for those who seek to make sustainable, intersectional improvements in diversity in leadership. The experiences of female board members in the past suggest we need to build pathways for improving access and diversity. Specifically, in order to achieve real reform we need to address blockages in the ‘pipeline’ to the boardroom (that is, structural career barriers) and shore up the ‘catalysts’ (or external and regulatory pressures) that force change on staid institutions. 

This article examines Australian women in corporate leadership since 1910, revealing the role of networks and personal characteristics for access to positions of corporate influence. From 1910 to 1964, corporate women were cast as the ‘good wife’, with marriage and kinship affording some the ability to influence the networks of corporate men, and the fortunes of the companies they controlled. Since the 1980s, the number of women directors has grown substantially, and women have come to occupy central positions in director network. Efforts by government, regulators and professional associations have improved the number of women in leadership, their importance in the community, and their ability to integrate with core male board members. These insights highlight the multi-dimensional progress of Australian female board members, and the effectiveness of both external pressure and internal advocacy for improving corporate diversity.

Investigates how quotidian interactions built trust and routines among a group of major firms in the Australian wool trade—a sector that required regular interaction to be effective. Deploying extensive archives of their meetings, we use social network analysis to examine interactions among the key group of firms and individuals. Through content analysis we infer the behavior and atmosphere of meetings. Finally, an evaluation of meeting agendas and outcomes demonstrates cooperation and a shared commitment to improving the operation of the wool trade in the 1920s.

Examines the network of board members of large Australian corporations in the 1910s. Social network analysis is used to identify the structure of the network, and prosopography is used to understand the characteristics of the group and the possible pathways through which interlocking directorates developed. The evidence reveals a heavily interlocked business sector in Australia in the 1910s. Multiple directorships were the result of professional skills, prior business experience, kinship, marriage, class, gender and empire.