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.

Provides a historical analysis of an urban services district through its examination of the Melbourne wool trade precinct in the 1920s. It is a study of both a local and global community whose social and spatial interaction facilitated large-scale trade of a complex commodity that has rarely been examined. Archival and geographic information systems (GIS) evidence reveals the “buzz” of the Melbourne precinct, created by local social and professional connections among wool brokers and buyers. “Pipelines” to wool growing and textile regions were developed through overseas branches of firms, with global knowledge exchanged through correspondence, telegraph, and migration. These features shaped the progress of the trade, facilitating improvements in its infrastructure and in the ability of Melbourne’s wool brokers and buyers to fulfill their role as intermediaries in the global supply chain for this complex commodity.

Informal spaces encourage the meeting of minds and the sharing of ideas. They serve as an important counterpoint to the formal, silo-like structures of the modern organisation, encouraging social bonds and discussion across departmental lines. We address the role of one such institution – the university tea room – in Australia in the post-WWII decades. Drawing on a series of oral history interviews with economic historians, we examine the nature of the tea room space, demonstrate its effects on research within universities, and analyse the causes and implications of its decline in recent decades.

Examines the nature and progress of interdisciplinary research fields. It argues that disciplinary and interdisciplinary research are complementary and that communicating infrastructures foster communication and integration between disciplines and the interdisciplinary research field to generate innovative knowledge. We apply this to the experience of economic history in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century to demonstrate the life cycle of a semi-permanent interdisciplinary research field.

Visualises and analyses the network of scholars living and working in Vienna in the 1920s. By linking the structure of social relationships to differences in ideas between individuals and groups, argues that the nature of this intellectual community meant that scholars could easily move between different disciplines and that certain individuals assisted this process by acting as intermediaries between domains of knowledge.