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The Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986, requires all private sector employers in Australia with more than 100 employees to report annually on programmes they have developed to improve women′s employment opportunities. A criterion sampling approach was used to identify organizations whose public reports to the Affirmative Action Agency in 1992, contained at least some evidence of affirmative action programme development. There were 288 organizations identified in this way. The employment profiles of these 288 organizations for the period 1991‐1993 are compared with a random sample of another 288 organizations reporting to the agency over the same period. There are no clear conclusions which can be drawn from the employment profiles. What does emerge from the analysis is that simple quantitative measures of the effects of affirmative action are clearly inadequate to capture women′s employment experiences.

The overarching aim of this chapter is to explore the existing status of mentoring in accounting firms in India and Malaysia, to understand whether or not mentoring is gendered in these country contexts, and to investigate the impact of the size of the firm and country context on mentoring. The mentoring framework is used as a theoretical lens to understand the orientation of principals and partners towards the existing and future mentoring support and activities of micro-sized, small-sized, medium-sized, and family-owned accounting firms operating in both India and Malaysia. Data obtained from 40 in-depth interviews (n = 20 in India and n = 20 in Malaysia) are analyzed using qualitative data analysis software NVivo12. The findings obtained from the study indicate that mentoring support exists informally in accounting firms, mentoring support offered and mentoring activities undertaken are gendered, and the nature, extent and type of mentoring offered in accounting firms varies according to the size of the firm in both countries. The chapter presents important practical, theoretical and methodological implications of the study for avoiding gendered mentoring practices in accounting firms.

Popular representations of the workplace have tended to construct women as unsuited to management and leadership roles. In their reflective capacity these popular fictional texts illustrate the workplace. In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of “reality”, the texts offer an important insight into women’s and men’s understandings and expectations of their workplace relationships. In this article we reflect on how popular films, plays and television shows can make visible some manifestations of the kinds of resistance women continue to experience in non‐traditional domains such as management. While these kinds of texts have not been central to the analysis of workplace relations within the management literature, we argue that as social documents they have much to contribute to an understanding of the limited advancement of women.

This paper aims to examine how directors operationalise Australian corporate governance guidelines to follow their self-regulatory responsibilities.

This study consists of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 41 directors of ASX200 companies.

This study sheds light on how directors behave when grappling with the challenges they face as they work within a non-mandatory governance code. It adds to the literature by finding that while most of the good practice guidelines detailed by the ASXCG are well understood and enacted, in practice directors focus on ensuring strong relationships, minimising risk and managing the tensions they face in responsibly managing remuneration.

This study highlights the three R’s and the workings of the code, it also reveals the dynamics of managing uncertainty at the board level. At the implementation level, these insights will help board members to reflect on where attention is focused within guiding principles.

This study contributes to corporate governance studies by filling the gap between what should happen – as per governance guidelines – and what does happen in practice in top level Australian corporations. In making visible what exercises directors most as they operationalise their responsibilities in Australia, a country with a non-mandatory “if not, why not” governance code, the authors demonstrate how self-regulation plays out.

The rapid expansion in part‐time employment in Australia over the past two decades has largely been driven by organisations’ desire to achieve numerical and functional flexibility (the business case for flexibility) rather than a desire to assist employees balance work and family responsibilities (the equal opportunities case for flexibility). Argues that the differences between the business and equal opportunities discourses surrounding flexibility result in significant problems for both employees and organisations – problems that limit the growth of the individual and the organisation. For part‐time employment to be an effective organisational strategy, it is critical that the human resource management (HRM) role actively negotiate between the different needs of employers and employees. This will entail making both parties’ needs explicit, acknowledging the differences between their needs and directing efforts towards constructing outcomes that are mutually satisfying.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how board recruitment processes have been impacted by the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) governance changes requiring listed boards to report annually on their gender diversity policy and profile.

Employing a social constructivist approach, the research analyses interviews conducted with matched samples of board directors and stakeholders in 2010 and 2017 about board recruitment in ASX50 companies.

The introduction of ASX guidelines requiring gender reporting disrupted traditional board appointment processes. Women's gender capital gained currency, adding an additional dimension to the high levels of human and social capital seen as desirable for board appointments. The politics of women's presence is bringing about changes to the discourse and practice about who should/can be a director. The authors identify highly strategic ways in which women's gender capital has been used to agitate for more women to be appointed to boards.

While sample sizes are small, data within the themes cohered meaningfully across the time periods, making visible how women's presence in the board room has been reframed. Future research could consider what this may mean for board dynamics and how enduring are these changes.

This study highlights the forms that human and social capital take in board appointments, which can be instructive for potential directors, and how these intersect with gender capital. The insights from the study are relevant to board recruitment committees seeking to reflect their commitment to a more gender equitable environment.

There has been a recalibration of men's and women's gender capital in board appointments, and there is now a currency in femaleness disrupting the historical privilege afforded “maleness”.

The gendered nature of organizations has now been well established by feminist researchers. In particular, the most senior levels of management have been identified as sites of hegemonic masculinity; the causes of which are complex, socially reproduced inter‐relationships that are highly resistant to change. While it has been argued that these structures will become less problematic as more women enter the paid workforce and more move into senior management, in this paper this argument is challenged. Recent research by the authors concerning women in the most senior ranks of management in the private sector in Australia suggests that, while the majority of these women identify the need for change, they have not used their role in senior management as a means of challenging gendered structures. The implications of the findings are that it is invalid to assume that change will come about through increasing numbers of women in management. Other means of challenging gendered organizational structures must be implemented, if quantifiable change is to come about.

This paper aims to demonstrate how close analysis of cultural narratives can be employed as effective pedagogical tools in the explication and critique of specific workplace issues relevant to health management education.

Two narratives have been selected to illustrate this point: the apparently “fictional” UK-based medical television drama series Bodies (2005-2006) and the apparently “factual” report of an Australian state government public inquiry into acute health care, the Garling Report.

Through their demonstration of how analyses of selected segments of these texts can be used in health management education, the authors conclude that the comparative analyses of ostensibly “fictional” and “factual” narratives allow for analysis and critique of the inadequacies of new public management (NPM) applied to the health care industry, leading to a greater understanding of wider ideological effects on public perceptions.

The authors argue that these understandings enliven students' learning experiences, and that such comparative analyses should be applied more widely across health management education to develop students' critical skills and openness to exploring alternative models.

Comparative analysis of cultural texts is novel in health care education, and allows for the interrogation of ideology and its effects.

Representations of female perpetrators of political violence contribute to society's thinking about women, gender, violence and agency. Analysis of this discourse is vital to understand its influence on society's knowledge of women and violence. The study investigates how gendered narratives are used to frame female ex-combatants in Nationalist and Unionist newspapers in the post-conflict society of Northern Ireland. The media is a central agent in the construction of knowledge; and this is significant for women who have perpetrated crimes or (political) violence. The existing research found that violent women are narrated and interpreted through gendered discursive frameworks to dismiss or make sense of their violence. However, in the Northern Irish case, although the women are constructed within gendered frames, this does not deny their agency in past political violence.

Although affirmative action is often referred to as though it was an homogeneous entity, the reality is that affirmative action policies can take many different forms. To date, the variety of affirmative action policies that have been implemented in Australia has not been well‐documented. In this paper, a framework is developed to describe the variety of affirmative action policies being implemented in Australia in the 1990s. The most frequently reported policies by Australian organisations concern reviewing employment policies for discriminatory practices. The next most commonly reported policies relate to companies’ efforts to assist employees to balance the competing roles of work and family. Policies that seek to challenge traditional patterns of employment, and policies that seek to “fix” women are less commonly reported by organisations. The breaking down of affirmative action into various types of policies provides scope for more fully exploring the question of the effectiveness of affirmative action policies.