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Like many other Western Countries, Australia's post‐war financial system was tightly controlled by government regulation. In a few short years, however, following a government appointed inquiry, most of the regulations have been swept away, making it possible, for example, for life assurance companies to enter the banking industry. At the same time, changes in official regulation of life assurance have made it easier for banks to retaliate by entering the life assurance business. The background to these developments are outlined and some of their effects on both banks and life offices are discussed.

Like other developed countries Australia has seen intensifying competition between financial institutions as a result of the combined pressures of economic and social change, deregulation of financial systems and the introduction of new technology. Increased competition has led to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between institutions, changes in market structures and a proliferation of new services and products. A new awareness of the role and importance of marketing in the services as something more than advertising and selling has arisen. The Final Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Australian Financial System (the Campbell Committee) in 1981 recommended almost total deregulation. Any necessary government intervention in the system should be by market methods, not direct controls. The effect has been most noticeable on banks and life assurance. The consumer will benefit from deregulation with a wider range of choice, but it may bring about job losses through new technology and poorer standards of service may arise. Its economic effects are feared. Eventually the need for legislation may arise again.

Diversity and inclusion initiatives are normally centred on legally protected traits such as race and gender. As the legal framework expands to ensure that underrepresented workers are protected, there exists a subset of the workforce who have diversity characteristics that are legally unprotected. For example, individuals who have visible tattoos can face employment discrimination when they are looking for work or looking to progress their careers. To add to the challenge, the perception of stigma is fluid and expectations related to the appearance of employees are determined by managers' perceptions of consumers' preferences. Drawing theoretically from self-categorisation theory and information processing theory, we discuss how the creation of a marketing and brand proposition framework can help to build an organisational identity that can benefit consumers and the organisation simultaneously. We also discuss the practical implications and strategies that organisations can consider to reduce such workplace discrimination.

In the long term, all organisations may be temporary. Some, however, are more temporary than others. Temporary organisations are designed not so much with an eye on enduring as on accomplishing a specific task. In this chapter, the authors explore paradoxes, understood as persistent mutually defining oppositions that occur at the intersection of ‘the temporary’ and ‘the enduring’. To do so, the authors discuss the concept of memory, which we use to explore the process of preserving and reproducing memories of people and events as a bridge between the temporalities of organising that are past and were never intended to endure, and those that are ongoing. By reconstructing one case of the European Capital of Culture initiative, the authors discuss memory as critical to temporary organisations in the sense that temporary organisations always have a memory that affords continuity: hence are enduring. The authors argue that there is endurance in the temporary and temporariness in endurance: expressing the paradoxical essence of organising.

Professionals often dislike dirty work, yet they accommodate or even embrace it in everyday practice. This chapter problematizes Andrew Abbott’s professional purity thesis by examining five major forms of impurities in professional work, namely impurity in expertise, impurity in jurisdictions, impurity in clients, impurity in organizations, and impurity in politics. These impurities complicate the relationship between purity and status as some impurities may enhance professional status while others may jeopardize it, especially when the social origins of professionals are rapidly diversifying and professional work is increasingly intertwined with the logics of market and bureaucracy. Taking impurities seriously can help the sociology of professions move beyond the idealistic image of an independent, disinterested professional detached from human emotions, turf battles, client influence, and organizational or political forces and towards a more pragmatic understanding of professional work, expertise, ethics and the nature of professionalism.