Search results

This paper aims to explore how corporate Australia engages in reconciliation through recognizing and providing pathways for Indigenous Australians' corporate leadership aspirations.

The research design is informed by the prior literature on pathways by minority groups to corporate leadership through the theoretical lens of transformational leadership. The investigation is conducted using textual analysis of reconciliation action plans (RAPs), a contemporary and voluntary practice adopted by Australian listed companies to disclose their commitment to national reconciliation. RAPs are publicly available from the official websites of listed companies.

The analysis of contemporary RAPs highlights organizational initiatives to support Indigenous Australians related to corporate and community leadership. Since the authors’ focus is the former, corporate leadership initiatives are further analyzed. Two initiatives for Indigenous Australians to pursue corporate leadership positions are emerging future leaders' programs and mentoring programs. This is the extent to which the authors observe Australian firms' transformational leadership. While some firms have implemented these initiatives with specific targets, other firms do not have specific initiatives or targets. The paper also conducts longitudinal analysis into the transformational leaders' past RAPs and triangulates to other evidence of reconciliation commitment such as the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

This paper contributes new insights to the research area of board cultural diversity, specifically to the limited literature on Indigenous reconciliation. It provides insights into firms and policymakers to address the ongoing issue of the underrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in corporate leadership. The sample of firms comprises Australian listed firms that have adopted higher-order RAPs, which restricts the generalizability of the findings to other sectors.

This paper explores the under researched phenomenon of Indigenous people's pathways to corporate leadership. The research design is informed by transformational leadership theory through considering institutional actions for reconciliation. This research provides evidence of the extent to which corporate Australia has taken action on the issue of the under-representation of Australian Indigenous people in corporate leadership.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

This chapter outlines the successful community engagement process used by the authors for the Kinship Online project in the context of Indigenous methodological, epistemological, and ethical considerations. It juxtaposes Indigenous and western ways of teaching and research, exploring in greater detail the differences between them. The following chapter builds on and extends Riley, Howard-Wagner, Mooney & Kutay (2013, in press) to delve deeply into the importance of embedding Aboriginal cultural knowledge in curriculum at the university level.

The chapter gives an account of an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLTC) grant to develop Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching and Sharing Resources (the Kinship Online Project). The project is built on an existing face-to-face interactive presentation based on Australian Aboriginal Kinship systems created by Lynette Riley, which is being re-developed as an online cultural education workshop.

A key consideration of the researchers has been Aboriginal community engagement in relation to the design and development of the project. The chapter delves deeply into the importance of embedding Aboriginal cultural knowledge into curriculum at the university level. In doing so, the chapter sets out an Aboriginal community engagement model compared with a western research model which the authors hope will be useful to other researchers who wish to engage in research with Aboriginal people and/or communities.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case for the importance of mentoring programs in addressing the disadvantage of minority groups in the workforce. Also, to report on a workplace mentoring program conducted for indigenous Australians at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Interviews with program participants.

Indigenous Australians are marginalised in the Australian workforce. Governments have developed many special labour market programs for indigenous Australians, the majority of which are based on public sector employment. There is potential for more extensive private sector participation in developing workplace programs to support indigenous Australians. Workplace mentoring, especially through indigenous mentors, is important in assisting indigenous employees sustain employment and enhance workforce attachment. The case study demonstrated how culturally appropriate mentoring programs can be successful in attracting, training and placing indigenous Australians into employment.

Confined to a single case study organisation, but the findings are in keeping with North American research on mentoring indigenous workers.

Mentoring has a strong role to play in assisting disadvantaged minorities improve labour market outcomes.

There has been no previous research in the Australian context on mentoring indigenous workers.

This chapter critically analyses the current participation of Indigenous Australian students in higher education and identifies new directions for seeding success and enabling Indigenous students to flourish in higher education contexts.

Statistical reports, government reports and the scholarly literature were analysed to elucidate the nature of participation of Indigenous students in higher education, identify strategies that are succeeding, identify issues that need addressing and explicate potentially potent ways forward.

The findings have important implications for theory, research and practice. The results of this study demonstrate, that while increasing numbers of Indigenous Australian students are accessing higher education, they still are not participating at a rate commensurate with their representation in the Australian population. The findings also suggest new ways to enable Indigenous Australians to not only succeed in higher education, but flourish.

The findings imply that more needs to be done to seed success in increasing the numbers of Indigenous Australian students in higher education to be representative of the population and ensuring participation in higher education enables Indigenous students to succeed and flourish. The findings also imply that there is a dire need for further research to identify key drivers of success.

The study supports the need for increasing the number of Indigenous Australians participating in higher education and enhancing higher education strategies to enable Indigenous students to succeed and flourish.

Enhancing the participation of Indigenous students in higher education internationally can help to contribute to the well-being of individuals, Indigenous communities and nations.

This chapter provides an up to date analysis of the nature of Indigenous Australian participation in higher education and identifies potentially potent new ways forward to seed success that have international implications.

Service marketers are increasingly aware of inequalities triggered by service systems and the need to prioritize practical strategies for reducing inequalities. A priority area for the Australian Government is reducing university education inequities for Indigenous Australians. This paper aims to examine how Indigenous Australian university students build and leverage their capabilities and strengths, harnessing service providers’ efforts towards enhancing participation (and completion) in university education – an essential transformative outcome for reducing inequalities.

A three-stage qualitative research process explored student retention/completion and capability building among a sample of Indigenous Australian university students, typically under-represented in the higher education sector.

Applying a manual thematic analysis, the findings reveal Indigenous students’ value co-creating capabilities (summarized in three dimensions) harness multi-actor processes extending beyond the service provider. Five dimensions summarize the service provider’s transformative service activities that strengthen capabilities for Indigenous Australian university students. Networks of place (a structured Indigenous Centre); processes (university systems); and people (social support), including peer-to-peer networks, are important service assemblages.

The authors present implications for supporting Indigenous students in persisting with and completing higher education. More broadly, the authors provide recommendations for service marketers to resolve barriers to service equality and enhance strengths-based approaches to value co-creation.

Underpinned by a strengths-based approach, the authors contribute towards an agenda of sustainable transformative services. Although considerable research reviews the experiences of Indigenous students, little research has taken a transformative service research perspective. Addressing this, the authors propose a conceptual framework linking consumers’ agentic capabilities with transformative service mediator practices.

Traditionally, mainstream cross‐cultural accounting research has applied a societal norms and values measure to the examination of differences in culture. This approach is limited, however, because it effectively disfranchises the culture of minority groups such as indigenous peoples within nations. Our paper provides evidence of cultural differences between indigenous Australian values and the Western capitalist values implicit in the language of accounting and accountability. Utilising an alternative yin/yang framework developed for accounting by Hines, we argue that the core indigenous yin values of sharing, relatedness and kinship obligations inherent in indigenous conceptions of work and land, are incompatible with the yang values of quantification, objectivity, efficiency, productivity, reason and logic imposed by accounting and accountability systems. This conflict of values then brings into question the impact of accounting and accountability systems on the indigenous peoples of Australia whose beliefs, norms and values are organised differently. The need to address such a conflict is critical for all of the world’s indigenous peoples. Perhaps even more so for the Australian indigenous peoples because of the insistence by governments, at both the state and federal levels, that the extreme social and economic disadvantages experienced by the Australian indigenous peoples can be dissipated by the imposition of strict financial accountability measures for all indigenous organisations and representative bodies. We argue that the demonstrated conflict of values is a significant reason for the inability of accounting and accountability systems to deliver such social and economic outcomes. The research findings of non‐indigenous researchers are largely drawn on in this paper. The two authors of this paper are not indigenous people and therefore we are speaking “of” indigenous culture and not “speaking for” them.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

Over recent decades, research institutions have prescribed discrete ethics guidelines for human research with Indigenous people in Australia. Such guidelines respond to concerns about unethical and harmful processes in research, including that they entrench colonial relations and structures. This chapter sets out some of the limitations of these well-intentioned guidelines for the decolonisation of research. Namely, their underlying assumption of Indigenous vulnerability and deficit and, consequently, their function to minimise risk. It argues for a strengths-based approach to researching with and by Indigenous communities that recognises community members’ capacity to know what ethical research looks like and their ability to control research. It suggests that this approach provides genuine outcomes for their communities in ways that meet their communities’ needs. This means that communities must be partners in research who can demand reciprocation for their participation and sharing of their knowledge, time and experiences. This argument is not purely normative but supported by examples of Indigenous research models within our fields of health and criminology that are premised on self-determination.

The oversight of ethical conduct of research is often placed on the university institution in partnership research. How institutions ensure the ethical conduct of research varies and for research being done with Indigenous communities, communities themselves are now conducting their own research ethics reviews. However, this chapter aims to place some onus of responsibility on the researcher themselves, to develop their own moral compass when working with Indigenous communities. (Borrowing from Toombs (2012). Ethical research for indigenous people by indigenous researchers. Aboriginal & Islander Health Worker Journal, 36(1), 24–26.) notion of the moral compass, the authors will discuss their own experiences as Indigenous researchers and how a moral compass is critical even in light of the best research ethics policies.

The authors focus on the Canadian and Australian context and provide examples from their own experiences as Indigenous people, researchers, and research ethics administrators. The focus of this chapter is to highlight some of the unethical research that has been conducted on Indigenous peoples and the policy and community response to that research. The authors explore how to build better relationships through research with Indigenous peoples.

This chapter does not aim to provide a thorough review of literature on research ethics with Indigenous peoples; however, some of this literature is cited. The focus of this chapter is to share the experiences related to policy from the perspective of two Indigenous researchers.