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The purpose of this article is to assess the ability of formal equal employment opportunity (EEO) programmes and workplace agreement making to facilitate work and family balance for women workers in Australia.

This article uses documentary analysis and semi‐structured interviews in six Australian organisations that are required to develop formal EEO programmes.

Formal EEO programmes and agreement making are limited in their ability to promote work and family‐friendly arrangements at the workplace. Informal arrangements and managerial discretion are important in realising work and care balance.

The paper is Australian based, and the case studies were confined to six organisations, which restricts the findings.

Leave and work arrangements need to be required within agreements and EEO programmes. Most programmes gravitate towards minimum requirements, hence, it is important to ensure that these minimum requirements provide for work and care reconciliation. Programmes beyond the workplace, such as funded childcare, are important in this context.

The article highlights that formal mechanisms cannot achieve work and care reconciliation for women workers if they are built upon very limited minimum requirements, are voluntary and are dependent upon a bargaining process at the workplace.

The chapter describes the phenomenon of company–community agreements in the mining sector, situates them relative to two veins of responsible investment activity, and assesses whether they might serve as a proxy for the “community relations” expectations of responsible investors.

Based on an evaluation of two recent company–community agreements and surveying of executives from mining firms that have signed agreements with Indigenous communities, it was found that: (1) though imperfect as a proxy for many of the “community relations” expectations of responsible investors, company–community agreements offer benefits and make provisions that exceed current expectations, especially with respect to the recognition of the right of Indigenous communities to offer their free, prior, and informed consent to mine developments; and (2) mining executives recognize the utility of agreement-making with communities, and are comfortable with such efforts being interpreted as recognition of the right of Indigenous communities to consent to development.

The chapter serves to introduce responsible investors to the emergence of company–community agreements in the global mining sector, and calls upon them to advocate for their further use in order to reduce the riskiness of their investments, address social justice concerns, and assist communities to visualize and realize their goals.

For the first time, the growing phenomenon of company–community agreements in the mining sector is situated within responsible investment scholarship. Additionally, drawing on both logic and evidence, the chapter challenges the responsible investment community to rethink its approach to screening and engaging the mining sector in order to advance the interests of Indigenous communities.

There is considerable political and industrial relations debate in Australia concerning the value and merit of Australian workplace agreements (AWAs). However, formalised individual agreements are a relatively new phenomenon in the Australian industrial relations landscape, consequently, to date there has been limited assessment of the strategies, outcomes and processes involved in making and negotiating such agreements. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing responses from 688 employers who had approved AWAs with the Office of the Employment Advocate (OEA) before February 2000. There are a number of issues that can be identified from this exploratory study. AWA employers were likely to be “individualistic” employers with more individual employee consultation and human resource practices. Individual employee and employer consultation arrangements were more likely to be used in establishing AWAs and generally communicating with the workforce as a whole. The survey also suggested that the majority of respondents intended to increase their use of AWAs in the future citing increased flexibility and the benefit of all employees being under one type of industrial relations instrument as the primary reasons for their introduction.

This paper considers whether the term patrimonialism can be applied to one racially bifurcated aspect of Australian history: the relations between ‘squatters’ and those with competing civil and property claims. From the perspective of white settlers, the power of pastoralists who acquired use rights over vast stretches of land in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a challenge to rural settlement, economic development, the right to vote, workers’ rights and parliamentary democracy.

From the perspective of Aboriginal peoples who held traditional ownership of pastoral lands, squattocracy began with armed conflict and ended with practices aimed at detailed government of their everyday life. More generally, as white settlers consolidated property rights to land, they expropriated Indigenous peoples’ capacity to govern themselves.

The paper concludes that there have been two distinct histories of patrimonialism in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the nineteenth century; Aborigines gained (de jure) full citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted for more than a century.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the Africa image and map portal (AIMP) project’s origins and development, along with its applications to date. This paper includes methods and a step-by-step appendix so that the project can be reproduced at other institutions.

AIMP was created with a suite of free and open source software, including QGIS, Mapbox.js and GitHub. Built around the concept of an interactive index map, AIMP allows for geographic searching of maps, posters and images from Indiana University’s (IU) African Studies collections. This paper presents a case study for the use of this geographic discovery tool at an academic library.

AIMP has allowed comparison of collection strengths with research interests of IU African Studies affiliates and to make strategic collection development decisions that will best serve the authors’ patrons. The instruction applications of AIMP are also full of potential. To date, the Librarian for African Studies has used the portal to familiarize faculty, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, with the range of image and map resources available to them, in a variety of settings.

AIMP allows researchers around the world to discover materials through a geographic search, dramatically connecting and increasing access to and discoverability of these important collections. The use of free and open source geospatial software (foss4g) means that the interface does not rely on an institution’s proprietary software-licensing agreements, making it replicable for other institutions. This use of foss4g widens access to maps, spatial data, images and posters of Africa held by IUL to a global audience.

While interactive index maps are popular among map libraries, AIMP uniquely acts as a discovery portal for a variety of media, including images and posters. In this way, AIMP works to overcome institutional silos and increase discoverability of these important collections to a global audience.

This paper argues that creative compliance tactics are an innovative union renewal strategy. Creative compliance involves the observance of the letter of the law while undermining its spirit. This regulatory inconsistency stems from indeterminate legal outcomes and discretion in legal interpretation and application. Drawing on interviews with senior union officials in four case studies in Australia, this paper reveals that two particular types of creative compliance tactics have been used by the unions to achieve positive outcomes: work-to-rule and the exploitation of loopholes. These opportunistic and proactive approaches to ‘anti-union’ legislation at the national level since 1997 represent a sea change in union tactics and a viable union renewal strategy, because they augment the individual ability of unions to shape and advance an agenda and therefore, adapt and transform at an organisational level. Consistent with adaptation theories on organisational-environment relations and strategic choice theory, the findings reinforce that unions ‘own’ strategic choices and that they can, in response to environmental scanning, adjust their tactics accordingly.

The labour markets of Australia and New Zealand have been regulated in similar ways, through industrial conciliation and arbitration, since the early 1900s. Globalization and market deregulation generally have led to intense pressure for greater labour market flexibility in both countries. In New Zealand, flexibility was achieved by a radical dismantling of the industrial relations system. What had been essentially a multi‐employer bargaining system was replaced with a system that supported individual employment contracting. In Australia, conciliation and arbitration remained protected by the constitution; however, industrial relations reforms aimed at severely weakening the system were implemented in the 1990s. This paper compares various labour market outcomes across both countries. The trends in both countries are similar despite maintaining different systems. Collective bargaining coverage has dropped. Collective bargaining outcomes have seen reductions in benefits, and significant changes in working time arrangements. Union density has dropped, as also has public sector employment.

In attempting an examination of the contractual and normative concepts of the collective agreement, some ideas are tentatively put forward in the pages which follow hoping that they will stimulate the reader's mind and open areas for further discussion.

A shift from collectivism to individualism in managing employees is identified in employment studies. Developments in Australia have reflected this change, accompanied by claimed organisation benefits. This paper examines an empirical data set to examine such claims on key dimensions in the employment relation. The analysis points to few differences in views between employees working under individual contracts and those not. Moreover the factors generating concern over individual and firm performance among employees differed little between the two groups. Traditional work factors underpinned attitudes for both. The differences that emerge from organisation size, union membership and gender appear to be inconsistent with the claims of individualism. The data point to the importance of general employee concerns – job satisfaction and perceived management style – in generating employee commitment and loyalty. The findings have implications for the nature of employee relations and management, which are discussed in light of their theoretical and practical ramifications.