Oral History and Business

This book introduces business historians to oral history methodologies and approaches. This succinct and accessible account is essential reading for business historians with little experience in using oral history, as well as those looking to gain deeper insights from their oral history data.

Robert Crawford is a Professor of Advertising in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His research focuses on the growth and development of the advertising, marketing and public relations industries. His recent books include More than a Glass and a Half: A History of Cadbury in Australia (Halstead, 2022), Digital Dawn in Adland: Transforming Australian Agencies (Routledge, 2021) and Decoding Coca-Cola: A Biography of a Global Brand (Routledge, 2021, co-edited with Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis). Matthew Bailey is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. He is one of Australia's leading retail historians. His book, Managing the Marketplace: Reinventing Shopping Centres in Post-War Australia (Routledge, 2020), is the first book on the subject, and one of the few to comprehensively examine Australian retail history. He has published widely on retail and retail property history, including in leading international and Australian journals such as Urban History, Journal of Urban History, Enterprise & Society and Australian Economic History Review. He is currently working on an ARC-funded project on the history of department stores.

Introduction: A Disrupted Conversation, 1. Managing Disruption: Business Change, Organisational Politics and Work Life Balance, 2. Creating Continuity: Stakeholders, Narratives, and the Cadbury Brand, 3. Spatial Continuity: Retail 'Town Halls' in Post-War Australia, 4. Digital Disruption: The Advertising Industry's Uneasy Revolution, 5. Continuing the Conversation