Oral History and Business: Disruption and Continuity

This book introduces business historians to oral history methodologies and approaches.

Using four distinct oral history case studies to explore ideas of disruption and continuity in business history over the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Crawford and Matthew Bailey demonstrate how critical engagement with oral history approaches serves to enhance and enliven business history as well as its relationship with other historical fields. The focus on disruption is used to encompass a broad set of processes such as technological change, the impact of external forces, informal business networks, social constructions of gender, knowledge transfer, firm adaptability and cultural change. The use of oral histories to interpret responses to disruption in the past, and to explore the features characterising business continuity, provides an opportunity to consider the human dimensions, subjective experiences and personal insights of workplace, firm and industry change. It also sheds light on the ways that people and firms respond to disruptive forces through innovation and adaptation - both successfully and unsuccessfully.

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.