 I am honoured to have been asked to give the 14th Annual Friends of the Noel Butler Archives lecture for 2015. Very sincerely. I would like to thank Pear for that very generous introduction. I had no idea I had done so much, but I am sure my grandchildren would be pleased to know. I started my Bachelor of Economics at Monash in 1963. My rival intersected the publication of Noel's two seminal pioneering works, The Australian Domestic Product, published in 1962, and his Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861 to 1900 in 1964. Of course, I had no idea at the time how Noel's work and the discipline of economic history he created almost single-handedly would shape my professional life. I was one of the lucky ones who found gainful employment in the burgeoning departments of economic history that sprung up in so many universities. I had been fortunate to have been taught and to have worked with a number of Monash staff who had a close connection with Noel. Gus Sinclair, who worked on the early collection foundation of the National Income Accounts, and John McCarty and Boris Shedvin, both very much of Noel's era, and had worked with his elder brother Sid at the University of Sydney. While I never worked at the ANU, I had met Noel on many occasions. All of us in the field were drawn to Canberra for conferences, for seminars and, as Pearce suggests, to use the wonderful collection of records at the NBAC. When Maggie invited me to give this lecture, she suggested I should try to be, and I quote, topical and edgy. I shall do my best. So let me begin with my introduction. The question I want to explore tonight is the future of archives such as the NBAC and the one at my own university, UMA. My broad point is that changes in what I describe as the supply of business history and the demand for it by corporates have changed significantly in the past few decades. The most pessimistic interpretation is that the changing practice of economic history within universities and the increasing reluctance of business to permit independent outsiders access to their records bodes ill for specialist archives. That's edgy. So let me start with the paradox. More and more is being written about business, but the work from whom we might describe as business historians drawing on archival material is situated on the margins of this avalanche. What scholars write tends to be read by only other business historians with some notable exceptions. Telling stories about business that reaches a mass audience is done by others, most notably by journalists and critics of various hues, and this information reaches audiences through a variety of media. Archives holding extensive records relating to individual firms will be less useful to those current and future scholars working in the shifting paradigm of business history. A recent content study of the topics of articles in leading business history journals from the date range 1970 to 2012, this is 42 years, shows that only around 20% of those articles were written about a firm. Moreover, I fear that in the current climate and foreseeable future, it will be harder to persuade companies to donate their records to archives that mandate the independence of the scholars using those records. So my argument progresses in a number of steps. First I want to discuss changes in what I call the practice of business history, that lessen the demand from academic practitioners for access to comprehensive archival material. Second, I want to suggest that firms today are less likely to make over their records for scholarly analysis than they were a generation or so ago. I will conclude by suggesting that the tide may yet turn back to the commissioning of full-blown histories. Thank promise of hope. So let me begin by discussing what I call the practice of business history. The questions raised, the methodologies employed by authors, the types of records used have changed over time in several significant ways. These changes have equally important implications for the fate of specialist archives holding their what I call whole of firm records. The first dramatic shift could be placed shortly after World War II when scholars such as Charles Wilson, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge produced his seminal book, The History of Unilever, a study in economic growth and social change. This was published in 1954. This book broke away from the interpretations of an earlier generation of largely amateur authors, family members and long-serving employees whose work he rather condescendingly described as I quote, heroic mythology. In one sense, Wilson was right as these authors lacked the technical skills of professional historians and, most likely, employed a great deal of self-censorship in the construction of their narratives. We learned more about successful firms than the much larger groups of those who had failed. Business history written by professional scholars boomed after World War II feeding on the growing willingness of leading companies to tell their stories, opening their own archives to researchers or donating records to external archives. Universities trained and employed scholars working in the field, primarily in economic history departments. Business history emerged as a vigorous sub-discipline with its specialist journals and professional organisations. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that the Australian Economic History Review began its life as business archives and history. The practice of professional business history, as described by Jeff Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin in the edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Business History, 2003, rested on two fundamental foundations. First, that the author had access to the firm's confidential archives. If I had slides, that would be a tele-sized, underlined confidential archives. And second, that the author has complete independence, also tele-sized, independence in the construction of the narrative. Stories about the progress of a firm shifted beyond genealogy and hagiography. Scholars drew upon a wide range of records, correspondence, minutes of meetings, financial accounts, technical drawings, patent applications, court records, personnel records, and on and on and on, to observe entrepreneurship and decision-making in real time. And so also to place these businesses in a wider economic and social context. Business history was the weft to the warp of the fabric of economic history. The work of one man, Alfred Chandler, recast the agenda for business history by taking us away from the study of individual firms. Chandler's big questions shifted the discipline from the late 1950s, early 1960s. He had provided an explanation for the rise of large industrial enterprise in the USA, and then later extended his research to Europe and to Japan. He also showed that large firms, industrial firms, tended to grow in a series of sequential steps, becoming large through vertical horizontal integration, followed by diversification of product and market from region to national to global. Progress of growth required corresponding changes in firms' organizational structures. Chandler's work was a major conceptual breakthrough that captured the attention of scholars in other academic disciplines, most notably management. Business history and management suddenly collided. Chandler demonstrated how teams of professional managers rather than the founding families determined a firm's long-term success, and these ideas resonated with those being developed in the strategy literature, the resource-based view of the firm, the idea that firms can be described in terms of their resources and capabilities. Moreover, management consultants leapt into the breach by showing firms how to reorganize their administrations as they recast strategies. Chandler used to complain that firms could have bought his book for $23 rather than play McKinsey's $100,000. In one sense, writing business history has become more challenging. In this day and age, ownership of all or part of the organization was regularly impacted by mergers and acquisitions and by divestment of parts of the firms. The portfolios of products and the activities were regularly rebalanced. The countries and towns in which firms produced, did R&D and sold their wares differed from decade to decade as firms internationalized in response to globalization. The ethnicity of management and of the workforce shifted accordingly as operations spread across the globe. How do you write about these firms? Consider the case of BHP, an iconic Australian firm. It has not had an Australian national as a CEO since 1998. Just half of its workers are located in Australia. Two of its divisions, Petroleum and Copper, have their headquarters outside Australia. Over 80% of its shares are held by footloose international investors. It operates with many foreign partners in joint ventures and it is said not to pay much tax in this country. The original name of the company was linked to a place. It's led in silver and zinc mines at Broken Hill in western New South Wales. The nature of the company's business altered from miner to steel maker around 1912. But it is still called Broken Hill Home. The connection between Place of Origin and what it did was broken as it became a global resources company having merged with South Africans' Billiton in 2001. The locally based steel business was spun off as Blue Scope in 2002, near the sea perhaps. A further reshaping of the global portfolio of activities led to another demurger this year. Spinning off a host of mines, now described as assets, bundled together in a freestanding operation called South 32, which is not a place but a latitude. The complexity of large organisations, particularly those operating on a global scale, is making it harder to write the comprehensive history of a firm. The specialist fields within management expanded, drawing on the core disciplines of sociology, psychology and economics. A general historian might struggle to develop mastery of them all. The numerous histories commissioned by Unilever demonstrate the point. Wilson's first book, mentioned earlier, took two volumes to cover the period from 1881 to 1945. It was organised chronologically. His second volume, Unilever 1945-65, Challenge and Response in Post-War Industrial Revolution, covers a shorter period, only 25 years, and is divided into an examination of a chronology and then perhaps anticipating Chandler examined organisational response to changing strategies. Unilever's foreign operations were so diverse and important that they required a separate telling. David Fieldhouse in 1978 published Unilever Overseas, Anatomy of a Multinational. And in 2005, Geoffrey Jones published the latest volume, which took the story up to 1990. Renewing Unilever, Transformation and Tradition. Like Wilson, Jones combines narrative and a series of examinations about particular issues such as branding, marketing, innovation, acquisitions and divestments. These topics are pursued in a greater depth than attempted by his predecessors. Advances in management and marketing theory have increased our understanding of how business operates, but few authors would possess the requisite knowledge of these diverse range of topics to satisfy a professional readership on each of them. Jones has produced an exceptional history aided by a team of assistants whose research was focused on their specialist areas. A new genus of business historian subsequently entered the field, and these greatly outnumber the previous occupants. These historians were employed in business schools rather than departments of economic history. Jones and Zeitlin described them as scholars who study the historical development of business, but who may or may not are talisized, may not use archival records. Their contribution has been to transfer new theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks into the field. Business history, especially in its leading journals, now borrows heavily from other social sciences for its questions and its solutions. Narratives without a theoretical compass are out of favour. The contemporary needs of those studying business and of the business schools that teach free-paying students how to run successful businesses mean that business history has assumed a new purpose, and that is to instruct best practice from the lessons of history. The lens of authors catering for this market differed sharply from the grand histories of single firms. What is needed for teaching... teaching-related business cases is up-to-date material. Understanding the present matters more than a whole-of-life narrative of a firm. Moreover, most teaching cases cover only a fragment of a firm's history. They are usually brief and few seek access to confidential archival material. Many use interviews with current staff and nearly all rely heavily on publicly available information, the press and analysts' reports. And many of these teaching cases are theory-confirming, providing a single illustration to verify what management literature currently believes. As the academic business history community digested Chandler's single unifying ideas, it has been replaced by multiple research agendas. It is just fragmented. The most recent issue of business history has a special issue entitled New Business History that calls on the discipline to adopt the research methodologies of the social sciences by, and I quote, developing theory and testing hypotheses. Scholars have already turned their attention to topics beyond the firm, studying industrial districts and clusters, trade associations and business groups. Moreover, the developing world has different business structures, family-owned conglomerates and state-owned firms, which challenge Western ideas about the conduct of business. Globalisation, particularly the shift from manufacturing to low-wage economies, led to a transformation of many Western firms. The boundaries of firms became porous as they outsourced activities overseas and worked with local providers. More and more firms became multinationals, including service firms, and or worked as partners in global supply chains. Operating in a challenging foreign environment has stimulated the study of firm and host government relations. The diversity of national environments and types of business organisations has fractured the US-centric version of what a modern firm was and how it behaved. Academic business historians have responded to the changing pattern of demand for their services. Teaching the increasing numbers of business school students has fueled a bonanza for case writing. As I shall discuss in a moment, firms are less willing to commission histories. Learned monographs tracing the history of a firm or its life, or at least a substantial length of time, has fallen from favour. Not the least because many universities, with a notable exception perhaps of Harvard, give greater rewards to publication in A-star journals. The expanding disciplines of management and marketing have provided new tools for business historians. They are deployed in writing papers for specialist journals. Theory Trump's empiricism in those pieces published in journals such as Business History, Business History Review and Enterprise and Society. Well, on to Act Two of the Gloom. Disclosure, memory and message. Why have some firms kept or handed their complete records to an archive and then asked or permitted someone to write their history? Many of the classic studies in business history were commissioned by firms. Charles Wilson, whose book I referred to earlier, is one of the best examples of this genre. In his preface, Wilson tells us that the directors of Unilever had decided, and I quote, I love these words, that it would be useful to have an objective history showing how their particular business came to be what it is today. He goes on. Besides serving as a reference work for the company itself, such an account, they felt, might contribute to a better understanding of the nature of business in the academic world and elsewhere. Unilever threw open its comprehensive records to an independent scholar confident that the resulting story would reflect well upon itself. Will today's business historians have the same access and freedom to write about the transformative companies of the 21st century? The Apple's, the Google's, the Walmart's, Facebook and so on? What of Australia's leading companies? As importantly, will those firms keep sufficient records, hard copy and or digital, that will permit an author to unravel or construct the story in any depth? My intuition is that the answer to both those questions is no. Let me argue in my case with reference to Australia. Around the mid-20th century, Australian firms had very different connections with the community in which they operated than they do the sharehold of value-driven firms of today. Jeff Blaney marveled in his preference to Golden Paper, a history of the National Bank of Australasia that was published in 1958, that, and I quote, it is no light matter for a bank to open its records to an outsider and ask for a history which is fairly and truly presented. The publication of this admirable book coincided with the bank's centenary. We may guess at its motivation. There was a real sense of pride in having lasted so long and having built such a large business. The bank's balance sheet and its sense of importance grew hand in hand and it was able to draw on an internal narrative of having been a pioneer in business that helped build the country and survive through the challenges of the 1890s bank crisis and bank nationalisation. Like the directors of Unilever who wanted the public to see how, and again I quote, this particular business came to be what it is today, those at the National felt that such a story would reflect well upon them. My sense is that those firms operating over the century before the 1960s and 1970s may have been more anxious to have had their histories written by an independent author than those in the 21st century. Back then was an era when relations between business and what are now referred to as stakeholders were less complicated. There was a stronger sense of connection with community. Firms grew by opening new factories, mines and shops rather than closing them or divesting some operations or taking others overseas. In such an environment, firms confident of their success would be more prepared to open their records so that their achievements could be shared with a wider audience, an internal and external readership both of whom had some connection with the firm. For all its wealth and power the big end of town in Australia has been in a defensive mindset from the 1970s. It has felt more threatened and more under challenge over the past generation than throughout our history. To that end it employs lobbyists, consultants and PR firms to manage its image and to diffuse crises. Before the 1960s and 70s, firms were firmly linked to our shared understanding of our past. The unifying story of Australian experience in the 19th and for much of the 20th century has been one of progress, nation building and national development, the latter including notions of modernity and national security. Relations between business and the broader community shifted in fairly profound ways from the 1970s. The post-war economic miracle came to an end in the recessions and high inflation of the 1970s. The old model of doing business supported by tariffs and subsidies and operating with regulated finance and labour markets could no longer generate full employment and or stable prices. Faith in the Keynesian intervention ebbed a way to be replaced by a new model, the market that offered both choice and efficient resource allocation. The gift that business now has to give the community was to be shareholder value. Business could no longer appeal to the old national narrative of development progress. The lack of international competitiveness of manufacturing was cruelly exposed as tariffs fell. Firms cut local employment. Some moved operations offshore to take advantage of lower wage costs elsewhere. Many of the foreign manufacturing companies that had made hay behind the tariff wall also closed their factories and as tariffs fell sent in goods made elsewhere. The mining boom of the late 1960s and the stock market and property booms of the late 80s and early 90s changed perceptions about business. These episodes revealed serious weaknesses in the operations of our securities markets and ineffectual form of corporate governance and staggering incompetence and some illegality from firms large and small. Journalists had a field day exposing the follies of all involved. In this changing environment business seems less value to itself as business historians access to its records. Memory was the overriding impulse of the first wave of commissioned histories a pride in past achievements an acknowledgement of the roles of individuals and families in creating firms that serve their communities and a nation a testament to ethical leadership and kind employers and the importance of science and technology as handmaidens to a story of progress. Firms currently are more concerned about managing the message. A company history is a matter for the marketing or PR department. For many firms and the consultants which advise them and in many cases write the volumes the object of the exercise is image management. I know of books commissioned by two of Australia's largest corporations that have been abandoned in the past few years one after being completed one before it actually began. Many more companies have decided to launch such an exercise especially if there is a risk that an independent author might uncover a skeleton in the closet. We have the current example of Qantas preventing the publication of fighting words by a former employee Lucinda Holford. Firms simply want to manage what the world knows about them and from personal experience I can attest the contracts offered to independent authors today are far more restrictive than was the case 30 years ago while I refused to sign mine. The shareholder value corporation is a different animal compared to the National Bank of Australasia in the 1950s. The influence of founding families with notable exceptions such as the Murdochs, Packers, Prats, Lawies is generally less powerful than it used to be. Compared to a generation earlier today's firms and top management teams have far shorter tenure than their predecessors. Senior managers may work for many different firms during their careers. Top executives and boards do not have the same emotional connection with the firm as the managers of yes to year. Memory stretching back into the past matters less to these people. Firms can refuse to commission histories, deny access to their information and publish carefully managed messages about themselves however they cannot stop people writing about them. Bridget Griffin Foley's wonderful book The House of Packer The Making of Media Empire shows her work of great scholarship can be written without access to the subject records or access to its people. However it is unlikely that other authors will have such persistence or be able to find a subject whose activity produced such a rich set of documents from third parties government inquiries, the courts, trade unions and so on. Over the past three decades most should I say most, many at least of the books published about Australian business have exposed failure and folly and most have been written by journalists. Books about the near death experience of banks, badly behaved insurance timber and asbestos companies and tales of failed and dishonest entrepreneurs fill the shelves of book shops. We recognise celebrity business people by their Christian names. We have Twiggy, Kerry, Gina, James, Clive, Nathan who's losing weight and visibility from the current crop and Bondian skates from the earlier age of excess. They are subject to best-selling biographies you can choose between the authorised and unauthorised versions. Some business stories have become TV series and the domestic lives of our billionaires and their warring children are cannon fodder for the pages of daily newspapers and gossipy magazines. James Packer, son of the carer for Kelly Kerry has been filmed fighting one of his friends in a suburban street. The latest round of litigation over inheritance and the exposure of murky deals between politicians and businessmen by ICAC in New South Wales promises a bonanza for what Charles Wilson calls the economic crime club genre of business history. Conclusion, let's try and finish on a good note. My gloomy story has important consequences for the managers of specialist archives holding business records. I'm sure that they are well aware of the trends I have described. It is difficult to get firms to donate material and or to permit open access. The preoccupation with image management has reduced the flow of commission histories and in some case the independence of those authors. My fear is that firms may be less inclined to invest in preserving and maintaining their own records. There is more interest in the here and now than in the past from an academic audience the business schools and the wider public. An archive whose records connect to a world of over half a century ago as does the University of Melbourne archive may suffer from increasing irrelevancy from those wanting the here and now. I promised you at least a glimmer of hope and there are refreshments afterwards. Nearly a decade ago I addressed an audience of those people whose job it was to manage what the public knew about the workings and images of firms. I provided my explanation of why their clients felt so threatened why these firms had lost faith in the power of memory to deliver a positive message. Business had been increasingly seen as the bad guy from the 1970s onwards. At present the media is full of reports of self-serving financial advisors and supermarket chains misleading suppliers mistreating we might imagine that the firms involved might not want to commission a full blown history. However firms can be persuaded that telling their story is of greater value than trivializing the message or retreating into silence. The world in which business now operates has been transformed by globalization and I'm thinking particularly about Australian business history. There have been winners and losers. Firms have had to adapt to survive often shedding activities, moving to new locations. It is better for Australia that many firms have survived and indeed prospered than they went to the wall and the wider public might want to know how that has been achieved. Can business recapture the position it held for so long as a valued and trusted partner within the community? That it once did so resulted from its inclusion in powerful stories and myths about national identity. The challenge for business today is to tell a story about what it does that fits into a wider national story. I suggested to my audience of PR gatekeepers that a better way forward would be to use the pioneering metaphor to describe their adaptation to the shock of globalization. It has been beyond memory to something renderland with meaning. The old powerful story is about taming a continent. A story of going inland. What we need now is a story to make sense of Australia's place in a globalizing world. A world of going outwards. A story of going out as exporters, partners in supply chains and as Australian based multinationals. Globalization poses challenges to business and the community as great as in the first stage of pioneering. Then we struggled to come to an understanding of a new continent to cope with its distance, heat and lack of water supply. A story superbly retold in Don Watson's The Bush. Now the challenges come from having to find ways to compete in a wider world. But all the virtues of the old story are required now. Determination, resilience, ingenuity to make do with little. Optimism that you will eventually succeed. Immigrants, individuals, multinationals play their part in developing the capabilities of domestic firms and industries that enable them to survive and to extend. Venture capital and incubators are new versions of old stories of startups. Collaboration between government, scientific research institutions and business building hubs clusters and networks is another form of community building. The outcome of this engagement with the wider world matters to all Australians the stories of national development and business can still be seen to be interwoven. Am I hopelessly optimistic about business changing its mind about the value of business history? Possibly so. However self-interest is a strong motivator. In its special report on family business in the 18th April issue of The Economist that journal argued that a reason for family firms having a competitive advantage of their public corporation rivals was quote, because they have a better story to tell about themselves. Customers connect more with long-lived family companies with whom they shed strands of personal memory of family in place. The Economist piece argued that quote, the more companies compete to sell meaning as well as mere products the better family companies will do. All firms can play that game what better way to do it than to replicate the motivation of the directors of Unilever to provide last time I'll quote this to provide an objective history showing how their particular business came to be what it is today. Full disclosure would pay higher returns than managing the message into oblivion. Thank you very much. Thank you.