In 2017, the then Australia’s Race Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane wrote that:
To date, there has only been limited attention paid to … [the leadership] aspect of Australia’s multicultural experience. While various literature has examined the structural and institutional aspects of racism and multiculturalism, there has been a dearth of empirical studies of cultural diversity and leadership. (2017, 288).
There have been several important reports and publications produced since that time, most notably by Nana Oishi (2017), the Australian Human Rights Commission (2018), Cecilia Cmielewski (2021) and Karen Loon (2022). However, most of these publications focus on the cultural backgrounds of senior leadership in business, politics, government in Australia. Few focus on Asian Australians in particular, and none make a particular effort to move beyond the governance and corporate world with the exception of Oishi and Cmielewski.
This collection of essays takes up Soutphommasane’s challenge to provide critical and experiential studies of Asian Australian leadership. It is well documented that a diversity of backgrounds, approaches and ideas are better for collective decision making (Hyun 2012; AHRC 2018; Evans 2019; Page 2007). It is also understood that representative decision-making is at the heart of democratic organisations and having diverse leaders making these decisions not only has innovative value, but symbolic value. At 17.4% of the Australian population (ABS 2021), Asian Australians have an important role to play in contributing to a stronger, more resilient, and creative nation. But Asian Australians face significant barriers to mobility in every sphere of public and political life, in particular in reaching positions of leadership (Soutphommasane 2017; Pietsch 2017; Chakraborty and Walton 2020).
Charismatic, performance-driven or transactional corporate leadership models, which have dominated the practice and literature on leadership, have in recent years been critiqued, with increasing attention focused on how leadership is culturally and discursively linked. To this end, this collection of essays does not focus solely on high profile or representative figures who have made headway and broken the ‘bamboo ceiling’ as individuals in their respective fields. We are interested in those changemakers who have contributed to the development of their broader communities and cultures. While citizenship is not generally considered in relation to leadership positions, we argue that the two are vitally connected; without a feeling of belonging, inclusion and ownership, barriers to mobility will continue to persist. This, in turn, perpetuates a missed opportunity for enriching the nation’s human capital.
Setting the stage
In early 2023, Mladen Adamovic and Andreas Leibbrandt conducted a study entitled “Is there a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities to enter leadership positions? Evidence from a field experiment with over 12,000 job applications.” It investigated six different ethnic groups with varying resumés of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Arabic, Chinese, English, Greek and Indian names. All candidates were born in Australia, worked in Australia, and went to an Australian school or university. The two-year field research project found that “ethnic discrimination is particularly pronounced in the recruitment of leadership positions” (Adamovic & Leibbrandt 2023):
For leadership positions, applicants with English names received 26.8% of positive responses for their job applications, while applicants with non-English names received 11.3% of positive responses. This means ethnic minorities received 57.4% fewer positive responses than applicants with English names for leadership positions despite identical resumes. For non-leadership positions, applicants with English names received 21.2% of positive responses for their job applications, while applicants with non-English names received 11.6% of positive responses. This means ethnic minorities received 45.3% fewer positive responses for non-leadership positions despite identical resumes. (Adamovic & Leibbrandt 2023)
The study relies on similar research in the past decade, and states that “this discrepancy is particularly hard to understand given that ethnic minorities are often born and educated, and have worked, in their country of residence” (Adamovic & Leibbrandt 2023). The study underscores the urgent need to reconsider how in Australia has yet to confront racialised and ethicised barriers to the development of its multicultural leadership potential.
In 2012, the then Prime-Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. In the foreword to this Australian Government document, Gillard commented:
Whatever else this century brings, it will bring Asia’s rise…. The transformation of the Asian region into the powerhouse of the world is not only unstoppable, it is gathering pace….Thriving in the Asian century therefore requires our nation to have a clear plan to seize the economic opportunities that will flow and manage the strategic challenges that will arise…. This White Paper is a plan to build on our strengths and shape our future…. It details how, by 2025, Australia can be a winner in this Asian century by becoming more prosperous, more resilient, and sharing the new opportunities…. It calls on all of us to play our part in becoming a more Asia-literate and Asia-capable nation. (Australian Government n.p.)
One may rightfully object to the instrumentalist uses through which Asian Australians might fulfil our “human resource” destiny. As we write this introduction in 2025 with data that still points to the paucity of non-European leadership across all sectors, it is clear that much work remains to be done before the so-called “distinctive contributions” of ethnic minorities in Australia can be valued as critical assets for nation-building.
The 2014 Diversity Council of Australia report, Cracking the Cultural Ceiling, drew attention to the biases and stereotypes rife in the cultural sector about Asian leadership capability. This was followed in 2015 with Leading in the Asian Century: A National Scorecard of Australia’s Workforce Asia Capability that reported that two-thirds of Australian workers have little knowledge of Asian business contexts, even though “seven out of Australia’s top ten export markets are in Asia, and constitute 66 per cent of our total export market” (Evans 2019 n.p.) Similarly, the Cultural Diversity Report 2015 by the Asian Australian Lawyers Association Incorporated found that Australians with Asian background accounted for only 3% of partners in law firms, fewer than 2% of barristers and 1% of the judiciary. In spite of the penny having dropped at some institutional levels, the 2018 Australian Human Rights Commission found that less than 5% of Australians of Asian heritage occupied senior executive levels in business and corporate boardrooms; only 1.6 percent became CEOs. (Australian Human Rights Commission 2018 n.p.)
2019 seemed to be a year of reckoning, when report after report reiterated the term “bamboo ceiling” with regards to Asian Australians. At the specially convened Asialink Asian-Australian Leadership Summit, in partnership with the Australian National University and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) Australia, the hyphen of nationalised identity was very much in sight, with the explicit agenda of “both energizing and implementing a new national commitment to both recognize and break through the ‘bamboo ceiling’ and celebrating Asian-Australian leadership” (Asian Australian Leadership Summit 2018 n.p.). In addition to luminaries such as Jeremy Fernandes and Kumi Taguchi (media), Jenny Leong and Penny Wong (politics), Peter Varghese (public service and university sectors) and creatives including Adam Liaw and Annette Shun Wah, a large number of Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN) members were also represented at the Summit.
In the midst of these acknowledgements and recognitions was the insistent disquieting revelation, from a national survey of more than 2000 people conducted by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods in August 2019, that 82% of self-identified Asian Australians had experienced discrimination in a wide variety of social, state, personal and professional situations. Diversity Arts Australia’s landmark report, Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity in Leadership Within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors (2019), found major discrepancies at all levels of the arts where culturally and linguistically diverse creatives were not represented in award panels, board memberships, and executive bodies, despite contributing substantially to the sector. As the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and made its home in Australia, the climate became particularly insalubrious and vitiated for Asian Australians. In July 2019, a survey conducted by the think tank Per Capita and the Asian Australian Alliance reported that 400 people of Asian background had been subjected to heightened racial abuse during the pandemic. (Asian Australian Alliance and Per capita n.p.)
And yet, as this collection demonstrates, Asian Australian community workers, artists and scholars continue their work attesting to their resilience and transformative potential.
Leadership Studies
The field of leadership studies has been described as constituted by three main paradigms: mainstream/heroic, post-heroic and critical studies. The mainstream/heroic approaches are most well-established and dominate the curriculum of business courses and management programs.
These approaches tend to focus on the leadership qualities and behaviours, strategic mind-set, charisma, and personality attributes including emotional intelligence (Collinson 2020). Mainstream perspectives concentrate primarily, as David Collinson notes, on individual leaders and pay less attention to the power dynamics, structural and cultural conditions and the consequences of leadership. Mainstream approaches tend to be binaristic, emphasising mutually exclusive either/or distinctions such as transformation/transactional, leadership/management, instinctive/learned leadership, autocratic/collaborative and so forth. Such approaches tend to focus on personas and personality traits informed by psychology (Collinson 3).
The relationship between leaders and followers is one of the most studied aspects in the field, with the leader as the privileged partner in the relationship, and the follower in a largely passive role. “Even when leader-led relations are addressed they tend to be understood as largely static, stable and predictable: their dynamic, shifting character is underplayed.” Collinson’s critique of mainstream approaches aligns with our view that the dominant model of leadership tends to be corporate- focused and ignores the asymmetrical nature of leader–led dynamics. There is a narrow focus on the leaders’ “‘transformational influence’ and capacity to inspire. Power is simply treated as an uncontroversial property of leaders and most research conveys the impression that leadership and leaders are inherently positive influences in organizations and societies.” (Collinson 3)
Post-heroic leadership approaches have developed in direct response to the blind-spots in such mainstream approaches. They focus on relational and collective dynamics, examining processes such as distributed, shared, collective and collaborative leadership (Collinson 3). By shifting attention away from the individual to the collective, Collinson claims that “post-heroic perspectives examine the socially constructed nature of leadership, and in the process highlight the importance of (empowered) followers. Yet, post-heroic approaches sometimes invert the dominant dichotomy by privileging collective dynamics while downplaying individual agency.” This reversal of the dichotomy can overlook the asymmetrical nature of leadership relationships:
To be sure, organizations need to be understood as collective endeavours. But in practice, this sense of collective interdependency is often in tension with the numerous ways in which organizational power is enacted: how owners seek to control, how leaders seek to lead and how managers seek to manage. (Collinson 4)
The final category is also the most recent development in leadership studies. Critical leadership studies are a diverse set of approaches focusing on the situated power relations and identity constructions through which leadership and followership dynamics are enacted (Collinson 4). Critical leadership studies focus on power relationships and are informed by cultural studies, deconstruction, dialectics, environmentalism, feminism, history, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis. For the purposes of this collection, one of the most productive aspects of this emergent area of study is the focus on power dialectics that challenge the binary thinking characterising mainstream and post-heroic approaches. Central to this is a dialectical understanding of power relations. Critical dialectical perspectives problematise asymmetrical power relations in leadership dynamics and recognise that different forms of power can be in tension with one another and may also produce unanticipated and unacknowledged effects. According to Collinson, critical dialectical studies emphasise that leadership can also emerge informally in more subordinated and dispersed relationships, as well as in oppositional organizational forms (Collinson 7).
Critical leadership studies have opened important sites of investigation that have informed the discussions/interventions in this collection. Among the most significant is the observation that power and the manifestation of leadership is gendered, racialised and intersectional. Historically across the global North and South, power and leadership have been associated with men and masculinity.
Feminist-informed approaches to leadership have exposed such underlying assumptions and demonstrated that gender is a critical aspect of organisational structures and dictate the power dynamics between leaders and their constituencies. They challenge the privileging of the heroic model of leadership and foreground its masculine and corporate underpinnings. Feminist studies have contributed new insights into different modes of leading (such as collaborative leadership) and the value of emotional intelligence, intuition and self-reflexivity. Importantly, feminist and postcolonial approaches have focused not only on political and corporate sectors, which remains the primary domain for leadership studies, but also into communities, and cultural and education sectors.
This collection of essays draws on this body of scholarship and especially the focus on intersectionality to explore how factors such as heritage, history, gender, sexuality, political ideologies, forms of learning and socio-economic status impact on the kinds of leadership practices that are enacted within specific organisational and institutional environments. The collection brings an intersectional approach to understanding Asian Australian leadership practice to challenge corporate/heroic accounts of leadership. Central to the rationale for this collection of views and experiences is engagement with alternative, collaborative and communitarian ideas of leadership (Chan and Du-Babcock 2019, Kirkman et. al. 2009). We approach leadership expansively as having the ability to empower others, to build capacity and take action to facilitate change (Du-Babock and Tanaka 2017; Angouri and Marra 2011; Paludi 2012). In developing this collection, our position has been informed by the belief that leadership is not a static position but the practice of influence. Leadership is not about a position in a hierarchical organisation or corporate context. One does not become a leader by virtue of achieving a particular pay scale, a title or number of direct reports. Kevin Kruse provides a helpful working definition for our work when he describes “leadership as a process of social influence, which maximises the efforts of others towards the achievement of a goal” (Kruse 2019).
We find this focus on social influence, as distinct from power or authority, useful in understanding the different working environments described by our contributors. Kruse reminds us that leadership is not merely the exercise of influence on others but importantly, the ability to galvanise people to achieve a desired outcome. We would add that leadership is not only optimising the efforts of others but also optimising the benefit to others and not just to oneself. Many of the essays in this collection demonstrate how leaders work towards creating cultural change for others. Leading thus becomes the creation of opportunity for others including mentoring and succession planning.
Cultural citizenship
Australia’s diversity of leadership is necessary to address, assess and answer the challenges that Australia faces in the Asian Century (Evans 2019; Rhodes, Pullen and McEwen 2023), yet we do not appear to see the faces and profiles of prominent Asian Australian leaders in mainstream Australia. As Chiu (2021) observes, ‘There is a cognitive dissonance in championing a diverse, multicultural population and at the same time maintaining extremely unrepresentative corridors of power.’
The 2018 Leading for Change report by the Australian Human Rights Commissions and partners asserted that:
The problem with cultural diversity and leadership is not strictly about the under-representation of diversity in leadership. It is also that cultural diversity may be unevenly represented within certain roles or occupations. Obtaining statistics on such patterns is difficult, given the lack of data on cultural diversity at such a disaggregated level. However, many would speculate that culturally diverse backgrounds are likely to be more significantly represented within support or technical roles within many organisations. Certainly, there is a perception that those from non- European backgrounds may be drawn to fields such as information technology, finance or administration. (28)
The report cites the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as illustrative of ethic zoning. Within the ABC, the representation of non-English-speaking backgrounds is dramatically higher among ‘technologists’ (29.2%) than among ‘content makers’ (8.3%) (28). The report concludes that within certain professions or industries, the pattern of cultural representation may mirror the hierarchy of prestige or power within the field.
Similarly Cmielewski’s 2021 work, Creative Frictions, asserts that Australia’s creative production does not reflect the nation’s culturally diverse population, despite decades of arts and cultural policy attending to this issue. Cmielewski examines how non English-speaking (NES) background creative leaders work within the mainstream while maintaining their creative integrity and independence, leading change in the arts sector.
This clutch of essays focuses particularly on the arts and political community sectors to highlight the diverse perspectives and practices of Asian Australian leadership. In particular, the collection connects creative leadership to the notion of cultural citizenship. We point the way towards the development of a conceptual model of cultural citizenship that accounts for Asian Australian contributions to leadership across several key sectors and industries.
As Toby Miller asks in his book Cultural Citizenship, ‘why citizenship, and why now?’ Citizenship has moved beyond ‘narrow confines of the sovereign state’ (Miller 2006: 27, 28) to be articulated in the media; in Miller’s case, television. Miller outlines three zones of citizenship, “with partially overlapping but also distinct historicities” (35):
- The political (the right to reside and vote)
- The economic (the right to work and prosper)
- The cultural (the right to know and speak)
Within the cultural realm, Khan et. al. (2017) suggest that cultural citizenship is composed of three main components: participation, belonging, and capacity (4). Unlike the formal, legal frameworks that underpin belonging to a nation, cultural citizenship refers to the informal, societal dimensions that facilitate belonging and enable one to contribute to, and shape, the dominant culture. That is, cultural citizenship is manifest not formally but substantively, by actively participating in a community (Nunn 2017: 218; Clark 2007: 304). These informal dimensions of citizenship can include participation in the workforce, experiences of inclusion or exclusion, or having access to knowledge or resources that makes one an active and equal member of the community. This model of cultural citizenship will be used to assess the diversity of Asian Australian leadership in the arts by evaluating the pathways and barriers to leadership as they relate to measures of participation and belonging, including intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic standing. The aim is to identify the factors and experiences that create the so-called ‘bamboo ceiling’ (e.g. unconscious bias) (Loon 2021), as well as self-censorship from within and beyond the Asian Australian community that results in barriers to linguistic and cultural diversity and greater community engagement.
Addressing the components of cultural citizenship that Khan et. al. (2017) identify, participation, belonging, and capacity, the essays in this collection elaborate on the contributions of Asian Australians across a broad spectrum of creative engagement.
The Collection
Section 1: Media and Representations
A key aspect of cultural citizenship is its close relationship to media practices and images. For individuals to feel as though they belong within the nation, they must see themselves and their communities represented within the media (Cunningham and Sinclair 2001; Hjorth and Khoo 2016). On the one hand, there is over-visibility of Asian Australians in terms of otherisation – resulting in experiences of discrimination (Biddle et. al. 2019). On the other hand, there is under-visibility – the under representation and under-valuing of Asian Australians in leadership positions (Diversity Arts Australia 2019).
Central to participation, belonging and capacity building is the relationship between media activism and cultural citizenship. Citizenship through the media means the ability to participate in sharing one’s ideas and stories and build resilient forms of community, produce engaged citizens and articulate alternatives to cultural engagement and imagination (Lopez 2016: 10). In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe emphasises how Asian American citizenship operates outside the control of the state in the realm of culture where “the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined” (1996: 22). In the Asian Australian context, this collection is timed to take stock of Asian Australians as significant contributors to the nation’s arts and creative sectors, where they bring their diasporic perspectives, networks of influence and expertise to strengthen the diverse fabric of Australian society.
Earvin Cabalquinto’s provocation, “Fostering digital belongingness in disruptive times: The case of older Asian Australian leaders in Victoria, Australia,” explores the ways in which leaders of organisations for older Asian Australians used online platforms and digital devices to create a space of connection and belonging during Victoria’s protracted COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Cabalquinto’s interviews with four leaders highlights how their interventions through online and digital spaces provided much needed leadership and support for communities struggling with isolation during a challenging time.
Gilbert Caluya’s “Moguls, Tycoons, and Gurus: Asian Leadership in Australia without Asians” takes as its starting point the paradox of using terms and ideas linked to Oriental despotism to describe leadership practices, while Asian Australians themselves are noticeably absent from positions of leadership, considered submissive, compliant and incapable of occupying positions of authority. This dualistic vision of the Orient as comprised of autocratic rules and subservient subjects continues to inhabit contemporary understandings of Asians in the workplace. From this starting point, we can consider how Asian Australian leadership skills or potential can be developed in contrast to these sustained stereotypes.
Section 2: Leadership rhetoric and heuristics
John Young’s “Leadership, Intention and Virtue” takes up this collection’s challenge and invitation to consider leadership through the lens of cultural citizenship, exploring how empathy, intention and virtue provide alternative ways of conceiving of leadership in contrast to a nationalist, representational approach. In rethinking Asian Australian leadership, the question of intention – of intended action within the space of the nation and in the context of cultural citizenship, is key in re- thinking the existing frameworks for understanding leadership.
Section 3: Politics
Osmond Chiu’s “After Fowler: a turning point for Asian Australians in politics?” examines the 2022 Federal Election, which delivered a record number of women, First Nations and other people of colour as members of Parliament. In particular, there was a significant increase in Asian Australian MPs, more than doubling in the House of Representatives from three to seven. Chiu suggests that this watershed election result reflects a growing recognition of the importance of culturally diverse representation in Australian politics, one where cultural backgrounds and personal stories are relevant to leadership style in politics. Yes, the political underrepresentation of Asian Australians remains a concern, with Australia continuing to lag behind Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in senior leadership roles in politics.
Sukhmani Khorana’s “Straddling the ‘ethnic’ and ‘mainstream’ spheres: Asian Australian political leaders and their digital campaigns during the 2022 federal election” takes a closer look at three Asian Australian female Members of Parliament winning marginal seats against the odds in the 2022 Federal Election: Sally Sitou in the New South Wales seat of Reid, whose family fled Laos after the Vietnam War, Sri-Lankan Australian physician and academic Michelle Ananda-Rajah in the Victorian state of Higgins, and Goan-Australian engineer Zaneta Mascarenhas in the West Australian seat of Swan, all Labor members and second-generation migrants of Asian descent. Khorana identifies how these often younger, second-generation migrant women have been successful in mainstream politics by resonating with both the ethnic and mainstream populations through their political persona. As Khorana notes, this persona ‘is constructed through a mix of grassroots campaigning work and innovative mainstream and social media promotion activities’.
Section 4: Practice
In the next set of reflections, we see Asian Australian leadership in practice. Ruchira Talukdar’s “Forging global North-South community through climate story-telling: Possibilities for an emergent South Asian leadership in Australian climate activism” provides Talukdar’s personal experience as co- founder of Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity, an intergenerational South Asian climate justice collective, in building a South Asian youth leadership on climate justice in Australia. Talukdar foregrounds the experience of making an intervention in the Australian climate movement through a North-South intersectional approach, which, for all its emphasis on diversity as a virtue, continues to fall behind in racial diversity.
Veteran arts leader Annette Shun Wah provides a case study of Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), a performance which she has led from its origins as Performance 4a, now CAAP, a non-profit performing arts company based at Carriageworks in Sydney. CAAP was established to address a perceived lack of representation of Asian Australian stories and artists on professional stages and has been instrumental in bringing visibility to Asian Australian performance.
As the essays in this collection demonstrate, leadership needs to be defined expansively in terms of capacity building, empowerment and change making. By highlighting the contributions of Asian Australians across a broad spectrum of creative engagement, this collection redefines leadership at the intersection of cultural citizenship and so acknowledges the important role played by Asian Australians in building a more resilient and democratic nation.
This publication was initiated by a panel discussion led by the editors at the Gender & Cultural Diversity in Politics: Australia, Asia & the Pacific workshop at the ANU in 2022 supported by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, the Centre for Asian Australian Leadership and the School of Culture, History and Language. Special thanks to Associate Professor Tanya Jakimow for her support.
Acknowledgement:
We acknowledge the long-term support of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN).
Biographies:
Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty teaches and researches Indigenous, multicultural and postcolonial literatures at Monash University.
Prof Olivia Khoo is Head of Film, Screen and Culture at Monash University, and former Chair of the AASRN.
Prof Jacqueline Lo is the Director of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University and Founding Chair of the AASRN.
Eleanor Jackson is the current Chair and former Editor in Chief of Peril Magazine.
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