Academy Fellow

Professor Bronwen Morgan is nationally and internationally regarded as a leading scholar in socio-legal studies. Her work on regulation has been recognised for its innovation and significance from an early stage in her career, with her 2005 monograph ‘Social Citizenship in the Shadow of Competition: The Bureaucratic Politics of Regulatory Justification’ (Taylor & Francis) being awarded the Hart/SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics. Her work was also central to defining law and regulation as a field of scholarship, with the influential and enduring textbook co-authored with Karen Yeung (‘An Introduction to Law and Regulation’, 2007, Cambridge University Press) followed by highly cited work with Navroz Dubash on ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State of the South’ (2013, Oxford University Press) which has helped shape new directions at the intersection of development studies and political economy.

From this strong interdisciplinary foundation centred on regulation, Morgan’s scholarship has continually broken new ground, such as by bringing the disparate fields of rights and regulation into dialogue with each other through an edited collection, a 3-year summer school series supported by the US National Science Foundation, and her 2011 monograph Water on Tap (Cambridge University Press) analysing struggles over access to water. Her contribution from there has been distinctive in its exploration of how activist energies engage with the regulatory dimensions of systemic economic change: a line of work encapsulated in her 2012-2016 ARC Future Fellowship which explored responses to climate change at the intersection of social activism and social enterprise. She has since become a key contributor to debates on the legal and regulatory issues raised by the sharing economy, solidarity economies, and commons-based approaches to economic change, writing and editing a series of works on these themes in prestigious outlets in the UK and US. While regulation scholarship has long evinced interest in the role of non-state actors, Morgan’s scholarship draws in a wider array of scholars working on private and company law as well property theory and the commons.

Morgan has also made significant impact in building community and advocacy networks around new economies. Her Future Fellowship research led to the creation of the New Economy Network of Australia Cooperative Ltd (NENA), which she co-founded and where she has been a Board member and Coordinator of the Research Hub since its 2019 legal incorporation. NENA now has 8 geographic hubs, 25 sectoral hubs and 300+ members, a thriving annual conference and a journal, and is building strong international networks (eg with the International Solidarity Economies Network, the transnational Wellbeing Alliance and the UK New Economy Organising Network). In addition, her work on the legal form of social enterprise since 2013 – both scholarly and policy-related liaison with a wide array of stakeholders – was cited by the Australian Law Reform Commission in its 2019 recommendation that social enterprise legal reform constitute one of five proposed priority areas for law reform.

Board of Directors, New Economy Network of Australia Cooperative Ltd

Advisory Board, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Co-Editor in Chief, Global Social Challenges Journal

Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2012-2016

Hart Socio-Legal Prize for Early Career Academics 2004

University of Sydney Medal for English Literature 1988

1. B. Morgan, Thorpe, A. and Cooper, D. 2021, ‘The hopeful edges of power: Radical governance and acting ‘as if’’, Griffith Review 73, 233-245
2. B.Morgan 2019, ‘Transcending the Corporation: Social Enterprise, Cooperatives and Commons-Based Governance’, Chapter 24 in T. Clarke, J. O'Brien, & C. R. T. O'Kelley (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation (pp. 667-686). Oxford University Press. in T Clarke and J O’Brien (eds) Handbook on The Corporation (Oxford University Press), pp 667-686 
3. B.Morgan 2018, ‘Telling Stories Beautifully: Hybrid Legal Forms in the New Economy’, 45(1) Journal of Law and Society 64-83 (in special issue on Law for a New Economy: Enterprise, Sharing, Regulation)
4. B.Morgan 2018, ‘The Sharing Economy’ Annual Review of Law and Social Science 14(1) 351-366
5. B.Morgan 2011 Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)