Staff profile

Area of study

Management

Brief profile

 Dr Brown has an established international reputation for research and publication in the areas of community association, the third sector and social capital. This has built on his earlier work into forms of social exclusion. He jointly authored the book: Rhetorics of Welfare (Macmillan, 2000) which was the first national study of Australian non-profit welfare organisations. He has published widely in this field with recent emphasis on the role of community sport organisations and their relation to social capital. He has successful in obtaining several ARC funded Discovery (formerly Large) and Linkage projects as well as research based consultancy projects. His work has centred on issues of community organisation and the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion. In 2006 he was appointed on secondment as the foundation Director of Research at the Epilepsy Foundation of Victoria where he instituted a programme of community based research centring on strategies to achieve greater community inclusion. Much of his work in this field has had comparative international focus and he has given keynote addresses to conferences and research groups in Australia, Malaysia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom. He has held Visiting Fellowships at the Universities of California (Berkeley), Hull, Stockholm, and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). He was the President of the Australian and New Zealand Third Sector Research Association between 2005 and 2009.