Transnational Management:
China & Singapore
In the
ICAS 2 panel, 'Case Studies from the Chinese Cultural Realm: Colonial
Bureaucracies and Transnational Enterprises', the role of cultural
discourses in the management of transnational enterprises was
discussed. The panel followed up on the shorthand conclusion to
the findings of the IIAS 'Qiaoxiang Ties' research programme (1996-2000,
see: 'IIAS Newsletter' 24, pp. 31, 41-3). There it was purported
that: '...it is imperative to study cultural phenomena in order
to understand Chinese transnational entrepreneurship and enterprises
in our frame of time. At the same time, it should be doubted whether
institution building based upon the presently prevalent cultural
assumptions is viable in the longer term'(Idem, p. 31).
* By LEO DOUW
The management of female
employees appeared to be a fruitful field of enquiry. Cen Huang
(University of Calgary) argued that claims of cultural affinity
in those enterprises in South China that Taiwanese invested in
have often worked counterproductively, because Taiwanese managers
incorrectly expected their employees to behave according to commonly
shared 'Chinese' values. Irmtraud Munder (University of Applied
Sciences, Furtwangen) noticed that managers' claims to cultural
affinity might only serve to establish their authority for them.
Cultural distinction could then very well lead to a wide divergence
between perceived reality and actual conditions as shown in Renate
Krieg and Kerstin Nagels' (both attached to Hochschule Bremen)
research on Sino-German joint-ventures. The German managers in
those enterprises usually have a more favourable judgement of
female employees who are above their male counterparts, but tend
to argue that Chinese culture stands counter to female predominance,
and they therefore hesitate to promote women to higher positions.
Another such field of enquiry hence the title
of this panel is the tendency for most transnational enterprises
to replace their expatriate managers by indigenous ones. Interestingly,
overseas Chinese enterprises do not seem to suffer from the pressures
involved than enterprises with non-Chinese backgrounds, as discourses
of cultural distinction presume. Leo Douw presented examples from
a wide range of foreign enterprises active in China during the
entire twentieth century. These seem to suggest that it is not
so much the affinity of an enterprise with Chinese culture, but
rather the type of commodities it produced, and the structure
of its organization, which explain the degree of indigenization
of its management. The often-heard argument that employing indigenous
managers would lower the wage bill does not seem very plausible,
yet it harbours an element of cultural distinction. As the research
by Krieg and Nagels revealed: in contemporary Sino-German joint
ventures, the Chinese side uses this argument more emphatically
than the German side.
The quest for institutional change, had us discuss,
how the organizational culture of particular transnational enterprises
interacts with their wider social and political environment, and
how power struggles within the enterprises are related to power
shifts in the wider society. As Leo Douw described: under colonialism
and thereafter, Chinese officialdom had persistently added to
the pressures from within foreign enterprises to indigenize their
management and also to the indigenization by colonial governments'
managerial staffs. Heidi Dahles (Free University, Amsterdam) pointed
out that the gross majority of Singaporean foreign direct investment
goes to China and Hong Kong, and not to the Singapore-instituted
Sijori Growth Triangle. Thus cultural affinity is an important
factor in making decisions on foreign investment or, more likely,
Singaporean state activity had influenced the choice for both
the creation of a distinct Singaporean-Chinese identity and the
direction of Singapore's major investment flows.
Cultural
brokers
If cultural change reflects power shifts and the
occurrence of social change, then it becomes crucial to gain more
insight into who are the brokers that negotiate cultural identities.
Sikko Visscher (Amsterdam School of Social Scientific Research),
in discussing the localization of Singaporean politics in the
immediate postwar period (1945-51), went deeply into the backgrounds
of Singaporean businessmen of Chinese descent. In the course of
time, they gave up their transnational identities and brokered
the cultural and social differences among the various local Chinese
groups, and between them and their English rulers.
A well-known sceptic of cultural explanations, the
panel's chairman, Chan Kwok Bun (Hong Kong Baptist University)
found himself to be joined by Irmtraud Munder and some other panellists
in his doubt whether cultural hybridity is always a helpful concept
for describing cultural change. Cultural brokers from a deviating
cultural background may be distrusted by both the indigenous group
and the immigrants. Also, different cultures need not, by definition,
be incompatible, as Kerstin Nagels remarked. In the process of
globalization the well-established institutional framework of
the nation-state is changing, as national cultures are being replaced
by sub-national and transnational ones. The uncertainties that
this situation engendered have caused the informal brokerage of
cultural norms and values to become important, and also caused
research on informal brokers and their activities to have become
essential for knowledge on present day social and political change.
If cultural change is considered a creative process in which shifts
in the underlying power relations and their connections with economic
and institutional change are included, it seems essential to look
at how this change is brokered by creating new cultural constructs.
A sentence borrowed from Arif Dirlik, which is meant to apply
to a somewhat different field of enquiry, befits ours quite well:
'The present is not a time of chronicling cultures, but of creating
them' (2001: 24). *
It
is expected that continued cooperation among the panel's members
will be facilitated in the near future, by the University of Amsterdam
and Hong Kong Baptist University, in particular its David C. Lam
Institute for East-West Studies.
Those
who wish to join may contact:
References
Arif Dirlik, 'Markets,
Culture, Power: the Making of a Second Cultural Revolution in
China', Asian Studies
Review,
vol. 25, nr. 1, March 2001,
pp. 1-33
pp. 1-33
Dr
Leo Douw is lecturer of Modern Asian History at the University
of Amsterdam and the Free University Amsterdam E-mail:
lm.douw@let.vu.nl