Chinese Business in South-East Asia: Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship (2002)

Business in South-East Asia: Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship. Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao. Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001. Pp. 205. This collection of seven essays attempts to reinterpret the factors behind the growth of business in modern Southeast Asia. The book opens with a critical comment over recent literature on the dynamics of enterprise in Asia: First, we contest the fashionable thesis that the institutions, norms and practices of ethnic were the reasons for the growth of their enterprises. Second, we question whether entrepreneurs have depended primary on business networks based on shared identities to develop their corporate base (p. xi). In their informative introduction entitled Chinese Business Research in Southeast Asia, the editors provide a useful survey of the existing scholarship and further elaborate their dissatisfactions with it. According to them, the existing literature tends to take the community in Southeast Asia as a homogeneous group and ignores the significant cleavages that have prevented them from acting as a collective unit. Moreover, they argue that much of the existing research has been limited to the largest firms and pays little attention to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With respect to the network perspective, the editors suggest that the most useful concepts that can be used for determining the creation of long-standing business links are interlocking stock ownership and interlocking directorship. Gomez and Hsiao point out that there is little evidence to demonstrate their existence among business in Southeast Asia. On the contrary, there have been numerous accounts of disputes between businessmen that have tried to co-operate in ventures involving joint ownership; such disputes have prevented them from co-operating to promote their individual business interests (p. 33). This chapter concludes that three broad themes need to be brought into the analysis state, society, and capital. The following chapters deal with the individual cases of major countries of the region and Taiwanese business in Southeast Asia. They are more or less an extension of the main themes put forth in the introduction and normally consist of two major portions: a critical review of the existing literature and the formulation of new research agendas. The chapter on (by Chan Kwok Bun and Ng Boey Kui) points out there are methodological problems in much of the scholarly literature on business, which does not distinguish between the many SMEs and the few large conglomerates (p. 60). Chan and Ng suggest that the structural weakness of family business lies in the non-separation between ownership and management control. They also call attention to the dark side of guanxi (connections), which could result in cronyism, corruption and nepotism in Southeast Asian countries except Singapore (p. 53). The chapter on Malaysia (by Gomez, Loh Wei Leng, and Lee Kam Hing) contends that capital is subordinated to Malay political patronage and that entrepreneurs prefer to establish joint ventures with multinational corporations (MNCs), usually Japanese and European-owned companies. This observation is related to their criticism of the network literature, which tends to presume the universality of the values and socio-economic institutions (p. 81). The authors suggest that the research on Malaysia provides .very little information on ownership patterns, company structures, business strategies, forms of diversification, sources of funding, and the extent of intra-ethnic business co-operation (p. 84). The chapter on the Philippines (by Theresa Chong Carino) is a useful attempt to readdress the balance by not only criticizing what has gone wrong, but also offering what can be done empirically. …