Malaysia and the Development Process

Globalization, Knowledge Transfers and Postcolonial Dilemmas

Vanessa C.M. Chio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135932206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on recent deconstructions in anthropology, postcolonial studies, and critical sociology, Malaysia and the Development Process situates and explores the phenomenon of international knowledge transfers within the context of globalization. Based on primary and secondary research, and a series of 'experiential' reflections, fieldwork was conducted in two foreign electronics multinationals and a variety of public and semi-public institutions. The findings reassess issues of knowledge, power, subjectivity and agency, and the relations between the West and the non-West, as they are negotiated between and within multinational workplaces and local agencies in Malaysia.

Chapter One
Introduction

Speeding along the multi-lane highway connecting Subang International Airport to the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital and soon-to-be home to the world's tallest building, there is a certain sense of having arrived. More specifically, as you encounter the landscape and activity of fast-expanding and fast-changing KL [as the capital is known to locals], you notice and feel the tremendous amount of hustle and bustle permeating its every corner, an almost non-stop conglomeration of motion and noise, and you think to yourself: “things are happening here.…” The symbol of Malaysia's entry into the global economic arena, the capital is a city constantly in motion. Seemingly unending streams of cars, motorbikes and pedestrians vie with buildings under constant and continuous construction for preeminence within the newly arrived person's sensory perception—antlike platoons of beings going somewhere, anywhere and everywhere.

Somewhat like the busiest of cities elsewhere in Asia, the degree of movement and noise is at once invigorating and annoying in its constancy and frequency: the blaring of horns as drivers cut and overtake each other, the rumbling of pink city buses filled to bursting with passengers, the sound of steel girders being hammered into the earth, the constant stopping and going of traffic making way for pedestrians and road-hogs alike. And yes, even the occasional yell or two [to put it in its secular form] from these denizens can be heard through the insulated confines of air-conditioned taxis and cars. However, unlike stereotypical images of Asian cities of old, gleaming steel towers dotted and concentrated throughout this landscape glare and wink down at passersby, with yet more of these like structures under construction still.

Meanwhile, palm fronds and the lushness of vegetation flanking the Airport's entrance to the highway and the humidity that rushes out to meet the newly arrived signal a certain geographical displacement. Selamat Datang! Welcome! This, along with the somewhat disorienting effect of seeing traffic organized along the “wrong” side of the road reinforces a sense of spatial displacement, just as women in colorfully printed baju kurungs and kebarungs, road signs or names in Malay, and glimpses of songkoks and turbans signal a certain cultural displacement. The visitor realizes that he/she is not home, the returnee a slow but growing sense of orientation as the body and senses register sights, sounds and smells vaguely familiar yet not quite so.

Once on the road, however, as you speed by the Sungai Way Free Trade Zone located about halfway between the Airport and the city center, the mind's eye register names familiar to visitors the world over: Toshiba, Motorola, Matsushita, Panasonic. And so on the list goes—flagships of transnational and global capital denoting modern technology and goods; propellers of the nation's export industrialization strategy; symbols of development and progress in this, the New World Era. Not so different after all.

A second glance and you feel—physically and emotionally—the “beat” behind the motion: a certain alertness and determination, a sense of positive-ness and the boundless possibility attached to possibility itself—reactions intoxicating not just for their capacity to uplift the spirit, but also for their commentary about the worlds and homes left [temporarily] behind, where images of other gleaming steel towers vie with images of the homeless and the unemployed, of well-insulated museums and drug-infested ghettos.

Yet another glance and you notice the dustiness and fogginess of emissions polluting the skies, the redness of earth exposed, and the impatience amidst the optimism. You notice vaguely-remembered buildings and streets missing; suburbs no longer isolated but linked to other like suburbs, most barely distinguishable from one another to the unfamiliar eye: all interrupted now and then by still more buildings and steel structures. You “see” the absence of cows and corner newsstands; the presence of a highway cutting through what used to be the grounds of the Istana, or rather, the National Palace.

* * *

Welcome to a panoramic view of Malaysia in the act of striding towards an Industrialized¹ status; the reason for my presence in this capital in this instance. Indeed, the return at this juncture to my nation of birth—albeit on a somewhat different level [researcher], with a somewhat different purpose [research], from a somewhat different location [western researcher, management scholar]: definitely not the usual jaunt home for a visit with family and friends. This then is the terrain and site from wherein I will be living, interacting and researching for the year to come. It is January 1995. Unbeknownst to me, this simultaneous sensation of familiarity and disorientation was to become an almost constant part of my research time, location and process during the coming year. While glimpses of these shifts had been seen during my previous visits to negotiate the possibility of returning, they were to become central to the project itself: an index of the very processes I myself was trying to document at a more institutional and sociological level.

Leaving the country at a young age for the West, the Malaysia I inhabited during this time was one which was somewhat alien to my experience as a Malaysian up to this point—filtered as it was with the institutional and economic exigencies of a nation and a society in the midst of, literally and figuratively, transforming itself. Yet this very institutional and economic exigency was a key reason for my return. It is one of the ironies of the project that the information and tools by which I was equipped to assess this transformation were arsenal gleaned from my time in the West: whether as a participant, scholar and/or critic of the organizational and social sciences. So it was that my return would be marked in the most immediate and fundamental of ways by this paradoxical juxtaposition of realities; filtered throughout by the memory of a Malaysia from my childhood, and a simultaneous exposure to what it means to live on an everyday basis in this nation as a researcher in the community: a personal and social Other in opposition to the “official” Malaysia I had come to try and understand.

From my starting point within two Western electronics multinationals in the states of Selangor and Penang to the varied numbers and levels of statutory, educational and government agencies which I traced through in my documentation of the epistemic and institutional forms and practices propping-up the nation's development strategy, the world I traversed was the world of technocratic expertise. It was a world peopled by the presence of senior and high-level engineers, administrators, scholars and managers; where overriding concerns dealt with overseeing production runs, meeting policy objectives, and translating organizational aims. Whether private or public, local or global, all the individuals I met and talked with during this time were concerned in one way or another with the formation and sustenance of institutions.

Yet, as I discovered time and again throughout my stint in Malaysia, even within the otherwise technocratic and linear spaces of the foreign multinationals, there were certain moments infused with local mediations, appropriations and contestations over the so-called dominant rationalities and practices of modern institutions. As a commentary on culture and volition, these mediations and appropriations are themselves indicators of the plurality and agency of a people and a society already cultured, historicized and filled with meanings.²

I highlight this technocratic focus here to acknowledge the class-based and professional character of the world that the project and I are located in. I acknowledge this to claim a certain ownership over the subject and location of my inquiry, and begin making visible the academic and conceptual boundaries organizing the subject itself. Included here are its focus on Economics as a terrain of production and way of knowing, its overriding interest in productivity, and the explicit privileging of administrative efficiency.

Mine was not the world of the operator within these multinationals. Nor was it the world of the foreign worker negotiating these same multinationals. As I realized soon after beginning my fieldwork, I could no more negotiate—or be accepted by and/or be accepted as representing—this other world, than I could climb the Himalayas. The reason? I am not one of them. And while I was sure that I could—technically, administratively, practically—take on the job of an operator, I could never paradoxically, be him/her. History and a whole slew of other demarcations (e.g., class, education, ethnicity, culture) became a boundary locking me out, and them in.

Existing in tandem with this official and located visibility was a world colored by the constant battle to outwit traffic jams and taxi drivers; of finding myself ignominiously and repeatedly lost amidst the concrete cookie-cutter jungles of suburban Subang Jaya. Aduh miss, if you don't know where you live, how I take you home? To which this researcher quickly and apologetically replies: excuse, excuse, sorry encik, I baru balik from overseas. Yaakah? okay, okay, tak apalah, I cari your home, don't worry. It is a refrain and an excuse that, conveniently and inconveniently for me, worked and lasted for six months across two states. The assumption and existence of an all-knowing, purposeful researcher-anthropologist reduced to the rubble of quick apologies and kindness from strangers; the authority of the researcher-expert replaced by spatial and social disorientation.

This social world of the researcher I was also plagued by an endless negotiation between seemingly inchoate identities [Western researcher, Malaysian-born Chinese], mis-identities [non-Chinese, non-local Chinese, non-local Malay, non-Malaysian], or much to the amusement of locals and friends alike, of having to deal with good-natured ribbings about my Mat Salleh Malay, my “twangy” Cantonese, and my hopeless Hokkien. It was a world colored by constant reports of landslides and construction accidents, discussions about religion, and questions about the Malay language and Malaysian identity. I also witnessed from up-close friends and colleagues juggling between home and work, earning power and escalating educational and medical costs, and foreign maids negotiating from the private confines of Malaysia's growing suburbia. Most of all, it was a time marked by a concerted effort on my part to learn and relearn the living history of the nation.

The challenge for me became one of trying to understand from the ground up and from the standpoint of lived experience—the agglomeration of knowledge/knowing and location that is “I/eye”—how these two or more worlds, these “malaysias” were connected. I found myself asking time and again: how are decisions made in institutions, the concepts or practices used by decision-makers, and the links forged between institutions and sectors related to the congestion, the perceived absence of cows, the boundless optimism, the search for identity, and the pride and the frustration that I was myself witnessing and/or experiencing during this same time? Just as the challenge was simultaneously one of trying to understand from this standpoint of a living history how these “malaysias” were/are connected [economically, socially, academically, theoretically] to the West I too had come from and am traversing still.

But this journey through paradox and irony, theory and lived experience did not end when I physically left Malaysia. Just as the collapsing of these lived dichotomies was to be a constant and continuous challenge for me in the field, so too has it been a key duality I have had to confront once back from the field in the writing of the text, the representation of the experience, the telling of the story. For connected to this experience of disconnection was a question about knowledge and science as an armamentarium of practical applications and prescriptions, and the location of knowledge as a reflective mirror and an alternative reconstruction of reality. Indeed, as a politicized statement about the lack of alterity itself.

Central then to this struggle and this confrontation is a politics of representation that echoes the questions posed by the project itself. How should or can I represent the interconnectedness of these stories? What should I highlight? Which should I privilege? How to recreate in the telling of the story and the experience, the immediacy or situatedness of the ethnographic encounter? How to convey through concepts and words the physical and social moment that is now no more? And do so without diluting the complexity or richness of both field and experience? Can I do it and still claim an ethnographic or scientific authority that the story itself will likely declaim? On what other basis must I then place my ethnographic authority? My voice and my experience? And where is the Other in relation to this?

Through these questions, partially informed by my theoretical frame, I am compelled to return to the lens framing the project, and see in it a mirror reflecting my struggles back to me. Unmediated and unmitigated by the so-called data I had collected in the field, I had become part of my own subject and object of study in the most personal of ways. What had I seen? How had I seen? Who am I in relation to my objects of inquiry, and my subject matter? Indeed, what is it to think of Malaysia with both capital “M” and little “m” as an object for inquiry? How is this related or unrelated to the academic exercise of writing and knowledge construction?

A commentary on what it means to be a professional academic, the writing of the text became a struggle: against writing convention, against form, against structure—a veritable series of inherited and learned conventions ranging from the practical [how to write, what to write, where to write] to the epistemic [disciplinary boundaries, conceptual filters, beliefs about science, authority, contribution]. A process of unlearning had to be made, where notions about what is appropriate and necessary had to be deconstructed cognitively, textually, theoretically; and the theoretical armamentarium of critiques informing the current project, appropriated and used as a living experiment and reflection on lived experience.

THE PROJECT AND ITS QUESTIONS

Conceived in response to an amalgamation of factors that are theoretical, professional and personal, this project is an intersection of multiple possibilities and opportunities. Theoretically, it was formulated in response to certain questions raised by writings in anthropology, social theory and postcolonial studies highlighting the “situatedness” (Haraway, 1988) of modern disciplinary knowledge (e.g., development studies, science, anthropology, history), and their relationship to other fields of know how not traditionally considered by their respective disciplines. To writers raising this specter of a non-neutral and non-universal science, “knowledge” that we take for granted—for example, that development is an antidote to poverty and a barometer of progress; that history is a linear record of social or economic evolution; that science and the scientific method are universal ways of knowing—are first and foremost symptomatic and representative of a very particular form of knowing and living which is specific to a certain culture and time: Modernity (e.g., Chatterjee, 1993, 1987; Clifford, 1988; Escobar, 1994a, 1994b; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1998; Prakash, 1990; Radhakrishnan, 1996, 1994; Rich, 1984; Said, 1989, 1979). These scholars pinpoint attention to the epistemic and cultural heritage of modern knowledge, the practices organizing the production of such knowledge, and the relationship between knowers (e.g., western self, researcher self), and known (e.g., non-western others, objects of inquiry) which underwrite the construction and representation of these knowledge.

In contrast to these views, the increasing prominence of, and interest in management and organizational research of an international and cross-cultural nature since the early 1990s also served as an entry-point for the project. During this time, calls for greater engagement by management scholars in international or cross-cultural research were fielded out across the academy, part and parcel of a generalized interest in globalization and its processes (e.g., Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Doktor, Tung and Von Glinow, 1991a). Triggered partially by the collapse of the Eastern European bloc and the economic success of newly industrializing nations in East Asia (e.g., Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore), this interest in “the global” often translated into an explicit concern with identifying or assessing how such emerging economies and nations may benefit from, or have benefited from, the introduction of free-market policies to organization and development.

Expressed more generally, scholars in the field were—and still are—concerned with learning how these economies would benefit from transfers of western management and organization knowledge. Most, albeit not all, of these scholars saw in the transitions and changes occurring in these economies, a signifier for globalization itself. To them, such transitions and changes were taken as evidence of the success, the efficacy and more importantly, the applicability and appropriateness of western forms of organization and administration to any and all contexts. In contrast to the growing recognition about the situatedness of modern know how that was emerging in the social sciences, an explicit and implicit “universal-applicability” was/is attached to the international and the cross-cultural in the management sciences. Hence, the aforementioned interest in, and presumption about, the benefits to be had from a systematic adoption of market-oriented policies by newly emerging or industrializing nations. It is in response to these disjunctures in theoretical and academic circles regarding what constitutes “the global” and “global knowledge” that this project is formulated around.

According to normative approaches in the field of international management, knowledge transfer as a proces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Studies in International Realtions
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Terms
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Institutional Ethnography and Multivocality
• Chapter Three Modernity and the International Management Gaze
• Chapter Four Towards Vision 2020 and the New Malay[sian]
• Chapter Five Quality in the Service of Development
• Chapter Six Mediating Culture and Mediation by Culture
• Chapter Seven Counter-Representations and Negotiations for Voice
• Chapter Eight Discussion and Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index