Southeast Asian Capitalists

This collection of essays explores the origins and roles of Southeast Asian business groups, especially as they developed during the 1970s and 1980s. An important contribution to studies of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia. Includes a comprehensive introduction by the editor.

The role of ethnic Chinese business in Southeast Asia in catalyzing economic development has been hotly debated - and often misunderstood - throughout cycles of boom and bust. This book critically examines some of the key features attributed to Chinese business: business-government relations, the family firm, trust and networks, and supposed 'Asian' values. The in-depth case studies that feature in the book reveal considerable diversity among these firms and the economic and political networks in which they manoeuvre. With contributions from leading scholars and under the impressive editorship of Jomo and Folk, Ethnic Business is a well-written, important contribution to not only students of Asian business and economics, but also professionals with an interest in those areas.

This book explains the political origins and evolution of capitalist institutions in developing countries by looking at distinct patterns in the electronics industry in three Southeast Asian countries: Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. An analysis of the political determinants of these patterns has a number of theoretical and practical implications. It includes a new explanation for family business behavior, a unified framework for explaining capitalist varieties, a guide for institutional reform, and a comparative examination of three dynamic Asian economies that provides important insights to students, scholars, and people in business.

Essays demonstrate how to reduce the entry cost ot North American businesses trying to penetrate East Asian markets.

Professor Yoshihara, an international expert on the Southeast Asian economies, looks beyond the causes of the current crisis to discuss what can be done to build a dynamic economy in Asia to ensure prosperity for the future. He takes the viewpoint that the only way to achieve this is to promote integration into the global economy through free trade and free capital movement. He puts forward a convincing argument that government intervention is not the way forward and has in fact helped cause the present crisis. But a prosperous future is possible, he argues, by renovating institutions and adapting new attitudes. A most timely book with lessons for other parts of the world as well as for Southeast Asia.

Professor Yoshihara, an expert on the Southeast Asian economies, looks beyond the causes of the late 1990s crisis to discuss what can be done to build a dynamic economy in Asia to ensure prosperity in the future. He believes the promotion of integration into the global economy will achieve this.

This collection examines the historically and geographically specific form of economic organization of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and how it has adapted to the different historical and socio-political contexts of Southeast Asian countries. Moving beyond cultural explanations and traits to focus on the process of evolution and dynamism of situated practices, it argues that Chinese Capitalism is rapidly becoming a form of ‘hybrid capitalism’ and embodies the interdependent of culturally and institutionally specific dynamics at local and regional level, evolving and adapting to different institutional contexts and politico-economic conditions in the host Asian economies. This text also explores the social organization and political economy of the so-called overseas Chinese by examining the changing dynamism of Chinese capitalism in relation to forces of globalization. Focusing on key actors, primarily Chinese entrepreneurs in their business practices, and situated practices as well as cultural, political, social and economic factors under globalizing conditions, it provides providing a broad understanding without fixating or homogenizing Chinese capitalism, contributing to the understanding of the contexts that give rise to the emergence and transformation of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia.

Market Cultures examines the spectacular growth of capitalist enterprise among overseas Chinese and Southeast Asians. It does so, not through formal models, but by way of the varied cultures and organizations in which Asian capitalism is embedded. Eschewing talk of a uniform Asian miracle, the book shows that there existed complex precedents for