THE BUSINESS IDEOLOGIES OF CHINESE MANAGERS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to study the business ideologies of Chinese managers (upper management) in Singapore, The managers have been selected on the basis of a systematic sampling of all the managers found in manufacturing firms listed in the Annual Census of Industrial Production 1972, mailing list. Broadly, our findings have revealed that the ideologies of the managers vary according to certain characteristics of the managers, for example their age and education. The young, high educated and the old, low educated managers tend to have different ideological beliefs, This we argued is probably due to the differences in social climate experienced by the young, high educated, and the old, low educated managers in their socialization process. In addition, we have argued that our findings reflect Singapore as a society in transition. Furthermore, we have also maintained that the impact of certain variables, for example education may not be as powerful as the socio-cultural climate of the managers in shaping their ideologies on the whole. We have found that we cannot apply the organising principles of ideologies of the managers in the industrialized West (e.g. United States) to the Chinese managers in Singapore. We found that the configuration of ideological elements amongst the Chinese managers differ from those of say, the American or the British managers. This suggests that there are a variety of possible ways in which the ideologies of managers may be structured, depending on the socio-cultural milieu of the managers. Paternalism which may be traced to certain Chinese cultural values has been found to be important in our study, especially amongst the older, less educated, owner-entrepreneurs found in relatively small firms. If Managerialism is considered to be predominantly the ideology of an industrialized, capitalistic society, then, paternalism is an important factor in accounting for the ‘Managerial’ tendencies amongst the older, less educated, owner-entrepreneurs. We have argued that this may probably be due to common elements present in both traditional paternalism and the Western Managerial ideology of an industrialised society. However, what has surprised us is that paternalism is also fairly important for a third of the younger, high educated managers, and this may probably explain these managers' preference for Managerial ideology, which essentially advocates looking into the welfare of the employees, customers and the public. This finding is interesting as generally the younger, high educated managers tend to be profit-oriented, in the Classical economics sense. The outcome of our findings suggests that it is not a wise step merely to borrow Western managerial ideas and practice and drill our local managers with these concepts. A better approach would be to expose our local managers to the varieties of management ideas and practices and then to tap carefully and intelligently from the existing stock of knowledge to suit our socio-cultural context. Perhaps, we should go beyond merely adapting Western management ideas and practice to suit our local context. It would be more worthwhile to institutionalize certain features of our socio-cultural milieu in management, at the same time be selective in the use of existing Western management concepts and practice. A first step to realizing this goal would be to inculcate in our managers, which are predominantly Chinese in Singapore, an appreciation of some of the traditional-familial values in management education, We are further suggesting on the basis of our findings, that a society which is in the process of modernization and industrialization does not necessarily mean and should not mean discarding away all of the traditional values on which the society has been built on. For any social developmental programme to be successful, it has to take into consideration the important aspect of the sooio-cultural milieu of the society.