Assessing the Look East Policy: Moving Beyond Work Culture and Ethic

Abstract

The Look East Policy (LEP) was introduced in 1981 after former Prime Minister Mahathir’s East and West competing perspectives contributed to a nationalist enthusiasm to turn Malaysia into a new industrialized country using Japan and Korea as models. This paper reassesses LEP within the framework of policy evaluation and addresses its long-term impact, with a few twists. For the purpose of this article, only Japan will be discussed as a model for LEP. This article argues that LEP has contributed to Malaysia’s progress in becoming an industrialized country. This research applies assessment indicators such as input, output, processes, performance, and cost considerations to evaluate the achievements made by LEP in terms of work culture, ethics, investments, and human capital development. Intensive interviews were conducted with 30 respondents from various organizations with similar profiles, each contributing experience such as studying, living, working, co-operating and collaborating with Japanese counterparts. Themes were developed based on sequential questions occurring in the narrative interviews’ transcriptions. This study shares respondents’ voices and it reports them as they are. The findings show that LEP produced both advantages and disadvantages, but the former seem to blend in better in organizations, individuals’ lives, and an incremental effort to establish a strong industrialized state

Educational Theories and Issues in Human Capital Development

“…The Malaysian Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has once introduced the "Look East" policy in 1981, whereby Japan and Korea are set as examples for Malaysian employees (Overtoom, 2014). However, as the time passed, this policy has been viewed as unsuccessful (Overtoom, 2014) as many Malaysians find the policy to be too burdening to be applied in the country (Talib@Khalid, Sulaiman, Isa, & Saad, 2013). This issue is a big issue to be looked into, as the basic ethical values are important in ensuring the success of an organization or an individual.…”

From family firm to Japanese OEM in tacit knowledge innovation: a case study of Sin Kwang plastic resources in Malaysia

“…The implementation of the foreign business culture such as Look East policy (LEP, 1981(LEP, -2007, has resulted in an important structural shift among Malaysians' family firms such as SKP where Japanese model of organization, technical or training programs, work ethics, cultural influence, education and MNCs, are promoted (Bhaskaran and Sukumaran, 2007;Lumpkin and Brigham, 2011;Lee and Gomez, 2014). Despite various research on LEP (Khalid et al, 2013), there is a lack of literature on how the following generations have to face different challenges due to alterations in government public policy.…”