Is there a Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism?

Abstract

The economic miracle of the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia has been attributed to their unique economic culture forged from Confucian thought and the emigration experience. However, this Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism (SOCC) hypothesis, based largely on qualitative research, has not been validated through quantitative work. This paper provides, for the first time, empirical evidence from a values survey and experiment which show that only some of the hypothesised SOCC values and behaviours differentiate the Chinese from less economically successful ethnic groups in Malaysia. While we find no evidence that Confucian values explain the success of the Overseas Chinese we do find it may lie in their (a) more conductive work values and (b) greater intra-ethnic cooperativeness, both accentuated by the emigration experience.

What Are We Explaining? A Review and Agenda on Initiating, Engaging, Performing, and Contextualizing Entrepreneurship

“…Another stream of studies has investigated differences in groups in terms of ethnicity (U.S.-based studies) or immigration status (Europe-based studies) in terms of entry (G. B. Fairchild, 2008), behavior (Chuah, Hoffmann, Ramasamy, & Tan, 2016), personality (Aboal & Veneri, 2016), push/pull into entrepreneurship (Constant & Zimmermann, 2006), self-employment rates (Fairlie, 2004), and repeat entrepreneurship (Westhead, Ucbasaran, Wright, & Binks, 2005). Additional groupings to highlight distinctions include corporate versus independent (Kacperczyk, 2012) and solo self-employed versus employer entrepreneurs (Medrano-Adán, Salas-Fumás, & Sanchez-Asin, 2015).…”

Understanding Malay and Chinese work ethics in Malaysia through proverbs

“…As one of the world's oldest cultures, the Chinese also have an impressive collection of proverbs encapsulating folk wisdom. Despite their long-standing presence in the country, the majority of Chinese Malaysians have held on to cultural traditions (Chuah et al, 2016), including the wide array of folk literature, of which proverbs (yan yu; 谚语) are a critical component (Peow, 2015(Peow, , 2016. In fact, the study of Chinese proverbs is a compulsory component of the vernacular Chinese school curriculum in Malaysia.…”

“…To avoid confusion, they are therefore excluded from our discussion here. For the sake of comparative discussion, when we refer to ‘the Chinese’, we refer specifically to the Chinese diaspora community of Malaysia, though it is worth highlighting that the historical, demographic, economic and political context of the Chinese Malaysians closely mirrors those of major Chinese communities found elsewhere (Chuah et al, 2016).…”

The Impact Of Confucianism On Interpersonal Communication Among Younger Generations

“…According to Chuah et al (2016) Wu (2015) stated that education in the modern era of China, Confucius teaching is still adopted as a symbol representing Chinese culture. Scholars affirmed Confucianism is to maintain and develop Confucian thoughts among the followers (Tang, 2015).…”