Session 100: Embedded Enterprise in China, Japan and Singapore: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Organizer: Kathryn C. Ibata-Arens, DePaul University

Chair and Discussant: Gary Herrigel, University of Chicago

This panel sets out to examine the historical embeddedness of economic activity in comparative perspective. We do this by showing political, social and cultural contingencies affecting economic outcomes—analyzing enterprise from the level of small firms to inter-firm networks to large corporations—in China, Singapore and Japan. The empirical contributions of the papers respond in part to existing problematics of dichotomy, heuristic, and linearity inherent in current approaches to studying enterprise activity—even those that address embeddedness. Papers draw on perspectives from anthropology, history, political science and sociology. These papers have been selected for potential publication in a forthcoming special issue of the journal Enterprise and Society, Oxford University Press. Papers were drawn from a larger group presented at the Princeton-Northwestern Junior Scholars’ Workshop on the Embedded Enterprise. A theoretical introduction piece for the special issue frames the individual contributions and provides a backdrop to debate and discussion. We hope that the panel prompts further discussion and ideally a blueprint for a vibrant new research agenda on the embedded enterprise with resonance across social science disciplines.

Multiple Embeddedness in Post-Socialist Corporate Reform: Theory and Evidence from the Chinese Oil and Petrochemical Industries

Kun-Chin Lin, University of California, Berkeley

Crucial to the success of China’s transition to the market economy is the central government’s capacity for institutional innovation. Since 1997, Chinese politicians have sought to transform the governance of state-owned industries from administrative to corporate hierarchy, through a strategy of dis-embeddedness that aims to disrupt and replace preexisting social norms and exchange relations. However, socially dis-embedded institutions have generated sociopolitical contentions and unintended economic outcomes that point to alternative conceptions of authority and exchange relations at sub-national levels. Focusing on the recent restructuring of the oil and petrochemical sectors into national oil corporations, I examine failures in the implementation of cartelistic pricing, inter-firm contracting, wage differentiation, and workforce reduction measures. My cases suggest that China’s non-democratic political settings at the industrial and workplace levels tend to compound socially discombobulating processes of transition, thus undermining the formal design and functioning of nascent market institutions.

Rescuing Business through Transnationalism: Singapore Chinese Business and Nationalist Activities in the 1930s Great Depression

Huei-ying Kuo, State University of New York, Binghamton

This paper illustrates the interplay between Chinese business and nationalist activities in British colonial Singapore in the inter-war era (1919–1941). It shows that the surge of Chinese business-led nationalist activities in 1930s Singapore cannot be simplified as movements implanted from mainland China. These movements had their own rationale, which was associated with the economic interests that dominated Chinese enterprises in Singapore.

Singapore Chinese bourgeois nationalism emerged in the context of the expansion of Japanese business power in Southeast Asia from the mid-1910s. Chinese wholesaling and retailing system in the region was jeopardized. Particularly from the late 1920s, important trade of Singapore Chinese such as rubber manufactures and Oolong tea were threatened by similar imports from the Japanese Empire. Established Chinese elites developed an explicit allegiance towards Chinese nationalism as well as an anti-Japanese position. The first Chinese anti-Japanese nationalist campaign was organized in 1928 in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese military clashes in Jinan, China. Throughout the 1930s, fund-raising campaigns became the standard Chinese business response to the accelerating Sino-Japanese conflict. At the same time, "buy Chinese national products" movements were mobilized to appeal to fellow Chinese to support their businesses. Because major Chinese businesses were embedded in transnational China-Southeast Asian networks, these nationalist activities therefore entailed a transnational rhetoric. The transnational rhetoric was present in the challenge against the Japanese but not the British interests, as well as utilized in redefining Chinese national products in an extra-territorial sense.

Embedded Colonialism: The Commodification of Emotion, Sexuality, and Ethnicity of Korean Nightclub Hostesses in Japan

Haeng-ja Chung, Colorado College

This paper explores colonial practices in contemporary Japan by using the case study of Korean nightclub hostesses in Japan. Colonialism remains intact among Koreans in Japan even though Japan’s official colonial occupation of Korea (1910–1945) is assumed to have ended more than a half century ago. I focus on the emotional, sexual, and ethnic work of Korean nightclub hostesses. In doing so, I draw on models of emotional labor (emotion management of both others and self) (Hoschchild), sex work (Chapkis), and impression management (Goffman).

Studying Koreans at hostess clubs illuminates the conflicting colonial processes of marginalization and assimilation of the "other." Korean hostesses are required to perform the contradictory roles of both displaying Korean ethnic characteristics and "passing" as Japanese. While the customers "fetishize" the "Koreanness" of migrants, a persistent postcolonial reality forces resident Koreans suppress their ethnicity and pass as Japanese. The ethnography is enhanced using participant observation as a paid hostess, interviews, and archival data in several sites (e.g., Nagoya, Osaka, Los Angeles) over time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Dis-embedding from Hierarchy in Japan: The Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Entrepreneurs (SME Doyukai), 1947–1999

Kathryn C. Ibata-Arens, DePaul University

Until now the story of Japan’s post-war pyramid-like business organization has been told from the perspective of national bureaucrats and big business executives. In Japan’s pyramid the pinnacle of economic and political power resides in Tokyo conglomerates and elite ministries (METI, MOF). The image projected to the outside world has been of cooperative, trust-based relational contracting within which big business at the top "took care of its suppliers and subsidiaries below.

The story from the bottom, however, is often one of technology expropriation (of patentable technology), monopsony squeeze (e.g., unilateral cost-down demands) and the like. Firms unwilling to toe the line have been wholly excluded from access to the benefits reserved for those at the top of the pyramid (lucrative main bank financing, government funds, technological information). This paper offers a historical narrative of political struggle by independent-minded entrepreneurs in post-war Japan in building broad-based coalitions to avoid becoming embedded in these hierarchies while at the same time trying to obtain alternative sources of finance and technological know-how.

The most successful example of such efforts found in the SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) Doyukai. The SME Doyukai has somehow managed to remain completely independent from the state while most others have failed. This independence has not come without cost, and the association has gone through a number of institutional dilemmas in this regard. The paper analyzes these dilemmas over time and offers comparative lessons.