Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

A JAPANESE FIRM IN MALAYSIA 119
course. These six (four Chinese, one Malay, one Indian) constitute the present
local senior management group, both in the sense of their long service and because
they occupy senior positions, including those of production manager, engineering
manager, personnel manager and sales manager. Their experiences demonstrate
the transfer of the principle of seniority in management policies of Japanese
ventures overseas and also the lack of emphasis placed on formal educational
status.
In the 1970s, the managerial levels were top-heavy with Chinese. This can be
attributed to a number of factors. There were few Malay science graduates,
especially those willing to work in the private sector. If Malays could not attain the
status and security of a job in the public service, then money was their priority. 16
Income levels are critical for urban Malays, not only for private status and
personal consumption, but also because of obligations to support various kin,
through gifts of money, or board, food and educational allowances to children from
home villages also seeking a prosperous future in the city. When one member of
the extended kin group attains middle-class status, he or she is used as a
springboard to help other relatives do the same. Pressure is put on such
individuals to maintain their high level of income in order to help the whole family
advance economically and socially. Hence, job hopping for higher pay was
common among Malays who did enter the private sector.
For Malays in the 1970s, the need for money was linked with the need for that
money to come from a secure, high-status occupation. The status of one’s job
accrued to all the relatives in the village as well, and this was always a
consideration for the individual Malay manager who may have become the first
member of his or her family to gain a tertiary qualification. Having a sideline
business to earn money like the Chinese would not satisfy job frustrations. Nor did
the Malays have an established socio-cultural milieu in which to do this until the
latter half of the NEP era when the preferential loans granted to Malays under the
NEP, and the entrepreneurial ethos it promoted, created many new Malay
entrepreneurs as well as first-generation professionals.
The growing number of large firms needing professional managers in the NEP
era gave educated Malays new opportunities beyond the comparatively low-status,
low-paid occupations formerly available to them in the immediate post-colonial era
as clerks or members of the police or armed forces, and so on. Because of the
need for large companies to employ a significant percentage of Malays at higher
managerial levels, Malays also had more mobility than non-Malay professionals.
The Japanese were also able to appeal successfully to Chinese Confucian
notions of loyalty to the company after the Chinese had been trained in Japan.
Compared with Malays, the Chinese were more willing to take salaried jobs in the
private sector, and to stay in one position rather than job hop, because of their
ability to satisfy the frustrations of working in one particular company through
sideline activities. Under NEP, Chinese professionals had fewer prospects of job
mobility than their Malay counterparts.