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

134 WENDY A.SMITH
not specific to the Japanese firm and would have been experienced in any large
foreign firm. However, the experience of employment in the Japanese system did
have specific consequences for the Malaysian managerial class as outlined above.
Workers too experienced benefits specific to the Japanese firm. They had the
opportunity to be promoted from the level of worker to manager. They
experienced security of tenure, allowing them to make commitments to large
projects like the purchase of a home or a car. The Japanese were less strict with
shift schedules, allowing them to run side businesses and earn a second income in
the informal sector (Smith 1988:455). Thus their loyalties were diverted away from
the company and from class solidarity to the pursuit of self-interested economic
gain in the short term. Their working-class consciousness was subverted by a
preoccupation with consumption and they relied on vertical links of patronage
within their ethnic groups to fulfil these desires through access to promotions in the
organisation or licences for petty trading activities outside it. In that sense, the
Japanese management system promoted their social mobility both through their
participation in the company organisation with its stable career and promotion
prospects and in the wider range of economic activities it allowed them to engage
in.
In this way, employment in the Japanese firm gave Malaysians of all classes and
ethnic groups a foothold into the consumption-dominated lifestyles of Malaysia’s
‘new rich’. Different individuals used the resources available in different ways to
maximise their status: Sanusi chose to consolidate his status as a patron figure in
his ethnic group; Rahman chose to express his status through piety, even in the
modern organisational context. The Japanese organisational structures allowed
for these variations. Ultimately, considerations of highly politicised ethnicity
constituted the basic reference point, but state-validated ‘Malayness’ could still be
expressed through patronage or piety within the Japanese firm.
Notes
All cost and income figures presented in this chapter are expressed in Malaysian
ringgit and were current for 1990 when the exchange rate was MYR$2=A$1.
1 The members of the new rich whom I focus on in this chapter are the professional
managers in a Japanese joint venture in Malaysia and, to a lesser degree, the
workers whose stable incomes allow them to aspire to middle-class lifestyles and
replicate them to some extent.
2 All members of the plural society are Malaysians, and strictly, we should refer to
them as such, or as ‘Malaysians of Chinese ethnicity’, ‘Malaysians of Indian
ethnicity’, and so on. ‘Malaysian Chinese’, ‘Malaysian Indians’ and ‘Malays’ is
another way of referring to the members of these distinct ethnic groups. In this
chapter, I am using the local mode of expression: ‘Malays’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indians’, but
this should not be taken to mean people with Chinese or Indian nationality.
3 Ingenious arrangements are made to accommodate ethnic factors in a class context.
As the key expression of their Muslim identity, Malays will not eat pork under any