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Modernity, development and representation: International transfers of western management expertise in Malaysia

Vanessa C. M Chio, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

Inspired by writings from anthropology, postcolonial studies, and sociology highlighting the situatedness of modern disciplinary knowledges, this dissertation explores alternative possibilities for understanding, researching, and representing knowledge in the international and cross-cultural arena. Through its focus on transfers of management knowledge and expertise, this dissertation investigates the specific intersections among culture, knowledge, and practice informing received understandings about transfers as a globalization process. The methodologies of institutional ethnography and multivocality, which ‘write-in’ multiplicity and social particularities, are used to explore and problematize these intersections. Within this project, Malaysia is a theoretical and empirical space for investigating these representational, methodological, and textual issues. ^ Research was undertaken in Malaysia for a year at two electronics multinationals and several government, statutory and academic institutions. Data were drawn from observations, interviews, and a variety of secondary materials. Findings indicate that knowledge transfer is a process marked by a series of translations, appropriations, and reinterpretations, rather than the literal or linear transmission of knowledge that is usually assumed. The project shows how concepts and practices transferred, such as TQM, are constantly changing, producing a multiplicity of meanings, practices and identities, and reconstituting a series of shifting simultaneities. ^ Informed by local culture, history, social locations, and local knowledges, this project challenges the assumption that Others are knowable, and ‘transferability’ is possible. It does so through a focus on issues governing research process, and by highlighting concerns about representation and voice. It situates engagements between Self and Other in terms of practices and relations of knowledge, power, knowers, and known. Of particular significance is the project's attentiveness to the researcher-self as an agent of knowledge/power. This attentiveness re-situates knowledge in terms of ‘who speaks’ and ‘what for’. ^ Through this focus on relations and engagements, knowledge and power, representation and voice, the project provides a framework and a methodology for reconstituting a form of knowing and doing which is accountable and able to re-situate and problematize ‘differences’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘change’ as these concepts are traditionally represented in the managerial literature. ^

Subject Area

Archaeology|Management|Industrial engineering

Recommended Citation

Chio, Vanessa C. M, "Modernity, development and representation: International transfers of western management expertise in Malaysia" (2000). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9978484.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9978484

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