Culture and network institutions in Hong Kong: a hierarchy of perspectives. A response to Wilkinson: 'Culture, institutions and business in East Asia.'

Organization Studies, Spring, 1998 by Sid Lowe

Barry Wilkinson's (1996) criticisms of the culturalist and institutionalist explanations of the structure of business in East Asian 'miracle' economies requires a response and a solution to the problems identified by his critique. Wilkinson regards both accounts as partial, deterministic and, at times, misleading. More specifically, both are portrayed as denying a role for human agency and neglecting political aspects of the design and maintenance of business structures.

This paper takes issue with some detail of the submissions in Wilkinson's critique, but generally accepts that, as separate approaches, culturalist and institutionalist explanations are partial. To resolve the problem, an attempt is made to synthesize culturist and institutional approaches into an outline theoretical framework. The submission is that the synergies resulting from this synthesis address most of Wilkinson's coherent criticisms. The paper examines the influence of culture at macro- and meso-level on business activity in Hong Kong. The outline theoretical framework is also constituted by combinations of models of structure\co-ordination from formal 'market' and 'hierarchy' perspectives and the informal 'network' perspective (Thompson et al. 1991).

Consequences for research are then discussed and some methodological implications are reviewed in terms of the priorities in examining the issues that arise from the outline theoretical framework and the possibilities for developing a more encompassing approach.

Wilkinson's Critique of Cultural Approaches: Problems and Responses

Wilkinson submits that the culturalist and institutionalist explanations of the structure of business in East Asian 'miracle' economies are determined by pre-modern belief systems or traditions, and draw selectively upon the work of Max Weber. These approaches are accused of partiality, of misleading us and of legitimating the East Asian business elite. They are also accused of giving deterministic accounts which deny a role for human agency, so neglecting the importance of interests, power and ideology (Wilkinson 1996: 421).

Most studies involving values within Burrell and Morgan's (1979) paradigms of 'functionalism' and 'interpretivism' are concentrated firmly within the 'sociology of regulation', and, as such, essentially concern the 'problem of order'. As a result, the first source of criticism of cultural studies comes from the 'radical change' theorists who point to forms of coercion arising from the control and manipulation of value systems by elites to maintain their power and the status quo. Wilkinson can be seen as providing a form of intellectual heckling from a 'radical change' perspective which hinders advancement of understanding the East Asian 'miracle' within social science. Such destructive critique from one paradigmatic location of another problematic is a simple task and 'all too easy' (Burrell and Morgan 1979: 395).

In complaining of the preponderance of pre-modern influence upon East Asian business structures, Wilkinson's main objection (1996) appears to be the problem of socio-cultural determinism. In so far as any consensus exists amongst so-called culturalists, it is not of a simple determinism, but of a complex interdeterminism between influences of pre-modern values, modern values, formal institutional and informal institutional norms, and ideological and political interests (including imperialism and global capitalism).

Within this tenuous consensus is the idea that culture is a collective ideational domain or 'mental program' (Hofstede 1984) which parallels and co-determines a more evident social domain involving structure and action. This conception is best described using the mental metaphor of culture as a 'mind' and social activity as a 'brain' (Brownstein 1995: 330). The brain is tangible and more easily examinable, but the mind is intangible and difficult to examine empirically. However, examination of one without the other is partial, while examination of both simultaneously is problematical because: 'Social phenomena are produced by the interaction of minds. But the process of interaction immediately produces a change in the mental characteristics of those who are parties to the social interaction' (Cohen 1968: 13) and so social phenomena are not reducible to mental products alone. They are wholes created and composed of elements, which, in turn, obtain their characteristics from the whole. Consequently, the simple either - or antinomy between 'culture' and 'institution' implied in Wilkinson's (1996) paper somewhat oversimplifies how many 'culturalists' and some 'institutionalists' see the world. It seems that Wilkinson's mistake follows Hodder's fallacy which is to see culturalists as a homogeneous group of objectivist 'scientific' determinists who regard culture as something of a unidimensional phenomenon (Hodder: 1996:12) and who appear incapable of understanding the dynamic and 'multidimensional' Chinese (Hodder 1996:15).

The literature on the relationship between culture and economy (work and organization) is often contradictory, reflecting different conceptions of what 'culture' is. Many distinctions between conceptions of culture are evident and a rough analytical distinction between constitutive forms (categories, typifications and scripts) and forms that are predominantly regulatory (norms, values, routines) is one of the most useful (DiMaggio 1994: 27). The former approach, favoured by most anthropologists, emphasizes culture and economy as mutually generative and difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish from each other since culture is seen as providing systems of meaning which define actors' interests, so enabling economic action, which in turn generates categories and understanding in an iterative process. The latter approach, favoured by most economists, is to treat economic behaviour and culture as analytically distinct and to stress how culture constrains and configures the individuals' economic efforts (DiMaggio 1994: 28). In this view, the assumption appears to be that the relationship between culture and economy is not mutually generative, but involving a dependent and independent variable. The main contention is often, which is the latter and which the former. I submit that Wilkinson's criticism of culturists is actually a critique of regulatory culturists, and therefore that Wilkinson ignores the heterogeneous nature of so-called culturists.