Organizational Literature, Asian

Conceptual Overview

Asia comprises many countries with different cultural, economic, geographic, political, and social spheres. Geographic and demographic factors feature very strongly vis-à-vis specific nations, ranging from those with vast land surfaces and huge populations, such as China, to relatively compact territories and less populous city-states, such as Singapore. The degree to which nations have experienced economic development and the time over which they have done so may also be crucial. An evaluation of the direction of Asian economies and their managements in terms of the late-development effect was proposed by Ng and Warner. It breaks down the whole set of countries in Asia into two main sets, namely, the more developed economies on one hand and the less developed countries on the other. In addition, instead of invoking a crude economic determinism, it may be suggested that there is a subtle link between the cultural distinctiveness of nation-states and their business and economic performance. Also, Child attempted to synthesize the low-context approach (based on material resources, such as the economic or technological) with the high-context approach (based on ideational and institutional components) in order to explain crossnational and cross-cultural organizational differences.

As Warner claimed, there is no one consistently uniform culture in Asia that binds the countries found in that continent together. However, there are “family resemblances,” in both historical legacies and common traits. A cluster of countries with apparently similar characteristics has performed very well for a sustained time, and these countries share Confucianism as a common feature.

As Zhu wrote, fundamental traditional thinking in most parts of east and Southeast Asia was influenced by ancient Chinese philosophies, predominantly by Confucianism. Confucius (551–479 BC) developed a set of teachings based on absolute respect for tradition and on a carefully ranked hierarchy founded on primary relationships between members of families and between leaders (or rulers) and their subjects. Zhu and Warner identified Daoism as another influential school. The founding father of Daoism, Lao Zi (6th century BC), introduced the idea of yielding to the primordial ways of the universe, which contains the polar complements [Page 1109]of yin and yang. The third influential school with regard to business and management is the general area of war strategies (bing fa). As Zhu and Warner wrote in 2004, bing fa was developed for military purposes and has since been applied to almost all human interactions. These aspects of traditional thinking have had a profound influence on the formation and practices of modern managerial paths found in Asia.

To identify the diversity of organizational literature among Asian countries, eight countries may be taken to represent both developed and less developed paths in terms of their societal changes, organizational culture, managerial behavior, and managerial value. These eight countries are China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam.

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