Bøker utgitt av National University of Singapore Press

Academic analysis of business ethics in Southeast Asia. Taking cues from the Japanese concept of ethical or stakeholder capitalism, this book demonstrates how the business activities of firms in Thailand and Indonesia are guided by their perceptions of morality in society and their concerns about the environment. The authors explore the likelihood that foreign influences contributed to the development of such management philosophies, for example through the expansion of Japanese subsidiary firms in the 1980s or the spread of foreign articulations of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) since the 2000s. Companies in both countries may exercise a degree of pragmatism in how they develop these activities. As the authors reveal, the perceptions of morality in business that have shaped many entrepreneurs and companies in Thailand and Indonesia are their responses to the dynamic political, social, and economic factors that have formed the business environments of both countries.

A history of regionalism in Indonesia. Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, is a vast archipelago with a relatively short history of unified rule. The devolution of power to the provinces after 1998 has meant that regional social traditions and historical legacies are powerful forces in contemporary politics. South Sulawesi (Southwest Celebes), a crucial and understudied region of Indonesia, is no exception. Starting in 1669, tensions between the Dutch East India Company's cosmopolitan port town of Makassar and the aggressive, competitive dynasties of the interior began to shape peninsula politics. A strong ethnic Chinese community embodied the town's wide horizons, while in the countryside, the nobility's engagement with Islam ranged from symbiotic co-optation to hostility. Religion, rather than politics, framed the main challenges to authority. Finally integrated in 1965, the city and province remain among the most clientelist in the country, their politics personalized and transactional. Nevertheless, the large city of Makassar is booming. Dutch indirect rule and neocolonial strategies entrenched the power of local elites, who resisted changes imposed by Batavia or, after 1950, by Jakarta. In this history, Heather Sutherland's long-term perspective avoids dichotomies like continuity and change or autonomy and dependence, recognizing that trade-offs have always been fundamental to interaction within and between town and country and between the province and distant capitals.