published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

The object of this empirical study is to clarify, consolidate and build on various conflicting research findings on the relationships among ownership structure, corporate governance, and corporate performance using data from 149 Singapore public listed companies. This study contributes to our understanding of these relationships by examining the total continuum of ultimate ownership structures measured by control rights within a single economic and legal research context and various performance measures. Adapting the approach advocated by Agrawal and Knoeber (1996), the seven governance control variables used in this study are self monitoring by the inside manager-shareholder, monitorings by outside blockholders, institutional investors, government shareholders, independent directors, market for CEO, and bank and financial institutions. This study firstly shows an interesting pattern of interrelationships among the corporate governance mechanisms which evolve so as to minimise systemic agency costs if the corporation has in place an optimal mix of the governance control mechanisms. The more general pattern of the interrelationship is that of substitution while the two special cases of complementary interdependence exist.

In spite of widespread critiques about the neoliberalisation of higher education and its production of citizenship in relation to the market, transformation of students into profit-maximising individuals, and the vitalisation of a self-enterprising subjectivity, many of these claims remain under-examined with respect to cultural production. The objective of this research is to explore the neoliberal production of middle-class citizenship through the lens of educated non-elite local youth in Singapore. By combining geographical, sociological and anthropological insights about education and youth, I develop a theoretically informed ethnographic case study to examine how this segment of young people reproduce themselves as middle-class citizens. The research is based on eleven months of fieldwork at a local private institute of higher education, where I hanged around, talked to, and observed Singaporean young people between ages 18 and 25 studying for their first degree. The ethnographic materials are written up into four substantive papers, demonstrating the ways in which educated non-elite Singaporean youth in private higher education engage with state disseminated ideas around neoliberal accumulation and human capital formation. I argue that these students draw on class-based sensibilities and feelings to produce vibrant forms of normativities, subjectivities, and politics that pose a challenge to dominant assumptions of a "hollowed out" citizenship under neoliberalism. The research makes two overall interventions in geographic and social scientific writings about neoliberal restructuring of higher education and its implications for youth citizenship. First, it cautions against a straightforward claim that neoliberal technologies of control have extended market values into citizenship subjectivity and, with it, the erosion of progressive political projects. Second, it provides a much-needed analysis of middle-class citizenship formation among young people caught at the losing end of a diversifying educational landscape.