This thesis provides a theoretical foundation explaining the long-standing paradox of Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneurs' highly successful economic behaviour. Combining Western and Eastern philosophies, this study examines the role of culture in prescribing beliefs and practices that affect human efforts to self-actualise, notably the motivations underlying these entrepreneurs' business practices. It applies Aristotle's notion of phronesis (practical knowledge or wisdom) to organisation studies (as suggested by Tsoukas and Cummings, 1997, and Flyvbjerg, 2006). The enquiry employs the concept of self-organising systems (drawn from complexity theory) to ground the Confucian organismic conception of the cosmos (Needham 1956).
The underlying empirical study investigated Chinese entrepreneurs' strategic actions in a particular field (Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia), an environment characterised by complexity, uncertainty and social instability. Primary data was collected through extensive field interviews, developed into narrative case studies and analysed using the explanation building technique (Yin 2003) based on Confucian modelling of social interactions to explain informants' trajectories in their life course.
The findings support the Confucian organismic conception of the cosmos, which emphasises the notions of complexity, continuity, irreversibility and unpredictability. When the future is highly unpredictable, people learn and progress by recourse to learned strategies that were effective in their own adaptive success in the past. Especially when facing tension or instability, the studied entrepreneurs' decision making and strategic actions were spontaneous, without explicit predetermined goals, but based on their pragmatic value judgment, phronesis (practical knowledge) of a situation and the capability of the individual actors within their social networks to control it. When faced with a higher level of instability (especially under extreme constraints), their actions were instinctively revolutionary, often requiring a jump to a new level of network with higher complexity (Holland 1998), returning them to a normal condition. The entrepreneurs' wulun-based social roles and guanxi-based social institutions legitimised all such decisions. Their strategies were therefore contextual and pragmatic, driven by the actors' instinct to enhance the survivability of the individual, family and society.
Chinese culture embraced the natural state of complexity, dynamism and unpredictability of the cosmos by establishing Confucian social institutions, specifically wulun and guanxi, that are learned and practiced from an early age and subsequently internalised as habitual and dispositional practices, including in business. Wulun functions as a social control mechanism for constraining people's behaviour and at the same time allowing people to increase their ability to adapt in order to self-organise in different contexts, whereas guanxi is practiced as a strategy to create a pool of interlocking resources that provides a feedback loop promoting continuous self-actualisation and self-transformation. Identity is associated with progression and transformation; when the self is developed, the family and the larger society are also transformed.
The contribution of this thesis is its integration of Western and Eastern, natural and social, complexity theory and organisation studies concepts to illuminate the relationship between the self-actualising behaviour of entrepreneurs and the cultural context within which they operate.
Keywords: phronesis, complexity, Confucianism, self-organisation, self-actualisation, wulun, guanxi, pragmatism
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/256953 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Sunaryo, Lenny, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Otago. Department of Management |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://policy01.otago.ac.nz/policies/FMPro?-db=policies.fm&-format=viewpolicy.html&-lay=viewpolicy&-sortfield=Title&Type=Academic&-recid=33025&-find), Copyright Lenny Sunaryo |
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