Is there a Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism?

Swee Hoon Chuah, Robert Hoffmann (), Bala Ramasamy and Jonathan Tan
Additional contact information
Swee Hoon Chuah: RMIT University
Robert Hoffmann: RMIT University

Small Business Economics, 2016, vol. 47, issue 4, No 14, 1095-1118

Abstract: Abstract The economic miracle of the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia has been attributed to their unique economic culture forged from Confucian thought and the emigration experience. However, this Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism (SOCC) hypothesis, based largely on qualitative research, has not been validated through quantitative work. This paper provides, for the first time, empirical evidence from a values survey and experiment which show that only some of the hypothesised SOCC values and behaviours differentiate the Chinese from less economically successful ethnic groups in Malaysia. While we find no evidence that Confucian values explain the success of the Overseas Chinese we do find it may lie in their (a) more conductive work values and (b) greater intra-ethnic cooperativeness, both accentuated by the emigration experience.

Keywords: Chinese Diaspora; Cultural values; Family businesses; Enterprise; Questionnaire; Experiment; C72; C91; F22; L26; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-016-9746-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:47:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s11187-016-9746-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-016-9746-5

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().