Abstract
Social scientists concerned with economic development have long contended that kinship ties and loyalty to members of one’s ethnic group impede entrepreneurship. According to this view, the use of personalistic or particularistic ties to recruit managers and workers blocks ethnic and kin-based firms from growth. Such firms are doomed to remain inefficient, small in size, and ill-equipped to seize new opportunities for expansion. See (Ogburn and Nimkoff 1958; United Nations 1951, 1955; Wolf 1955; Nimkoff 1960; and Levy 1966).
I dedicate this chapter to the memory of my friend and co-author sociologist Janet Salaff, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, who passed away unexpectedly November 10, 2010. This chapter by Landa & Salaff (1986) is a slightly revised version of Landa and Salaff’s (1980) paper. We presented our 1980 joint paper at the Structural Analysis Workshop Series, Sociology Department, University of Toronto, 8 February, 1980. See also Acknowledgements.
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Acknowledgements
We submitted our paper (Landa & Salaff 1986) to the American Sociological Review. Our paper was rejected by the reviewer on grounds that we should use the Marxist class-based paradigm rather than the use of our transaction costs paradigm. This shows how far ahead of the sociological literature our 1986 paper was. For the 1986 version of our paper, Janet Landa wishes to acknowledge a grant from the Ford Foundation which allowed her to do fieldwork on Hokkien merchants in 1969. Salaff wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Mellon Foundation for Advanced Chinese Language Training, which enabled her to undertake the translation of the autobiography of Tan Kah Kee. The assistance of Professor A.H.E. Ward is gratefully acknowledged. She also wishes to thank the family of the late Mr. Tan Kah Kee for their generous assistance with printed materials and oral histories of Tan Kah Kee and his colleagues and in reviewing an earlier version (1980) of the manuscript. The final responsibility for the accuracy of these data and views expressed in the paper remain with us. Comments on our earlier version were made by Mr. Tai Huai Ching and by Professors Ray Breton, Jeffrey Reitz, and Nancy Howell, to whom we express our appreciation.
*As this chapter is heading for the press in 2015, I have proofread the paper, and corrected a few errors in the 1986 version of the paper. I also wish to thank my brother Dr. William Tai Yuen (2013, chapter 5) for providing some useful comments which I took into account in this final version of the Landa-Salaff (1986) paper/chapter 11 of my book.
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Landa, J.T., Salaff, J.W. (2016). The Socio-Economic Functions of Kinship and Ethnic Ties in the Establishment and Growth of the Tan Kah Kee Family Firm in Singapore: A Transaction Costs Approach. In: Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54019-6_11
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