PhD thesis Acknowledgements, 2009

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My PhD thesis, entitled Swedish management in Singapore: a discourse analysis study (2009) will be printed within the week. In this post, I’d like to share with you the Acknowledgements section of my thesis. This section tells briefly, the story of how the PhD thesis began and the individuals who helped me put it together.

More about my PhD thesis can be found at cherylmariecordeiro.com. The public defense of the thesis will take place on Saturday, the 9th of May, 2009 at 10:00 hrs, Room T302, Arkeologen, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Gothenburg, Sweden.

The Invite to the thesis will be posted on my website shortly.

Acknowledgements

Photo for CMC © Kevin Dominic Cordeiro 2009.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro by Kevin Dominic Cordeiro, Kranji, Singapore

My PhD years at the University of Gothenburg and this thesis has had mentorship from numerous outstanding individuals both from within the university and outside of it. It is to these individuals, including the Scandinavian and Asian respondents that took part in my study, that my heartfelt gratitude and thanks go out to, for without their help, this thesis would not have seen its ISBN number.

First and foremost I would like to thank my parents Rita and Adrian Cordeiro and my brother Kevin, who through my childhood and study career had always encouraged me to follow my heart and inquisitive mind in any direction this took me. My parents provided me with a loving home, one where an academic mind was celebrated, and Kevin’s sharp sense of humour has been a gift in my life. If we ever had a family motto that would have been – If there’s a will, there’s a way – a philosophy of life I have been carrying with me every day.

I grew up in the Republic of Singapore. The history of this city state is not older than that I have followed much of its development myself, from its modest situation after its separation from Malaysia in 1965 towards becoming a small but modern state, with its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita ranking among the highest in the world. Singapore has accomplished this and several other milestones without basically any natural resources. In fact, Singapore does not even have enough natural freshwater resources to sustain its own population. I could not help but ask myself, how did Singapore make all this possible?

Singapore is also multi-cultural and multi-religious, as such, there was often some kind of celebration going on somewhere. The cultural beliefs and obligations were legion. My school- and classmates were Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians and Arabs etc, all living as far as I could tell, happily together. As I grew up, I was surprised to understand that this was not always the case in many other places of the world. Here again, I could not help but ask, how does Singapore handle the multi-faceted social fabric of its society?

Later, during my university years and while studying towards two separate Masters degrees I got to notice that there were many foreigners coming to Singapore to set up and run Asian market head offices. Among those were many Swedish organizations. It was obvious to me that these foreign companies were part of the what made Singapore a successful business hub.

Eventually my inquiring mind put me in contact with Jan-Erik Nilsson in Sweden who, being one of the founding fathers of the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III ship project, had a lot of thoughts on this subject.

It was our discussions around the peaceful and profitable historical Swedish – Asian trade adventures of days gone by and its modern continuation in Singapore that eventually led to the beginnings of this PhD thesis.

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When failure is success: a change of view in expatriate integration

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The job of the expatriate in international job transfers is hardly an easy transition. Most Scandinavian expatriate contracts in Singapore for example average 3 years, during which time, the employees, usually at managerial level, are supposed to make adjustments along several dimensions, both in the private and public domains.

International managers not only need to adjust to a new home, perhaps a new language, and new schools for the children if the family is in tow, but they are also expected to adjust into the new role within the organization and perform on the job.

If the ballpark figure is given at about a year to adjust to a foreign environment, then 3 years for the average expatriate contract, isn’t much time given to get things working smoothly, since as soon as you begin to feel comfortable in the new environment, it’s time to go home. Going home is not also always smooth sailing since you’re perhaps faced with a host of re-acculturation issues due to that you have gained new knowledge from the new environment and now cannot help but apply that new knowledge back home.

During the 1960s and up until about ten years ago, the majority body of literature that governed relocation and expatriate managers’ experience overseas equated their transition success with how far they’ve come to be integrated with the host country’s culture (Black, 1988; Janssens, 1995)

In speaking with Scandinavian respondents about their experience in socializing with Singaporeans, many of them mentioned that they felt marginalized and not at all integrated into the Singapore society. It didn’t seem to matter whether they were there for three years or in some cases, fifteen to twenty-six years. Disheartened and feeling not quite successful in the aspect of cross-cultural socializing, many said they felt ‘outside’ of the local system, some even mentioning that they felt more ‘Swedish’ or ‘Danish’ when they were in Asia, than when they were back in Scandinavia.

When it came to cross-cultural socializing, the organizations had office functions and staff dinner and dances, which they found a perfect opportunity to mingle with the locals, but apart from such events, they found themselves rarely socializing with the locals.
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The beginnings of profiling Scandinavian leaders in Asia: the 6 categories

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The experience of being and working in a foreign city is like a juxtaposition of realities. It’s difficult not to impose what you already know from before, to the here, now and the Other.
Photo by Doug Keyes, from his Becoming Language series.

In 2004, I had the opportunity to network and meet up with about 33 Swedish leaders (CEOs, MDs, regional managers, managers etc.) and their Asian counterparts. They all worked in Swedish related or Swedish owned organizations in Singapore, some of which being Ikea (I think almost all Singaporeans have something from Ikea these days, they have just opened a 2nd megastore on that tiny city island!), Sony Ericsson, Kvaerner E&C and ASSAB.

I was interested in the organization leadership profile since, as expatriates, most of the Scandinavians are already highly pressured to perform when they arrive at the Asian subsidiary. A standard 3 year working contract in Asia (which can be extended at the end of the 3 years if they wished), means there’s not much time for them as individuals and leaders of an organizatoin to adjust to the new culture, climate, food, people etc. and then get going on the job, showing performance results. Those with family might also have the family in tow, which means the added task of relocating the family, finding the right schools for the children, the right neighbourhood and ensure that the accompanying spouse doesn’t feel all too isolated in the new society.

The motivation for profiling Scandinavian leadership in Singapore came from casual coffee-shop talks, literally meeting up with Scandinavian friends whom I’ve known in Singapore for several years. In my café talks, I noticed that as a group of expatriates, they shared similar organization ideology, a certain point of view on life and how things worked. They also encountered similar problems such as language barriers, even though the administrative language in Singapore is English, and why it is that when an Asian says yes, s/he really means something else. And they find themselves spending a lot of effort and energy into understanding cultural issues such as politeness, the concept of face and more, in order to do business in Asia, to cooperate with their colleagues and keep employees satisfied.

But it wasn’t always an organization aspects that intrigued me but also off-handed social comments made, for example, on thoughts on how the average Singaporean would criticize and gossip about Singapore women, such as SPGs (Sarong Party Girls) who only date Caucasian men, but society at large would not lend a critical eye to the behaviour of Singapore men.

Hearing comments such as those has had the effect of making me feel like I’m looking through the looking glass. These perspectives were new to me and I found their points of view fun! It was conversations such as these that led to full fledged arranged interviews with more Scandinavians living and working in Singapore.

The interview topics, in time, reflected a pattern that could form larger categories that could roughly be depicted as concentric circles that radiated outwards, with the Individual as core. And the categories can be represented approximately as such:

Interview topics revolved around these 6 categories, the Individual, Family & Social, Organization, Society, National and Environment. These categories are reflected in the column to the right of the page. It is in these categories that these pages and subsequent topics will mostly be organized.

These 6 categories and their subsequent topics, what people are talking about when they talk about things pertaining for example, to the Individual, the Family & Social etc.

As soon as I have made a posting related to any of these categories, the category will make its appearance in the right hand column.

I hope this organization of information will make information retrieval and site navigation more reader friendly.

In search of the Singapore management style

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A Singapore print by Charlotte, principal artist and creative director of Lotti Lane. The myriad of colours captures the multi-cultural fabric of Singapore.

Singapore: a nation with a multi-cultural fabric
With its immigrant beginnings, Singapore has long struggled with the forming of a national identity. The Chinese were the largest immigrant group during the 1800s and early 1900s. Hailing mostly from the south of China, where they had very strong ties and loyalty to mainland China in the beginning. Many never thought of permanently settling in Singapore, but hoped to return one day to China. And when money was made in Singapore, it was often remitted to families back in China. Today, the Chinese make up about 75% of the Singapore population.

The natives of the land were the Malays, who today make up approximately 14% of the population. And Singapore had immigrants from India and other parts of the world, such as the Arabs, Portuguese, British, Dutch etc. The Indians form about 9% of the population and the ‘Others’ including the Eurasians (European-Asian descendants) make up about 2% of the current population. The multi-racial fabric is also reflected in Singapore’s four official languages, which are Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English.
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Swedish management: its research beginnings, characteristic traits and style

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Field in Mölle, Sweden.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2014

The Swedish management concept made headlines in 2001, as only sports news can do, when the BBC news reported that Swedish soccer manager Sven Goran Eriksson took England to the top in the World Cup qualifying rounds using Swedish management ideology.

As a field of research, studies on Swedish management is relatively new, beginning in the 1980s with research in the area of Scandinavian management. A prominent piece of work in the field at that time was Skandinaviskt management i og uden for Skandinavien by Geert Hofstede.

And in 1985, Jan Carlzon’s success as CEO (1980 – 1993) of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) led to his book entitled Riv pyramiderna!, which mapped SAS’s winning management strategy under his leadership. His success and work gained much media attention and created a Scandinavian leadership ideal. Carlzon’s main idea was to lateralize hierarchies and decentralize decision-making within the organization, which empowered employees further out in the service line to serve customers better. With decentralization, employees were given the power to make decisions on the spot, without having to go to their managers to ask for decision approvals. And since they knew the customers better, Carlzon was convinced that the people ‘out there’ would fit best in making the right decisions regarding their work situations. The lateralization process had its problems and hiccups, one of which was the consequence of making middle managers feel rather redundant and had to be reassigned duties.
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Sweden’s growing trade with Asia and it’s trade presence in Singapore

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A view of the Merlion at the Esplanade, Singapore.

An interconnected world

The world is becoming an increasingly small place to live in, we can feel it in the pace at which the world economy runs these days. World trade is much larger, faster and more intense than what we knew even from 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore as a trade entrepôt. Many organizations today are multinational in nature in order to compete on the global scene. Employees in such organizations are often located away from home countries in order to continue the work of the organization on a global scale, contributing to the existence, expansion and success of the organization.

Organizations going global would also mean that their people would be working on a global stage, having colleagues from foreign countries. It would mean working with someone who not only looks physically different from yourself but who share a different set of values, taken-for-granted assumptions and collectively shared beliefs, in other words, a different ideology (Simpson, 1993).

These collectively shared beliefs or ideology, stem from their own socio-cultural and political background and working together would mean communicating on a daily basis about work projects, negotiating meaning with each other so that each one understands what the other wants, the aim of which is to push the organization forward in reaching its goal.

Individuals who are often deployed to an overseas organization affiliate from their home country would often possess specialized knowledge, expertise and leadership skills, so that they can help set up and steer the affiliate organization in the new country.
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Fashion: an expression of Hegelian geist

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Oyster Dress by Alexander McQueen for S/S 2003. Ivory silk chiffon and silk organza.

I’ve been revisiting Adressing Fashion by the Metropolitcan Museum of Art (the avatar to the left will bring you to the MM’s website) and have picked out my favourite pieces from the their exhibition, to write about in this post. This is a subconscious streaming of thoughts, as it were, back on my favourite ponder on fashion, its connection to language, inspiration, geist and towards an understanding of a people.

My favourite pieces from this exhibit were the ones with a fuller silhouette, with soft flowing volume; their diaphanous design and characteristic, bordering on the ethereal. Even the ash grey of Theyskens piece below, with tones of grey darker than that of Badgley Mischka’s on Sarah J. Parker didn’t pull down my spirits or enthusiasm for the dress.

Evening dress by Olivier Theyskens for Nina Ricci, S/S 2007 in steel grey crinkled silk organza.

I’ve always thought fashion and personal style as a broad language of sorts. Looking at how the various designers expressed themselves in their pieces and how clothing changed with the times, the pieces in this exhibition called to mind Lars Svendsen’s philosophical take on fashion in his book, Fashion: a Philosophy. Svendsen (2006:64ff) didn’t quite agree with Lurie (1983) when she wrote that clothing was language. He was rather more convinced of Barthe’s (1967) theorizing on fashion as a system, paralleling that of Saussure’s signifier and the signified. I haven’t as yet read Lurie’s (1983) work but in light of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) work on The Grammar of Visual Design, perhaps a more concrete theory on the grammar of clothing isn’t too far away?

As fashion today is so diffused in culture, the grammar of clothing and thus clothing as a concrete language is difficult to assume diachronically. Fashion is studied diachronically, most of the time with regards to their transformation, perhaps as a commentary on the life and times of the people, “an immediate expression of our zeitgeist” as the Met Museum has it. What for example, could have expressed a certain meaning for a sub-culture, is today more diffused. High heels in the late-1800s associated with street walkers for example, are today standard office wear for most women. And most people today would gawk at the thought of one equating wearing high heels solely with prostitution purposes (which tangently reminds me in this instant, of the song Free Your Mind, by En Vogue).

For Halliday (1994, and almost all works from the 1960s ff), the system of language and meaning making is a conscious choice of words, people choose what they want to say it and how to say it, to fit the context. I think that point of view can be broadly associated with the fashion system. The fashion system, in designing and building up a wardrobe within one’s limits and means, is also a choice. It is a choice of textiles, textures, cut, silhouette, colour, function etc. Synchronically, perhaps fashion is an expression of personal spirit, as defined closest to Hegel’s geist.

Madame Grès (French, 1903–1993). A hand-pleated silk jersey dress by Grés herself, from 1971.

The work of Madame Grés (1903-1993) was part of this exhibition and she is to me, the epitome of self-expression in clothing design and manufacture. A tragic biography to behold, Grés reached the peaks and depths of the fashion industry. A legend already in her time with a Golden Thimble award in 1976, she passed on without word and in poverty in 1993.

Madame Grès silk jersey draped evening gown, c.1945. Picture from Vintage Textile.

Grés was a sculptress at heart and in training. In her 50 years or so as atelier, her designs shifted not with the raveling fashion trends of the time, but towards a concretion of a greater sense of personal style, personal achievement and perfection of her technique.

In light of Grés, I see many out there who use fashion as an immediate expression of personal style and spirit. From designers such as Westwood, McQueen and Galliano to individuals on the street who use current trends to their own understanding and purposes. Even those who are uncomfortable with being ‘fashionable’ haven’t missed a beat, as Stella Blum has observed,

Fashion is so close in revealing a person’s inner feelings and everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity so people tend to push it away. It’s really too close to the quick of the soul.

And so it goes that to understand a person or a people’s history, in addition to the study of events, language, culture and architecture, one would do well to include a study of the people’s sense of style, their choice of clothing for a particular era or period of time in order to understand their history, their lifestyle. Perhaps likewise in getting to know an individual.

Adressing Fashion in blog format is now closed, and I hope the Met Museum will have more of such showing formats in future, since it allows for an international audience to view and comment on the pieces on exhibit.

References

  • Barthes, Roland, 1967. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. Published again in 1983 and 1990. New York: Hill and Wang.
  • Halliday, M.A.K, 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
  • Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo, 1996. Reading Images: the grammar of visual design. London, New York: Routledge.
  • Lurie, Alison, 1983. The Language of Clothes. New York: Vintage Books.
  • Svendsen, Lars, 2006. Fashion: a philosophy. Translated by John Irons. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

The evolutionizing concept of luxury goods

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Scarlett Johansson for Louis Vuitton, featuring the That’s Love collection of bags

The definitions of luxury

Luxury is an extensive concept which connects with extravagance, prestige and elitism (Dubois and Czellar, 2002). Some standard dictionary definitions of luxury could include:

  • Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
  • Something expensive or hard to obtain.
  • Sumptuous living or surroundings: lives in luxury.

One could see how the above three definitions found in the American Heritage Dictionary, are intertwined and difficult to separate. A very broad definition of what is luxury, from Coco Chanel reflects this interlacing of definitions to form a concept of luxury: “Luxury is a necessity that begins when necessity ends” (Gradvall, 2007). Continue reading “The evolutionizing concept of luxury goods” →

The sexualizing of men in ads

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So we’ve all heard about women as sex objects in advertisements, movies, music videos etc., and how even women begin to look at women through the eyes of men, thanks to the caressing pan of the camera in movies, over women’s bodies etc. The institutionalizing of the sexes, of what is ‘real’ and of what is ‘normal’ (1971, Berger & Luckmann). Continue reading “The sexualizing of men in ads” →

Dolce & Gabanna: Lets do street violence in style?

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A banned D&G advertisement for Fall/Winter 2006.

In today’s Stockholm newspaper DN is an interesting article on redefining luxury, it’s changing premises and its spreading to the middle class rather than being exclusive to the “absurdly affluent”. I can’t help seeing the new D&G advertising for their latest collection in this light. It is quite obvious that they are trying to reach a different crowd than those who bought the original LV bags of the 1920s and crossed the Atlantic twice a year to spend the summer season in France, so much is clear. Continue reading “Dolce & Gabanna: Lets do street violence in style?” →