Understanding Malay and Chinese work ethics in Malaysia through proverbs

Abstract

Proverbs are important cultural products that both reveal and direct the values, behaviour and world view of a particular culture. This article relates the proverbial collection of two particular cultural groups, the Malays and Chinese of Malaysia, to workplace attitudes. After reviewing more than 2000 proverbs, we identified those that were most pertinent to the Malaysian workplace, based on two key categories: (i) the portrayal of work in the lives of the Malays and Chinese and (ii) the approach to workplace etiquette. Local proverbs portray hard work as an admirable quality among not only the Chinese but also among the Malays, despite suggestions to the contrary by some writers. Regarding workplace relations, proverbs again constitute a vital source of guidance for both groups, particularly the high regard for ‘face’.

Keywords

Chinese culture ethics Malay proverbs workplace

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ainon

Abdullah

(2006) Koleksi terindah peribahasa Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: PTS Millennia.

Ainon

Abdullah

(2008) Kamus peribahasa kontemporari. Selangor: PTS Media Group

Alatas

(1977) The Myth of the Lazy Native. London: Frank Cass.

Ali

(1975) Malay Peasant Society and Leadership. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Brown

(1969) Malay Sayings. Singapore: Asia Pacific Press.

Carruthers

(2003) Confucius and the Chinese Way of Doing Business. Sydney: University of Sydney Press.

Chuah

Hoffmann

Ramasamy

. (2016) Is there a spirit of overseas Chinese capitalism? Small Business Economics 47(4): 1095–1118.

Clifford

Swettenham

(1894) A Dictionary of the Malay Language. Taiping, Perak.

Ding

(2017) Persamaan akal budi dan kearifan orang melayu dan cina dalam peribahasa. In: Hamid

Abdullah

NFL

(eds) Akal Budi dalam Sastera Rakyat Naratif dan Bukan Naratif. Penang: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, pp. 154–168.

10.

Dorn

(1986) Gender personhood: Turkish Jewish proverbs and the politics of reputation. Women’s Studies International Forum 9(3): 295–301.

11.

Fang

(1999) Chinese Business Negotiating Style. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

12.

Fang

(2006) Negotiation: the Chinese style. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing 21(1): 50–60.

13.

Fang

(2014) Understanding Chinese culture and communication: the Yin Yang approach. In: Gehrke

Claes

(eds) Global Leadership Practices: A Cross-Cultural Management Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–187.

14.

Fischer

Yoshida

(1968) The nature of speech according to Japanese proverbs. Journal of American Folklore 81(319): 34–43.

15.

Goddard

(1997) Cultural values and ‘cultural scripts’ of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Journal of Pragmatics 27(2): 183–201.

16.

Goddard

(2000) “Cultural scripts” and communicative style in Malay (“Bahasa Melayu”). Anthropological Linguistics 42(1): 81–106.

17.

Goddard

(2004) “Cultural scripts”: a new medium for ethnopragmatic instruction. In: Achard

Niemeier

(eds) Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 145–165.

18.

Goddard

(2015) “Like a crab teaching its young to walk straight”: proverbiality, semantics, and indexicality in English and Malay. In: Senft

Basso

(eds) Ritual Communication. New York, NY: Berg, pp. 103–125.

19.

Goddard

Wierzbicka

(2013) Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20.

Goh

(2014) Koleksi Peribahasa China Terindah. Penang: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia.

21.

Goodwin

Wenzel

(1979) Proverbs and practical reasoning: a study in socio-logic. Quarterly Journal of Speech 65(3): 289–302.

22.

Graham

Lam

(2003) The Chinese negotiation. Harvard Business Review 81(10): 82–91.

23.

Hamilton

(1955) Malay Proverbs – Bidal Melayu. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.

24.

Hart

(1937) 700 Chinese proverbs. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

25.

Hose

(1934) Malay Proverbs. Singapore: Authority.

26.

Iakovleva

Nikolaeva

(2016) Chinese proverbs in American verbal culture. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 7(1): 284–292.

27.

Lauhakangas

(2014) Categorization of proverbs. In: Hrisztova-Gotthardt

Varga

(eds) Introduction to Paremiology: A Comprehensive Guide to Proverb Studies. Warsaw: Dde Gruyter, pp. 49–66.

28.

Lim

(1998) Cultural attributes of Malays and Malaysian Chinese: implications for research and practice. Malaysian Management Review 33(2): 81–88.

29.

Lim

(2001) Work-related values of Malays and Chinese Malaysians. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management 1(2): 209–226.

30.

Lim

(2003) Budi as the Malay mind: a philosophical study of Malay ways of reasoning and emotion in peribahasa . PhD thesis, Hamburg: University of Hamburg.

31.

McAmis

(2002) Malay Muslims: The History and Challenge of Resurgent Islam in Southeast Asia. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

32.

Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS) (1992) The MBRAS Book of over 1,600 Malay Proverbs: With Explanations in English. Kuala Lumpur: MBRAS.

33.

Md. Zabid

(2003) Perceptions of business ethics in a multicultural community: the case of Malaysia. Journal of Business Ethics 4 3(1–2): 75–87.

34.

Mieder

(2004) Proverbs: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

35.

Mieder

(2008) Proverbs Speak Louder than Words: Folk Wisdom in Art, Culture, Folklore, History, Literature, and Mass Media. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

36.

Mieder

Dundes

(eds) (1994) Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

37.

Mieder

(1977) Tradition and innovation: proverbs in advertising. Journal of Popular Culture 11(2): 308–319.

38.

Milner

(2011) The Malays. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

39.

Mohd Dahlan

(1991) Local values in intercultural management. Malaysian Management Review 26(1): 45–50.

40.

Nasr

(2010) Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition. New York, NY: HaperCollins.

41.

Oxford English Dictionary Online Edition. Available at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/153430?isAdvanced=false&result=2&rskey=8lFyk7&. (accessed 2 August 2017).

42.

Parkinson

(1967) Non-economic factors in the economic retardation of the rural Malays. Modern Asian Studies 1(1): 31–46.

43.

Parkinson

(1968) The economic retardation of the Malays – A rejoinder. Modern Asian Studies 2(3): 267–272.

44.

Pek

(2008) Insight of Chinese economics culture in Malaysia. International Journal of Business and Management 3(9): 65–73.

45.

Penfield

Duru

(1988) Proverbs: Metaphors that teach. Anthropological Quarterly 61(3): 119–128.

46.

Peng

Nisbett

(1999) Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist 54: 741–754.

47.

Peow

(2015) Malaysian Chinese stories of hard work: folklore and Chinese work values. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 11(2): 1–16.

48.

Peow

(2016) A comparative study of Malay and Chinese trickster tales: Sang Kancil, the rabbit and the rate. Kajian Malaysia 34(2): 59–73.

49.

Raihanah

Martinez

Wirdati

(2010) Islam and adat: considering the wife’s moral contribution in the division of harta sepencharian in Malaysia. Indonesia and the Malay World 38(111): 161–180.

50.

Richardson

Yaapar

Amir

(2016) Budi and Malay workplace ethics. Journal of Asia Business Studies 10(1): 78–92.

51.

Rohsenow

(2003) ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

52.

Salleh

(2005) High/low context communication: the Malaysian Malay style. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Association for Business Communication Annual Convention (pp. 1–11). Irvine: Association for Business Communication.

53.

Shukor

(2006) Malay Business: Revivalism Through Entrepreneurship. Kelana Jaya: Pelanduk Publications.

54.

Stewart

(2005) Wisdom from Africa: A Collection of Proverbs. Cape Town: Struik Publishers.

55.

Swettenham

(1942) Footprints in Malaya. St Albans: Hutchinson & Co.

56.

Tan

(1981) Bidalan Melayu: Malay Proverbs. Singapore: Graham Bash (revised and translated edition of Winstedt, Richard (1950), Malay Proverbs, London: John Murray).

57.

Tatira

(2001) Proverbs in Zimbabwean advertisements. Journal of Folklore Research 38(3): 229–241.

58.

Transparency International (2017) Corruption Perception Index 2016. Available at: https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016 (accessed 14 August 2017).

59.

Wan Husin

(2013) Business dominance among the Malays and Chinese in Malaysia from a civilizational perspective. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity 3(4): 360–364.

60.

Watson

(1996) The construction of the post-colonial subject in Malaysia. In: Tonnesson

Antlov

(eds) Asian Forms of the Nation. Surrey: Curzon Press, pp. 297–322.

61.

Winstedt

(1950) Malay Proverbs. London: John Murray.

62.

Yau

OHM

(1988) Chinese cultural values: their dimensions and marketing implications. European Journal of Marketing 22(5): 44–57.

63.

Zainal

(1995) The Malay family: beliefs and realities. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 26(1): 43–66.

64.

Zhang

(2016) Language as a reflection of culture: on the cultural characteristics of Chinese and English proverbs. Intercultural Communication Studies 25(3): 275–291.

65.

Zulkiflee

(2000) Kamus mega peribahasa. Batu Caves: Albaz.