1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910409678303321

Autore

Yao Souchou

Titolo

The Shop on High Street [[electronic resource] ] : At Home with Petite Capitalism / / by Souchou Yao

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Singapore : , : Springer Singapore : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

981-15-2031-3

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (ix, 177 pages)

Disciplina

658.045

Soggetti

Ethnology

Asian Economics

Asian Politics

Asia Economic conditions

Asia Politics and government

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction: Petite Capitalism: What Drives it? -- 2. The Shop on High Street -- 3. ‘She’s not Your Kin, But She is Your Aunt’ -- 4. Women’s Fate -- 5. Shop-Floor Heroes  -- 6. Tiger Parenting -- 7. A Lesson on Borrowing -- 8. Wholesale: The Road to Ruin -- 9. Family Legacy.

Sommario/riassunto

This book tells the story of a Chinese family owned shophouse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through the lens of petite capitalism. Neo-Marxist in spirit, literary in tone, it recounts the triumph and despair of a family in its struggles against the financial frailty and structural limitations of a pervasive economic form of the Chinese diaspora: the small family business. The daily realities of the Chinese shophouse are captured by the art of ethnography and the author’s own memories. The book examines Chinese petite capitalism afresh by bringing into focus issues not usually covered by writers on the subject—the concept of petite capitalism, the architecture of the Asian shophouse, the Hakka kinship, ‘tiger parenting’ and Chinese childrearing, the culture of debt, family legacy, and Chinese inheritance. The book reveals the business acumen for which the Chinese diaspora are renowned as part truth and part



myth. Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ haunts the small Chinese family business where hard work and individual efforts are helpless against the ever-evolving nature of capitalism. Souchou Yao is a writer and critic based in Sydney, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is a former Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His major works include Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise (2002), Singapore: The state and the culture of excess (2007), and The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small, distant war (2016). .