Malaysia as model

Abstract

This article uses a case study of public human resource management (HRM) in Malaysia to explore policy ‘transferability’, proposed as a refinement of Dolowitz and Marsh's policy transfer framework.

HRM in the Malaysian civil service is found to be relatively performance-orientated, though that is qualified by the Government's affirmative action policies. Malaysia's approach is attributed to factors that have their roots in Malaysia's history: the pervasive respect for authority, the ethnic mix, its Anglo-Saxon orientation, the successful economy, the National Development Policy of 1990 and the personal role of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed. These factors suggest that public management is both shaped and constrained by its historical roots. The case suggests that successful policy transfer requires an understanding of those roots, especially when there is a significant distance in cultural, political, economic or linguistic terms between the countries transferred from and to.

Key words:

• History
• human resource management
• Malaysia
• performance management
• policy transfer
• public management

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the contributions of the government officials and others who agreed to be interviewed for this study, and also the award of a grant by the British Academy, which made the research possible.

Notes

1 See James and Lodge (2003) for a critique of the policy transfer framework.

2 In fact Henderson (1999) has suggested that Malaysia is what Evans (1995) calls an ‘intermediate state’, only partly complying with the bureaucratic ideal (the contrast is with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan). But I think the point still stands.

3 Staff management is covered in greater depth in McCourt (forthcoming), where there is also a discussion of strategic human resource management, line manager ownership and employee selection.

4 The Anglo-Saxon orientation was still evident in 2003, when more civil servants were sent for study to Britain than to any other country, with the USA coming second.

5 A Sanskrit word meaning ‘sons of the soil’, which is used for the ‘indigenous’ (i.e. non-Indian or Chinese) community.

6 This was an area where change was more apparent than real. The Government claimed to have slowed the rate of increase to 0.2 per cent between 1989 and 1995. But once privatization is excluded, the remaining ‘core civil service’ actually increased by 7.7 per cent. This is similar to Britain, where again the Government claimed to have reduced numbers dramatically, whereas when privatization was excluded, the number of civil servants was roughly the same on the day Mrs Thatcher left office as on the day she arrived.

7 See later for Crouch's (1996) characterization of Malaysia as a ‘repressive-responsive regime’.

8 This allows those allergic to Carlyle's ‘great man’ view of history to argue that we are entitled to ask what it was about Malaysia that allowed Mahathir's writ to run as far as it did; or that Malaysians' need for a strong leader was going to conjure up, if not Mahathir himself, then someone very like him.

9 Perhaps we should prefer to label it ‘past-dependent’ to avoid committing ourselves to the not wholly satisfactory path dependence model.