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Abstract
Malaysian government planning and policy-making have increasingly come to recognise the role of women and the household in the promotion of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. Government planning documents emphasise the need to boost women's labour market participation, increase women's levels of entrepreneurship, and the need to strengthen and support the family unit—developments that can be understood in terms of a market-building agenda in which women's labour and the household are viewed as untapped resources in the struggle to maintain international competitiveness. This article explores an important dimension of this policy turn: the role of civil society in both promoting and resisting this market-building agenda. The paper focuses in particular on two case studies: religious non-governmental organisations involved in implementing ‘family strengthening’ programmes and civil society engagements with the issue of women's representation on corporate boards.
EXTRACTO - La creación de políticas y planeación del gobierno malayo han llegado a reconocer cada vez más el papel de la mujer y los entornos familiares en un número de estrategias orientadas a la mejora de la competitividad económica. Los documentos gubernamentales de planeación hacen énfasis en la necesidad de disparar la participación de la mujer en los mercados laborales, aumentar los niveles de emprendimiento femenino y en la necesidad de fortalecer y apoyar desarrollo de la unidad familiar que puedan ser entendidos en términos de una agenda de creación de mercado en la que el trabajo femenino y sus entornos domésticos sean percibidos como recursos no explotados en el esfuerzo por mantener la competitividad internacional. Este artículo explora una importante dimensión de este cambio en política: el papel de la sociedad civil tanto en la promoción como en la resistencia a esta agenda de creación de mercado. Este documento se enfoca particularmente en dos casos de estudio: las organizaciones religiosas no gubernamentales involucradas en la implantación de programas de fortalecimiento de la familia y en los compromisos de la sociedad civil frente al tema de la representación de la mujer en las juntas directivas de las empresas.
Notes
1 The NEP was designed as an affirmative action strategy aimed, via systems of quotas and other policies, at raising the status of the county's Malay (or bumiputera) population. As a result of its colonial past, Malaysia is a multi-ethnic country. In 2010 of the three main ethnic groups, Malays made up 60.3% of the total population (Chinese 22.9% and Indian 6.8%).
2 It is important to note that Howell (Citation2005) as well as Phillips (Citation2002) suggest that feminist scholarship has tended to have an ambivalent relationship with the concept of civil society—not least because of the way in which a lot of the scholarship on civil society tends put forward a view of the associational word as an autonomous (and gender neutral) realm, analytically separate from not just the state but also the family and the household. By conceptualising civil society not as an autonomous ‘neo-Tocquevillian’ realm of politics but rather focusing on the permeability of the boundaries between state, market, civil society and household, this article seeks to demonstrate the utility of a focus on civil society for feminist political economy analysis.
3 Moreover, Malaysia has considerably lower female labour force participation rates in comparison to regional competitors such as Thailand (70.0%), Singapore (60.2%) and Indonesia (51.8%) (Malaysia, Citation2010, p. 178).
4 This issue was raised in an interview with officials from the National Institute of Human Development, Ministry of Human Resources (and a member of Pemandu's Human Capital SRI Lab), personal interview, 21 February 2012. However, the majority of the current work being undertaken on women's labour force participation involves the Ministry for Women Family and Community Development who have recently started work with UNDP Malaysia on a broad research project looked at how best to increase women's labour force participation. Personal interview with Principal Assistant Secretary, Planning and Research Unit, Policy Division, Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development. Putrajaya, 27 February 2012.
5 Hoffstaeder (Citation2011, p. 14) notes the existence of a split between a secular (English-speaking, Western-educated) elite and an Islamic elite (Malay speaking, educated in the Middle East, Pakistan or Southeast Asia). While ‘the secular elite is still (largely) congruous with the political elite’, the Islamic elite ‘operates both within and outside of the state apparatus’. Within this context, we can observe the rise of Islamic authorities (such as the courts) operating relatively autonomously from other state institutions (Hoffsteader, Citation2011, p. 72). JAKIM in particular, designed to incorporate non-orthodox Islamic groups into the state, plays a significant role in the state's (oftentimes overtly elitist) policing of Islamic identities, but also grants Islamic groups an access to state institutions that is often not available to other civil society actors.
6 These are issues that have had considerable media attention and were also all raised in interviews with members of the Social Services section of the state's Economic Planning Unit, Putrajaya 11 November 2011.
7 More secular organisations are involved but are few and far between. One such organisation is Yayasan Strategik Social the social development wing of the Malaysian Indian Congress (part of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition).
8 This discussion draws upon personal interviews conducted with the head of Wanita ISMA and the director of the organisation's konvensyen Keluarga, Petailing Jaya, 10 February 2012.
9 See Hadiz and Teik (Citation2011) on the forms of new Islamic populism in Southeast Asia. In the Malaysian case, it is important to point to the significant role of both class and state policies—notably the incubation of a Malay middle class under the NEP—that fostered forms of Islamic populism amongst the urbanising professional middle class. On the influence of groups such as ISMA and Perkasa in contemporary Malaysian politics, see Noor (Citation2013, p. 97).
10 It should be noted that all Muslim couples in Malaysia are required to undertake a premarital training course administered by JAKIM the government's Islamic department as part of the marriage registration process.
11 Personal interview with the head of Wanita ISMA, Petailing Jaya, 10 February 2012.
12 Personal interview with the head of Wanita ISMA, Petailing Jaya, 10 February 2012.
13 See also work on Islamic Piety movements in Malaysia by Sylvia Frisk (Citation2009) that points to women's agency, negotiating abilities, and their collective identities as pious Islamic women.
14 Personal interview with Empower director Maria Chin Abdullah, Petailing Jaya, 20 February 2011.
15 Personal interview with Marina Mahathir, Kuala Lumpur, 9 November 2011.
16 Personal interview with Senior Assistant Director NIEW, Kuala Lumpur, 31 October 2011.
17 Personal interview with Chief Executive Officer, Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group, Kuala Lumpur, 28 February 2012.
18 This issue was raised by the Chief Executive Officer, Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group, Kuala Lumpur, personal interview 28 February 2012. At the February 2012 Women in Leadership Forum Asia that I attended in Kuala Lumpur, prominent representatives from the Malaysian state and business community including NIEW director Rafiah Salam, the director of the Malaysian Alliance of Corporate Directors, the chairman of the Malaysian Institute of Management and prominent Malaysian business women such as Raja Teh Maimunah the MD and CEO of Hong Leong Islamic Bank and the fund manager Shireen Ann Zaharah Muhideen also presented this issue in a similar manner (in relation to issues of both profitability and corporate governance as well as the role that women board members can play in promoting the interests of women further down the corporate ladder).
19 The WCI were unable to field a suitable candidate at the 2008 election and thus created the ‘everywoman’ character of Mak Bedah in order to highlight issues affecting women in Malaysia that were overlooked in mainstream political debate. See Lee (Citation2011).
20 The Wanita Suara Perubahan protests took place on 18 March 2012 and involved many of the same women activists who had been involved in wider Bersih campaigns for clean government.
Additional information
Juanita Elias is Associate Professor in International Political Economy, Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Warwick. Her work has appeared in journals such as International Political Sociology, Economy and Society, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, International Feminist Journal of Politics and The Pacific Review. She is the author of Fashioning inequality: The multinational firm and gendered employment in a globalising world (2004), co-editor of the book The global political economy of the household in Asia (2013), and co-author of the textbook International relations: The basics (2007). She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and an Associate Fellow of the Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre at Adelaide University.