Researching Hybridity in Social and Economic ... - NUS Home

This multi-locational and multi-disciplinary research into Chinese capitalism takes me
to the most important aspect of the integrated method approach – abstraction and
deconstruction (see Figure 1). Instead of overtly concerned with describing everything about
actor networks in Chinese capitalism – a methodological procedure often found in
ethnography (e.g. Yang, 1994; Yao, 2002) and some quarters of actor network theory (e.g.
Murdoch, 1997a), I was interested in unfolding the multiple logic(s) of these actor networks,
their shifting identities and discursive constructions, and the diverse mechanisms of their
enrolment. This approach to Chinese capitalism requires me to focus on key social actors and
their dynamics in different spatial and temporal settings. I believed that these processes do not
emerge directly from empirical observations. In other words, data do not speak for
themselves. I needed abstraction to distill these multiple logic(s) and causal mechanisms of
Chinese capitalism from an array of messy empirical data, and to facilitate theory
development (cf. Whitley, 1992; 1999; Orrù et al., 1997). Equally important, I wanted to go
beyond a materialist theory of Chinese capitalism that focuses narrowly on its economic
structures and is oblivious to its discursive constructions. Deconstruction is therefore a useful
method to identify different discourses of the rise of Chinese capitalism and Chinese business
networks as a vocabulary in our understanding of economic organization in East and
Southeast Asia. Following Derrida, Dixon and Jones (1998: 255; emphasis omitted) define
deconstruction as a method that aims to “delineate the social power that fixes meanings
constructive of identities, spaces, and disciplines”. By decentering hegemonic discourses of
Chinese capitalism as essential products of Confucian culture, I sought to theorize the time-
space dynamism of everyday life by Chinese and non-Chinese actors bound up within specific
hybrid networks of social and economic relationships.
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