ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurs and employees do not simply automatically enact standard routines, but nor do they approach challenges with a clean sheet of paper (Trice and Beyer, 1993:7). When new circumstances demand actions, a complex network of associations, tactics and past solutions present themselves, each in the context of associations with fears, desires and assumptions about how significant others would assess the various possibilities. But stopping at this cognitive level is inadequate. First, dominant ideas and powerful institutions constrain what can be easily thought. Second, the network of associations within the community, rather than inside the head, is often just as important. For example, Hamilton and Waters demonstrate how the Chinese in Thailand did not succeed in only one way: rather they responded to changing political and economic circumstances. Successful entrepreneurs from one period often could not effectively respond to new conditions. Indeed, new success stories emerged while others faded, partly because prior success had generated a set of alliances, networks and practices that made exploitation of the new opportunities more difficult. The result is that the history of the Chinese in Thailand is ‘not one of economic or even ethnic continuity. Instead, it is a story of changes, of sudden transformations, of ethnic reconstructions, and of a succession of distinct groups of Chinese entrepreneurs’ (Hamilton and Waters, 1997:279). An adequate model of economic culture must, therefore, be one that can help to illuminate these kinds of processes and outcomes.
