On the stalling of the Malaysian industrialization project: a reply to Narayanan
- 29 September 2008
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Economy and Society
- Vol. 37 (4), 602-612
- https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140802358073
Abstract
In his article for this issue of Economy and Society, Narayanan ( 2008 Narayanan, S. 2008. On the stalling of the Malaysian industrialization project. Economy and Society, 37(4): 595–601. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ) presents a critique of our earlier work on Malaysian industrialization (Henderson & Phillips 2007). Narayanan's objections are entirely empirical and they take the form of suggesting that had we looked at the ‘right’ data or ‘properly’ interpreted the data we provide, we would have seen that our hypothesis that Malaysia's industrialization project was ‘stalling’ was either wrong, or, if plausible, was unproven. In this response, we show that Narayanan is largely mistaken in his critique. While his contribution contains errors of interpretation, we argue that he is mistaken predominantly because he has misunderstood the methodological basis of our analysis. Specifically, he has failed to grasp our theoretical object and thus has been unable to identify the appropriate empirical terrain for assessing its significance and condition.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- On the stalling of the Malaysian industrialization projectEconomy and Society, 2008
- Unintended consequences: social policy, state institutions and the ‘stalling’ of the Malaysian industrialization projectEconomy and Society, 2007
- China's Competitive Performance: A Threat to East Asian Manufactured Exports?World Development, 2004
- Globalisation of High Technology ProductionPublished by Taylor & Francis Ltd ,2002
- Global production networks and the analysis of economic developmentReview of International Political Economy, 2002
- Technological Maturity and Development without Research: The Challenge for Malaysian ManufacturingDevelopment and Change, 2000