Large-scale urban transformation in Malaysia is the most visible sign of the rapid development which has accompanied the premiership of the current Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. The national capital, Kuala Lumpur, has seen the development of a new city centre (Kuala Lumpur City Centre, KLCC) which includes the world’s tallest building, the Petronas Twin Towers. Using techniques from cultural geography, this paper provides a “reading” of the building. The paper first considers the symbolic role of the Petronas Towers in realising a state vision of national development, the so-called Vision 2020. The building is seen to both image Malaysia as a “world class” national player (and Kuala Lumpur as a “world city”) as well as to promote new “ways of seeing” among national citizens. However, the paper also considers ways in which intended symbolic meanings are contested and the would-be hegemonic state vision reworked “from below” through everyday experiences of life in the city and the nation.

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Views From Above and Below: The Petronas Twin Towers and/in Contesting Visions of Development in Contemporary Malaysia

This article takes stock of the state of cross‐cultural management in Malaysia. It first focuses on a number of problems that cross‐cultural management faces generally, namely the lack of integrated knowledge and the possibility of subjectivity influencing the research design. Then the article looks at the state of cross‐cultural management research in Malaysia. It concludes that cross‐cultural management in Malaysia is, as yet, a series of “snapshots” with little follow‐up. Lastly, a number of themes for future research in Malaysia are proposed.

Cross‐cultural research in Malaysia

Summary. In Malaysia, Malay kampung or villages are modernity’s significant other in contemporary discourse. In contrast to this rhetoric, which reinforces a sense of rural–urban difference, this paper argues that Malay kampung are socially urban spaces, in so far as the lived experience of their residents largely conforms to characteristics of social life typically figured as ‘urban’. These include socioeconomic relationships characterised by occupational stratification, consumption and production based on commodification rather than subsistence, and social interactions marked by formal and attenuated social ties as much as informal and intimate relationships. Simultaneously nostalgic and derogatory narratives of modernity and urbanism fix kampung in social memory as sites marginal to and outside urban modernity. By contrast, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that the lives of kampung residents in contemporary Malaysia are substantially and qualitatively urban.

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Rural Villages as Socially Urban Spaces in Malaysia

(Re)positioning Malaysia: high-tech networks and the multicultural rescripting of national identity

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Shamsul Amri Baharuddin

Papers

Debating about Identity in Malaysia::A Discourse Analysis