Multinational Enterprise in Provincial Thailand: The Reach of the Singer Organization on the Eve of the Pacific War by Thailand RPCV Michael J. Montesano
Multinational Enterprise in Provincial Thailand: The Reach of the Singer Organization on the Eve of the Pacific War
Michael J. Montesano, National University of Singapore
By the early 1940s, the Singer Sewing Machine Company operated an unrivalled system of branches across provincial Thailand. Singer’s reliance—in Thailand as wherever it did business—on "hire-purchase" made the organization, management, and compensation of its provincial sales force especially complex. These challenges notwithstanding, the firm achieved very high rates of market penetration and of payment collection in Thailand. This achievement was due not least to Singer’s ability to introduce into the country a hierarchical model of sales and distribution developed in its earliest, North American markets and further refined in Britain, Western Europe, and Russia.
This paper draws above all on the rarely consulted records of the Thai commission charged with supervision and management of Allied firms and assets during the Pacific War. These sources include invaluable statements given to the commission by low-ranking Thai managerial and sales staff of a number of Singer’s provincial branches. Their statements make clear where and how hierarchical firm and local network met in the company’s Thai operations. They illustrate the great variety of patterns of interaction between firm and network that lay behind Singer’s success in the Thai market. They include data on the financial dimensions of these interactions. The statements suggest that some of the local social arrangements on which Skinner relied were in fact so fragile that terming them "networks" may be inappropriate. Finally, these sources raise important questions about the much greater reliance on local social networks that characterized the provincial branch systems of Thai commercial banks that emerged from the late 1940s onward.
