Confucianism, Discipline, and Competitiveness

Chris Baumann, Hume Winzar, Doris Viengkham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815378617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351062206
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Please view this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnyO4EILcg

The importance of competitiveness has increased rapidly in recent years, where a fresh look at the different forms in which competitiveness manifests is needed. Though the exceptional growth of East Asian economies has been hypothesised previously from a socio-cultural perspective, links have often been vague with little empirical evidence to support them. This book proposes that a unique paradigm of competitiveness has developed in the East as a result of the cultural traditions and social values influenced by Confucianism, and extends this hypothesis by exploring a critical missing link: the role of discipline.

Based on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and World Economic Forum (WEF), this book sheds light on important insights, through empirical evidence, that culture and discipline play an important role toward a country's academic performance, and ultimately, competitiveness. In comparing six geographical clusters, this book analyses data by applying the "Inter-ocular Test" – visualisation of data distributions – to supplement traditional statistical mean comparisons. The findings advance the discourse on culture and performance, by drawing attention to the significant impact that improving discipline can have for a nation's productivity–not only those of Confucian East Asia. Written with the evolving global economy in mind, this book highlights the relevance of discipline for shaping individual productivity for the future workforce, and offers new perspectives on how this can be achieved for all societies through three key contributions: Taxonomy of Discipline dimensions, "Parent-Engagement-School-Discipline Taxonomy" (PESD), and Wheel of Competitiveness.

Building on the authors' prior works, this book offers a comprehensive look at three interrelated concepts: Confucianism, Discipline, and Competitiveness, and how they relate to performance in East Asia. Written in an accessible style, this book will be a valuable guide for students, educators, practitioners, and policy-makers who seek to further understand the valuable role of discipline in shaping the success of societies, present and future.

1
Setting the Scene for CDC

Introducing CDC

We are introducing the idea of combining three seemingly unrelated dimensions from three different areas of study:

• Confucianism from cultural studies;
• Discipline from the fields of education and pedagogy; and
• Competitiveness from the sphere of business and economics;

or in short: CDC. “Competitiveness is not that bad … at least in the east, and also the west”, concluded Baumann and Harvey (2018, p. 198), pointing at competitiveness as a factor in the seismic changes in global economic (and other) power shifting to East Asia. Combining such well-researched areas with extensive literature each in their own right is not a trivial exercise. But then again, developing ‘something’ new, linking seemingly unrelated or disassociated constructs, and recommending a new way of looking at things is perhaps not meant to be easy.

We are novel in linking these three areas in one empirical study reported in this book, such a combination being the confluence of two fundamental questions that we aspire to answer in our research:

1. Could discipline be a driver of performance and competitiveness?
2. Could it be that under Confucianism, discipline is stronger, and therefore drives performance and competitiveness?

The literature has explored Confucianism and competitiveness, separately, and in great detail—we will summarise some key literature in the chapters to come. There are also numerous books (e.g. Yao, 2000; Tu, 1996; Moon, 2000; Porter, 2011). Nonetheless, the domain of discipline applied and passed on in a country’s education system has not previously been explored as a ‘link’ between Confucianism and competitiveness as we aspire to in the next four chapters of this book—this shall be our contribution offered here, i.e. a better understanding of how discipline drives performance and competitiveness.

Discipline has been studied in the context of parenting (Baumrind, 1991 a; Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts and Fraleigh, 1987) and education (Pellerin, 2005 a), generally pointing towards a positive correlation with some performance indicators, but empirical work testing discipline as a driver of academic performance and competitiveness has only recently emerged, and this book contributes to this debate—does discipline drive performance and competitiveness?

The premise for our research is that human capital and talent has equal and normal distribution by nature across ethnic and racial groups, i.e. from a biological perspective, no group is really better than the other, but the differentiation factor we anticipate is culture such as Confucianism. In other words, culture determines how education systems ‘work’, how schools are run, what type of school policy applies to which area (e.g. dress code), the curriculum and pedagogy, and ultimately it is these educational institutions and their style that result in higher (or lower) academic performance in global comparison. Again, there would be a normal distribution in terms of innate talent and intelligence (IQ) for each society, but we argue that the way education ‘works’ (i.e. the passing on of knowledge and values) is ultimately culturally driven, and a matter of self-discipline (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005). Our study is designed to explore precisely these issues—how does discipline drive performance, whether there is a difference between cultures, and to what extent does it drive national competitiveness?

We use international student data as measurement for discipline and academic performance, namely data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide project by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). PISA started in 2000 and is conducted every three years. In the last few testing rounds we saw Confucian societies (China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam) peak perform, outperforming the West and other Asian societies, indeed outperforming the majority of the world (Figure 1.1). This begs the question: in what way is education done differently in Confucian societies than in the West, other Asian countries, and other parts of the world?

As previously alluded to, discipline stands out as a key candidate for differentiation with evidence in the literature (Baumann and Krskova, 2016) that education in the Confucian Orbit follows strict principals with a focus on respect, punctuality, and performance orientation. Given the very nature of these Confucian ‘traits’, we anticipate that a Confucian approach to education should drive academic performance and ultimately also drive competitiveness.

In sum, this book explores the mechanisms, the empirical associations among the three dimensions Confucianism, Discipline, and Competitiveness (CDC). Conceptually, our framework is anticipated to work as follows (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1 PISA 2015 Rankings Across Academic Performance

Figure 1.2 Roadmap Structure of CDC

Structure of This Book

In short, we offer a new way of looking at culture and how it drives performance/competitiveness through discipline. Our key argument is that discipline drives performance and competitiveness, and that there would be differences around the world based on how cultural values determine the types of discipline imposed, and their degree of importance.

We have structured this book along the way we make our argument with subsequent empirical evidence. Each chapter is centred on a fundamental question we seek to answer, which, when taken together, contributes to our overall understanding of how the Confucianism-Discipline-Competitiveness (CDC) model operates.

Chapter 2—The Confucianism-Discipline-Competitiveness (CDC) Model

In Chapter 2 we explore the relationships among CDC dimensions. Essentially we use Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to probe to what degree discipline dimensions associate with competitiveness, and we contrast our model findings across six geographic clusters. Special focus is placed on a comparison of the Confucian Orbit to other areas with comparable economic circumstances, namely Anglo-Saxon and Western European nations. This testing shows how associations in the CDC model work, in general, but it does not demonstrate a direct comparison of CDC dimensions (mean, median, spread/distribution). In this chapter, we aim to answer the following: could school discipline be a driver of academic performance?

Chapter 3—Discipline and Academic Performance Under the Microscope

In this chapter, we pose the question of whether school discipline is stronger under Confucianism. We offer the results of our Inter-Ocular Testing (IOT) (Baumann, Winzar and Fang, 2018) where we explore differences among geographic clusters and cultures for each CDC dimension. Here we offer mean and median statistics. However, rather than simply concluding on cultural differences on statistical significance alone (i.e. a p-value), where with the large PISA data set means almost all would be significantly different to each other just due to the sheer size of students involved in testing, we offer comprehensive charts that plot the distribution for each dimension. This allows for a more realistic comparison of how the differences and similarities across the geographic clusters really play out.

Chapter 4—CDC Over Time: A Simulation Approach

In this chapter, we apply a temporal lens to examine the effect of academic performance on national competitiveness, with PISA data from 2000 to 2015, and World Economic Forum data from 2000 to 2018. Drawing on data from over two decades, we ultimately demonstrate that the discipline passed on in schools, at one in point in time, has a positive effect on a nation’s competitiveness in half a generation (approximately 15 years). We plot the data to illustrate the temporal developments of CDC dimensions, and establish a direct association between individual (micro) student performance, and national (macro) competitiveness rankings. We further dissect the data by segmenting students’ academic performance into ‘low’ and ‘elite’ (top 15 percent) performers, and present a number of simulated effects to account for changes in global competitiveness if discipline—at the school level—were increased, decreased, or simply maintained.

Chapter 5—Conclusions and Outlook on CDC

In our last chapter we look back on the results of our study, and offer theoretical, practical, and research implications. We also reflect on CDC from a broader perspective, including previous debates about the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua’s bestselling book on Asian-heritage parenting, but also why a case can be made that discipline is an important factor for future generations working in the gig economy. Importantly, we do recommend that CDC be incorporated in future work and research on education, and that discipline specifically should be explored more in various contexts. For practitioners, we offer a call to maintain or indeed improve discipline standards in classrooms since that is associated with better performance. We offer a practical typology of discipline dimensions, areas that trigger consequences for non-compliance, e.g. poor behaviour, disrespect, bad manners, unpunctuality, and—crucially and novel—also underperformance.

Spotlights

Throughout this book we include ‘Spotlight’ sections based on academic literature and popular press detailing the approaches of East Asian societies on a number of discipline/performance issues. This is a practical and easy-to-comprehend way to showcase how CDC elements have been enacted/construed/perceived across cultures and contexts.

In sum, we aspire to showcase a novel approach to a current topic discussed in the media, by experts and parents around the globe, and ask: how can we better prepare future generations for an increasingly competitive workforce? Our focus on discipline as a driver of performance

Figure 1.3 Visualisation of Cluster Groups by Country

and competitiveness is new, since this dimension of education systems has been largely overlooked in the literature to date (at least in the context we explore in this book), and our focus on cultural differences as driver of competitiveness may also to contribute to the literature on what really drives competitiveness (e.g. Confucianism through a disciplined approach in education).

All three CDC dimensions are dynamic—i.e. they change over time, and are different in different parts of the world. Our analysis focusses on the most recent wave of PISA data collection in 2015, with a temporal analysis over time for the simulation part of our book (Chapter 4).

In order to test for differences on the CDC dimensions, we have categorised the PISA data along the following geographical clusters, following Baumann and Winzar (2016), where countries have been organised on the basis of similar econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Endorsements
• Prologue
• 1 Setting the Scene for CDC
• 2 The Confucianism-Discipline-Competitiveness (CDC) Model
• 3 Discipline and Academic Performance Under the Microscope
• 4 CDC Over Time: A Simulation Approach
• 5 Conclusions and Outlook on CDC
• Epilogue: What Is a Society’s Brain For?
• Author Biographies
• Index