How to Headhunt for “Singapore Inc”

Can you run a country like a company? What effect would such a system have on citizens? In the case of “Singapore Inc.” or “Singapore Ltd.,” as the tiny equatorial city-state has been called, educated and mobile workers may express their buy-in with their own life stories, writes scholar Cheryl Narumi Naruse.

Naruse’s argument stems from a reading of Conversations on Coming Home, a government-supported collection of accounts by Singaporeans who have worked abroad. Conversations comprises profiles of twenty “highly skilled and highly educated professionals” with prestigious advanced degrees and whose résumés name-drop firms including Goldman Sachs and Mitsubishi. In accompanying photos, many of the interviewees hold smart devices or books—showing them as “both modern and technologically savvy, and thus well-embedded in a capitalist economy,” Naruse observes. Notably, though, Conversations spotlights only Singaporeans who have achieved success in scientific or financial careers, and all of the individuals featured appear to be ethnically Chinese.

Presented in a format that “resembles an expensive magazine yet functions more like a brochure for ‘Singapore Inc.,’” Conversations serves a “dual purpose of presenting Overseas Singaporeans as a model population and persuading Singaporeans living abroad to return,” Naruse writes. She reads the text as a compilation of coming-of-career narratives, a genre related to the bildungsroman but focused instead “on the privileged and upwardly mobile subjects” for whom “a professional or corporate career (rather than age) is the marker of maturity.”

She also notes that her “use of ‘career’ in the designation of this genre is deliberate in that it emphasizes the global economic background against which professional lives are constructed and valued.”

Over the years, Singapore has strategically hosted multinational corporations from all over the world, while the population is treated as “a source of ‘human capital.’” This philosophy regulates everything from public education offerings to policies encouraging childbearing among locals. In this vein, the booklet “attempts to socialize its audience into the ideological norms necessary to support the state’s neoliberal agenda,” Naruse explains. As a result, its stories all “promote values of individualism, human capital, and heteronormativity.”

Conversations portrays “coming home” as conveying professional benefits, with the profile of one young banker stating that moving back to Singapore “offers career growth and opportunity.” That’s despite “a contradiction between earlier denunciations of individualism as western decadence and the state’s current reliance on individualism” to promote its agenda, Naruse points out.

Even so, the decision to collect multiple stories into a single publication may be “a way of countering the emphasis on individualism implicit in these coming-of-career narratives.” With this focus on “personal satisfaction,” Naruse notes that none of the professionals profiled “explicitly frame their return home as an act of patriotism or as offering any benefit to the nation.” Yet the profiled also describe relocation as having a positive impact on family ties. In fact, an electrical engineer returning from New Zealand gushes in an interview that his young son “will receive a robust education and be exposed to a diversity of cultures and pick up Mandarin!”

In a framework where even babies can be budding cosmopolitans who represent human capital, Conversations “endorses heteronormativity through its promotion of the nuclear family, ostensibly in the service of the state’s pro-natalist policies,” Naruse writes.

Noting that life writing holds significant “affective and ideological power,” Naruse argues that this unusual text shows how the state uses the so-called “‘coming-of-career’ narrative, to persuade Overseas Singaporeans to return and participate in the economic life of the nation-state.”

“It is only on the basis of their cosmopolitan identity and (cultural) capital accumulation that they are hailed by the government as ideal citizens for returning home,” she surmises. “The Overseas Singaporean is thus the paradigmatic and ideal neoliberal subject that becomes conscripted by the state’s nationalist narrative to further integrate the island-nation into the global economy.”

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