Announcing: Yuan, Guo-Min Gracie and John Walsh, “A Study on the Relationships between Road Safety, Social Lifestyle and Community and Government Social Roles: Evidence from Motorcycle Riders in Bangkok,” paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Sustainable Management (Bangkok: Krirk University, 27th-29th November, 2023).
Abstract: An earlier phase of this studied focused on the factors behind the striking fatalities rate in Thailand from road traffic accidents, which is estimated to be 32.7 per 100,000 of the population. A qualitative approach to research among commercial motor cycle riders permitted the adoption of an emic understanding of their habitus. This revealed the mutual support networks among the riders and how through personal relationships with customers negative events could become positive, shared experiences. A study of the riders’ social relations indicated they internalized their working environment so as to embody social structures within their daily working practices. This included various seemingly small but in fact important factors such as customer recognition, team motivation, family care, community coherence and policy effectiveness. What is the relationship between this internalization, daily practices, everyday interactions with the state and the high fatality rates? We explore the tangible and intangible factors that contribute to this complex set of interactions.
I started a substack thing. Yesterday I wrote about the election on Sunday and today the Thailand +1 Strategy (https://ladprao64.substack.com/p/the-thailand-1-strategy). Do have a look, if you are interested in that kind of thing.
Abstract: Food insecurity is a reality for millions of people around the world and affects even relatively affluent populations such as those found in urban Bangkok in Thailand. It is anticipated that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic will have intensified the presence of food insecurity both in the initial closedown that prevented food from entering the city but, also, in the longer term as the economic damage has intensified across the country. This raises questions about the extent to which people are experiencing food insecurity and how are they dealing with it. In particular, what level of resilience are people showing in response to the crisis? A qualitative research program of personal interviews was organized to explore these issues. Content analysis revealed that the sample was responding to these issues in a manner generally predicted by the existing research but with the addition of a non-technical form of mindful meditation we have called ‘everyday fatalism.’ The paper contributes to awareness of food insecurity in Thailand during the coronavirus period and an understanding of the adaptability of people in a Buddhist society dealing with hardship. The spiritual element of life is present in becoming resilient according to how respondents describe their experiences.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the online webinar hosted by the ILO and featuring various governmental and non-governmental speakers on the issue of Youth Employment in Thailand in the context of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and how the situation can be repaired.
In his summary, Mr Graeme Buckley (Director of ILO for Thailand, Cambodia and Lao PDR) noted the many different initiatives that various ministries had introduced and reflected on the need for a human-centred recovery. The discussion had included various issues, ranging from the challenge of automation to the supposed differences of young people today compared to young people in the past. From my own perspective, it seemed that there is a need for a comprehensive and co-ordinated approach to labour market policy (Mr. Buckley also hinted at this) rather than the scatter-gun approach that is to be found now. The people involved are doing their best and there is plenty of good work going on, although the benefits could be enhanced by a more integrated approach.
Just Enough: A Journey into Thailand’s Troubled South
Mira Lee Manickam
Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2013
ISBN: 9786162150548
200 pp.
The three southern Thai provinces that border Malaysia – Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat – are distinct from the rest of the country. The majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims and their first language is not Thai. Their Islamic heritage links them with Malaysia to the south and to the Middle East to the west and it is in these places that many people migrate to work. The region, known as Patani, although this is not accepted by the Thai state, was once an independent state that was annexed by the Bangkok regime at the beginning of the C20th or, depending on perspective, this was the period when longstanding and powerful links between Siam and Patani reached the natural conclusion of union between the two. This was the age when British and French were intensifying their control of mainland Southeast Asia and what is now Thailand can make the claim that it is the only country in the whole region that was not formally colonized by an outside power.
The South of Thailand, of which Patani is a part, is a region that has long been considered a distant and remote area and civil servants posted there generally felt perfectly justified in resorting to the longstanding practice of kin mueang (literally, eat the state). Since they were not paid enough to fulfil their duties to the crown, local officials were expected to raise their own funds and exercise extensive discretionary powers to conduct local affairs to their own satisfaction and still maintain a flow of resources extracted from the local communities back to the capital. It is quite plain how such a situation would lead to systematic abuse of power, especially in parts of the country in which the fastest messengers moved on the backs of elephants and any form of oversight or accountability was quite absent. Problems are likely to have been worse when the government officials looked upon their subjects as others, as they did in Patani because the Muslim people had their own language and cultural practices, refusing to drink alcohol or eat pork and saving their money for pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia. As Thai nationalism was promoted as a means of enforcing unity first to resist colonization and then to demonstrate that the country should be regarded as a modern nation, the resistance of Muslim people appeared to represent a threat to the state. When being posted to the South began to be considered a form of punishment, then the low-level police officers and soldiers involved became antagonistic to the local people. Over the years, tit for tat exchanges continued at a level low enough that they could be just about ignored at the national level. However, exchanges escalated at the beginning of the C21st and high profile massacres took place after apparent weapons thefts from army bases. The area became dangerous, not just to anyone who could be considered a representative of a would-be hegemonic state (teachers and Buddhist monks were among those who were targeted) but outsiders of any sort.
It is into this dangerous situation that the young American ethnographer Mira Lee Manickam enters to do her fieldwork in one of Patani’s many fishing villages, which she names Dato (the names of people and places are disguised in line with standard academic practice when there are any security concerns involved). She has come from Yale University with a view to studying economic change within the village, which was based on challenges to the way the fishing industry has been managed traditionally. While detailing the resilience of local families to these challenges by the creation of the fish cracker business in waters which now yield much fewer high value products owing to over-fishing by competitors, she also describes more closely her desire to become accepted into the local society and to understand some of its more problematic issues – the rubbish and feces strewn everywhere, the poor dental health, the oppression of organized religion and its crippling effect on gender relations and enforced inequality. Many of the best parts of this often charming book concern her struggle to accept both herself and her position in village society – she is partly Indian by birth, which makes her appear less exotic to the Dato people and she seeks to erase much of the rest of her identity through adopting androgynous hairstyle and clothing. At the same time, she demonstrates good practice as a researcher by insisting on taking time each day to review and type her notes to make proper records. I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone who is considering conducting immersive qualitative or ethnographic research without prior experience. In particular, her work demonstrates the value of the research journal – the notes (and reflections upon them) or diary which a researcher maintains while conducting research and which is used to capture observations and insights that would not find themselves in official interview transcripts but which certainly deserve a place in the overall database.
On the other hand, what she does write about her research marks it as naïve – that is, it is not informed by theory or even by the lessons drawn by those who preceded her. While understanding the desire to write a book for a general audience (and noting that it appears to have been published some years after the research was conducted), the lack of footnotes or references of any sort is quite striking. It is also my opinion that she misunderstands the political situation during her fieldwork by blaming then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (as whose university I was working during this period) for the actions of the army, which then demonstrated their opinion of rule by popular civilian poll by deposing him in the coup of 2006. As I observed above, this is a long-term issue with much broader implications for Thai politics and state). I am also concerned by her conclusion that the people of Dato should be allowed to continue in their state of more or less cheerful ignorance produced by substandard education, limited opportunities and relentless discrimination because it is ‘just enough’ for what they can actually achieve. It is no surprise that she has left the academic world and taken up film-making and other forms of media creation instead.
This is a nicely written book (and, I suspect, one that has been briskly edited) and it contains much that will be of interest to readers curious about the lives of the people of Thailand’s deep South and, indeed, of people in many contexts responding to the pressures of globalization and of pressures on traditional societal structures and practices.
The organizer of the Phuket International Tourism Conference 2021 asked me to provide an extended abstract of our forthcoming paper, which is provided below.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF LONG-TERM RESIDENTIAL CARE FOR DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL ELDERLY ON THE LOCAL ECONOMY IN THAILAND
John Walsh, Krirk University and Wilaiporn Lao-Hakosol, Independent Scholar
In common with most of the rest of the world, Thailand has a rapidly aging population. Approximately 13% of the total population is now aged 65 or older and this figure is expected to increase to 23.1% by 2035, with concomitant increases in the proportion of people aged 70+ and 80+ (Statista, 2021). Historically, older people are looked after by family members when it becomes necessary and Thai society, just as in the case of a number of other societies, acknowledge and accepts this situation. However, declining birth rates mean there are fewer young or working age people available to take up this burden, while increasing mobility also means people may not be able to accommodate their parents or elderly relatives, especially if they have moved to the city for work. Previously, the government made available a few beds across the country aimed at the indigenous aged and some charitable organizations also assisted. However, these options have become insufficient to meet increased demand and, as standards of living have been improved, better quality long-term care is required. Various private sector interests have entered the market in order to provide accommodation not just for local elderly but also elderly from overseas who would like to retire in Thailand because of its climate, cost of living and, for East Asian people, familiar and welcome cultural norms. As a result, a national-level industry has developed which combines long-term residential care with related medical and tourist facilities. As a relatively new phenomenon in Thailand, it is not very clear to what extent this industry contributes to local and national economy and what potential multiplier links exist. This is, for foreign residents, part of the tourist industry. Similar to other aspects of tourism and hospitality, long-term care of this sort suffers from the problems that it brings mainly low-skilled and low-paying jobs and, also, that the bulk of the money generated may not remain in the same area but be repatriated to the home area of investors. However, there are clearly capital-intensive forms of investment involved in such projects and a need for skilled and semi-skilled personnel. What, therefore, is the contribution of projects of this sort on the local economy? Answering this question requires acknowledgment that the financial impact alone does not give the full picture. Instead, it is necessary to embrace the triple bottom line approach that also incorporates the impact of the activity on the social and environmental dimensions of a specific location. This paper takes a case study approach to investigate several projects within different parts of Thailand to estimate the overall contribution to the local areas concerned. As a result, it is possible to provide evidence not just to private investors but also to public sector planning agencies and community leaders to formulate their responses to potential projects by means of a thorough evaluation of the effects felt by relevant stakeholders.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Even until the first part of the C21st, Thailand had a pre-modern health system. Reforms made since then have provided a universal health care system at a low cost at the point of access, with a Patient’s Bill of Rights and appropriate hospital accreditation procedures. The relationship between doctors and patients has also changed so that the latter are no longer (but not always) treated as inferior to the former (Aulino, 2019:135). The patient-healthcare provider relationship overall is complicated by the pervasive deference (kreng jai) in Thai culture with respect to people considered to be worthy of it, because of status, wealth or age. Thai culture considers family circumstances to be combined with morality and virtue, so that people with a high rank in society are considered to be worthy of respect by all. Although the indicators of this are not always evident to outsiders (Moore, 2012), they are clear to Thai people. Those responsible for marketing this industry have resorted to familiar themes in the portrayal of Thai and Thai culture: “As a provider in the global service company, the Thai state and its corporate partners have capitalized on feminized Thai cultural traits as warmness, hospitality, and servility, as well as bodily and emotional labour performed mostly by Thai women, to compete in the market (Sunanta, 2014).” These dynamic factors are not operating in the same direction and this begs the question as to how the retirement industry will develop in a professionalized manner suitable for scaling up to the current and potential future level of demand. The subject is one of considerable interest in the study of tourism (e.g. Kolar & Tabkar, 2010; Zhou, Zhang & Edelheim, 2013) and, more generally, in the ways in which traditional patterns of behaviour are converted to market-based processes (e.g. Walsh, 2011). The research contributes, therefore, to the understanding of how tourism development has an impact on Thai culture and economy and gives rise to some policy and managerial implications.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The study adopted a qualitative approach to the research based on a program of in-depth personal interviews which are ongoing. Interviews were accompanied by extensive note-taking or were recorded for subsequent transcription. Interview notes and transcriptions were entered into a database together with relevant secondary sources and the contents of the research journal, which was used to record non-interview observations and insights that occurred during the research process. The contents of the database were subjected to recognized content analysis processes and the findings thereby obtained presented in the appropriate section of this paper.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Previous research (Lao-Hakosol & Walsh, 2019) had outlined the emerging shape and nature of the industry and this was mainly confirmed by the new research. As suggested previously, the professionalization of the service was reflected in diminution of importance of feminized Thai-style services from the perspective of the healthcare provider but not necessarily from the perspective of the consumer, who often had an imagined form of Thai-ness which it was expected would be available.
Table 1: Healthcare Villages and Condominiums
Project Name
Prices
Bangsai Wellness City (Ayutthaya province)
4 million baht and up
Jin Wellbeing Country (Rangsit area) (condominium)
4 million baht and up for 43-66 sq.m.
Sawangkanivat 2 (condominium, for one generation only) (Samut Prakan province)
1-2 million baht for 40-60 sq.m.
Otium Retirement Villa (Phuket province) (2021 construction in progress)
51.6 million baht for 276 sq.m.
Senior Complex (72 rai in Samut Prakan province (Ministry of Finance and Rama Hospital (expected to open in 2023)
Minimum rent 10,000 baht per month for qualified tenants
Camillian Group (Camillian group hospital, associated with religious institution)
30,000
17,000
Srisook Home Pathum Thani
35,000
22,000
15,000*
Sansiri Sukhumvit 107
35,000
25,000
Huachew University
28,000 (60,000**)
50,000**
32,000**
Source: Authors’ Survey (October, 2020-March, 2021). (* physiotherapy included; ** special care cases)
Most new developments are taking place in the periphery of Bangkok, for a combination of cost purposes and to maintain a market for healthcare professionals, who are often reluctant to work in what are considered to be distant provinces.
CONCLUSION
This paper presented findings concerning research into the emergence of long-term residential and health care in Thailand. The research was intended to determine the contours of the importance and value of this industry and its connections with other parts of the economy. It also investigated the nature of the offering provided by industry actors and government partners and the extent to which this has changed as historical approaches to promoting Thailand and Thai-ness have been affected by marketization of the industry. It is clear that the industry is still in the growth stage and that different segments can be identified which are serviced in different ways and with respect to the degree of technology and supporting equipment provided.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No acknowledgments.
REFERENCES
Aulino, Felicity, Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2019).
Kolar, Tomaz and Vesna Zabkar, “A Consumer-Based Model of Authenticity: An Oxymoron or the Foundation of Cultural Heritage Marketing?” Tourism Management, Vol.31, No.5 (October, 2010), pp.652-64.
Sunanta, S. (2014), “Thailand and the Global Intimate: Transnational Marriages, Health Tourism, and Retirement Migration,” MNG Working Paper (14-02), available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0018-F41B-B.
Walsh, John, “Suriya Coffins: Traditions Become Market Opportunities,” Society and Business Review, Vol.6, No.2 (2011), pp.168-75.
Zhou, Qilou (Bill), Jie Zhang and Johan R. Edelheim, “Rethinking Traditional Chinese Culture: A Consumer-Based Model Regarding the Authenticity of Chinese Calligraphic Landscape,” Tourism Management, Vol.36 (June, 2013), pp.99-112.
I am still in Ho Chi Minh City after presenting the paper on the Kra Canal at the 12th International Conference of Asian Shipping and Logistics here at RMIT. It was a successful event and I was pleased to be able to contribute.
Here are the details of our paper:
Walsh, John and Fuangfa Ampornstira, “Impacts on East Asian Shipping and Trade of the Opening of the Kra Canal and Special Economic Zone,” paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Asian Shipping and Logistics (RMIT: HCMC, June, 2019).
Abstract:
For centuries, engineers have speculated about the possibility of opening a canal at the Kra isthmus, which is the narrowest part of Southern Thailand and which would join the Gulf of Thailand with the Andaman Sea. Such a canal, if it could ever be really built, would significantly reduce shipping lanes that currently involve the Straits of Malacca and would short-circuit to some extent the geopolitical advantage that the USA has by its ability to regulate movements there. In recent years, a resurgence of interest in the canal, which had been more or less abandoned because of the sheer scale of the work involved and the costs it would involve, has been brought about as a result of increased Chinese influence in the region. Further, while the previous monarch was thought to be opposed to the project, the current incumbent is said to be more open to large-scale infrastructure projects that might characterise his reign. Opening the canal would have enormous social, political and environmental impacts on Thailand and the neighbouring region but would also have serious disruptive impacts upon current and future shipping patterns. This paper assesses the issue surrounding the building of the canal and the options for its ultimate configuration, if it does come to pass. It then attempts to identify the impacts of the canal and its attendant special economic zone, given the timescale likely to be required before it can be opened. Special focus is placed on the possible impacts upon existing shipping patterns in the region and the possibility that trade will be created or diverted.
Announcing: Azavedo, Mark and John Walsh, “A Comparative Study of Artisanal Food Producers’ Motivations in Western Australia and Thailand,” Acta Universitatis Danubius Oeconomica, Vol.15, No.3 (2019), pp.76-89.
Abstract: The research objective in this study was to discover motivations of artisanal food producers in Australia and Thailand. This was mainly to inform farmers’ market managers of the motivations of artisanal food producers, their clients, to better provide retail space to food producers. However, the same principle also applies to many other service providers, for instance banks, insurance companies and other financial services in developing products for this very specific group of small-scale business enterprises. Governmental advice and support services for these businesses will also benefit. Finally, out of a Royal Commission Report, chain supermarkets in Australia must source more from small-scale suppliers, yet they appear uninformed about who they are dealing with, their motivations and limitations, for instance not being able to supply large volumes. There has been virtually no research on artisanal food producers. Retailers have no research to inform them. Here was another gap to fill. Methodology for this study was interview-based qualitative, with data analysed through thematic content analysis. The paper’s originality lies in two ways, meaning that it fills research gaps but also because its results are perhaps surprising. Artisanal food makers are primarily self-concerned, not community-concerned as the previous study would indicate.
Ladprao 64 