Malaysian cultural identities and their influence on entrepreneurial intention and practice

Within Malaysia’s developing economic context, policies have been designed to address the perceived inequality in wealth and income distribution among the Malay population. The Malaysian government plays a major role in promoting Malays’ interest towards entrepreneurship as an attempt to reduce Malays’ perceptions of their economic disadvantage. By utilising Smircich’s conceptualisation of culture as a variable and culture as a root metaphor, as an aspect of social constructionist theorising, the researcher adopts a communicative-oriented perspective in researching upon these issues.Based on an inductive qualitative approach, forty Malay entrepreneur interviewee participants had been selected through purposive sampling and had been interviewed for this study. Based on the social constructivist theoretical perspective, this study adopts an interpretive approach by using semi-structured techniques to capture Malay entrepreneurs’ knowledge about intersection of entrepreneurial intention and practice with the social categories of their ethnicity, Islam, and culture within the Malaysia context. By using thematic analysis, this study provides evidence of an intersectionality which are both enabling and constraining at multiple levels of codes in the process of constructing Malay entrepreneurs’ entrepreneurial intention and practice within the business environment of Malaysia.Islamic values are pivotal upon the life of these Malay entrepreneurs, where entrepreneurial intention and its practiced relation and work are predicated on Islam, in their enactment in entrepreneurship. This study reflects individualistic values in it where it celebrates a comparison towards achievement-oriented approach which is a requisite in the western model values; existed within the Westerners’ entrepreneurial intention and practice. Thus, their findings are not necessarily transferable to Malaysian plural society, which is based on different cultural practice among ethnics and the existence of politically organised cultural communities, together with the overwhelming prominence of race in the modern Malaysian multicultural society