Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers’ experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

This book presents a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on the problematic of reform in Vietnam. It explores the Vietnam's reforms in relation to those taking place in other countries of the socialist world, comparing doi moi with restructuring in other socialist states.

This book studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, combining a focus on everyday practices and societal transformations. Zooming in on the new urban middle classes, and through in-depth case studies in the realms of mobility, food and energy, the book brings new insights to some of the most urgent global sustainability challenges. Based on a decade of research in Vietnam, the book aims to contribute to better understanding one of the most fascinating ‘development success stories’ in the world. It introduces the term ‘consumer socialism’ to analyse some of the contradictions embedded in the socialist market economy. Simultaneously, the book aims to contribute to strengthening consumption research in and on emerging economies, and for this purpose develops a theoretical approach focusing on social practices and the political economy of consumption.

The study is intended to give background material on certain problem areas in the existing social system of North Vietnam. Emphasis is placed on the historical development of the North Vietnam Workers' Party (formerly the Indochina Communist Party), its structural organization, tactics employed to seize political power in North Vietnam after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, and the resistance war it waged against France in the period 1946-54. Details are given on the formation of the various front organizations, particularly the Viet Minh and its successor, the Fatherland Front; the youth and women's organizations; and the trade unions; and on the methods employed by the North Vietnamese Communist leadership to mobilize the masses and use them to achieve their political, social, and economic objectives. Included are the discussions of the roles of the puppet Democratic and Socialist parties in furthering the aims of the Communists. Additionally, background information is given dealing with problems affecting the Roman Catholics, ethnic minorities, resettlement of the population, evacuation of urban centers, and the development of local industry. (Author).

A comprehensive collection of writings from economists of Vietnamese origin. Topics covered include macroeconomics, microeconomics, education, international trade, communication, income distribution and poverty measurement.

Contemporary Asian societies present a variety of contrasting experiences and afterlives of colonialism, revolutionary socialism, religion and secular nationalism. Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective draws together essays that demonstrate how modernity has shaped two Asian settings in particular – India and Vietnam. It traces historical and contemporary realities through a variety of compelling topics such as the experience of the Indian caste system and the ethical challenges faced by Vietnamese working women.

Comparative analysis of the public bureaucracy's implementation of two ASEAN policies in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.

Countries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region.

This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence. It combines various political economic perspectives to offer an integrated and comprehensive review of Vietnam’s recent development, discussing topics such as public administrative reform, labour markets and special economic zones, environmental management and other important contemporary issues. This concise and highly readable book includes a considerable amount of research, and as such provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers interested in political economic change and in Vietnam.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.