Obligation-based bribes in Vietnam: A view from the norm of reciprocity

Crime, Law and Social Change - Studies of bribery have been heavily influenced by the cost/benefit calculation, leaving social relationship of the involved parties under-explored. We propose the...     

Developing human resource in research and development: international experiences and implications for Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Human resource is the key driving force of research and development of a nation. Japan and Korea are two examples of how appropriate strategies in developing human resources have been transferred into remarkable achievements in R&D. In recent years, Vietnam has observed significant shift in investment for R&D. Thus, the lessons of Japan and Korea could provide Vietnam with valuable strategies for further development in human resources in R&D, particularly in vision of R&D development, policy flexibility, increased investment on R&D development and human resources, key R&D organization formation and increased international cooperation in S&T.     

The East Asia Security Environment in the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century and the Adjustments in Vietnamese Foreign Policy

International relations are social actions, and their expression is behavior of the states. According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the basis for any social action is habitus and capital (Bourdieu 1982). For Bourdieu, social action is not created in a vacuum but always takes place under certain social conditions. Different social conditions create different spheres that Bourdieu called action fields. The problem is that each field has its own rules, logic and goals. Bourdieu also uses the metaphor of game to explain the concept of field. Like the fields each game has also its own rules and logic. In order to participate in the game players are required to have some knowledge of game, and capacity, skills, and last but not least the interests to play game. The field of the Asia-Pacific region in the beginning of twenty-first century and especially during recent years is one of “center court” of the whole world involving all big players like the US, China, Japan, Russia and India. Their presence with their own behavior and different abilities, interests make this field more interesting, but at the same time more complicated and unpredictable. This article explores the different phases of Vietnam's foreign policy since reform in 1986 and joining ASEAN and adoption of “Resolution No. 8 (section IX) on the Strategy for Fatherland Defence in the New Context” in 1995.     

Exploring the dynamics of policy interaction: Feedback among and impacts from multiple,concurrently applied policy approaches for promoting collaboration

The prisoner's dilemma and stag hunt games, as well as the apparent benefits of collaboration, have motivated governments to promote more frequent and effective collaboration through a variety of policy approaches. Sometimes, multiple kinds of policies are applied concurrently, and yet little is understood about how these policies might interact with each other. This study uses a simulation approach to examine one such case, when policies focused on increasing collaboration competence interact with those that motivate parties to collaborate based on payoff and non‐payoff incentives. Theoretically, our findings suggest seven testable hypotheses for future, rigorous research. Practically, our initial findings suggest that increasing competency generally improves the performance of incentive‐based policies, but not always. Exhortation policies can go too far and may be more prone to doing so when the target population's competency is higher. This means that decision makers are more at risk of applying too much exhortation effort, especially if they are also concurrently applying a competency‐building approach. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Teaching international relations in Vietnam: chances and challenges

This paper traces the evolution of the teaching of internationalrelations (IR) in Vietnam, from the establishment of the firstInstitute of International Relations in 1959 to the proliferationof departments of IR or international studies from the 1990s.It notes the limitations facing teachers of IR and efforts todevelop and standardize the curriculum in recent years. It alsoexamines the way national history is portrayed in the teachingof Vietnam's foreign policy and regional relations in SoutheastAsia, with increasing attention paid to the Association of SoutheastAsian Nations from the 1990s. Received for publication August 28, 2008. Accepted for publication October 2, 2008.     

ASEAN's Indispensable Role in Regional Construction

The main objective of this paper is to answer the question why the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) should play a central role in constructing new security architecture in East Asia. The main argument of the paper is that, unlike other regions, a number of factors account for the complicated conditions observed in the East Asian region that provide a chance for ASEAN to be a central player in this process, promising because small and middle powers rarely can abuse power.

In order to achieve this objective, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part will analyze the major obstacles to the building of a constructive new China-Japan relationship akin to the post-World War II (WWII) ties between France and Germany. The second part analyzes the pivot to Asia by the United States to consolidate its role as regional facilitator. The third part shows why ASEAN can take the lead as a driving force or catalyst in fostering regional cooperation, because as mentioned above neither China nor Japan can do it at this stage. The paper concludes that despite the fact that ASEAN still faces many weaknesses and limitations, it continues to serve as a central player in an emerging architecture where, so far, no new alternative has appeared.     

Vietnam’s ‘socialization’ policy and the moral subject in a privatizing economy

Abstract

The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã h?i hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.     

Migration and Care Institutions in Market Socialist Vietnam: Conditionality,Commodification and Moral Authority

Since socialist Vietnam embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s, high population mobility has engendered shifting forms of insecurity in rural livelihoods and family lives. This article discusses how migrant households in a Red River Delta rural district draw on institutions of care beyond family and kinship to deal with such insecurity. These institutions simultaneously respond to local people’s changing needs and aspirations, and attempt to exert social and moral control. I show the increasing conditionality and commodification in the entitlements they provide and the differential ability of migrant households in accessing them. These rationalities are constitutive of the changing ways in which the institutions exert moral authority.