Managers and Management in Vietnam: 25 Years of Economic Renovation (Doi Moi) by Vincent Edwards and Anh Phan (review)

This book is highly recommended for managers, especially human resource managers, as well as for general readers. Using extensive surveys of public and private sector managers in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi from 2009 to 2010, the authors aim to explore the extent to which organizations comprise both rational (ly) and emotional (tinh) elements and how they are counterbalanced, manifested and viewed by all participants in the Vietnamese context (p. 47).

Managers and Management in Vietnam has a focus on workers’ rights and adopts a humane approach in analysing the doi moi policy. Its message is that prosperity must be accompanied by welfare. As is the case in the high-performing Asian “miracle” economies led by Japan, for instance, the authors recognize the roles of the government and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in promoting state capitalism, a needful precursor to marketization and privatization. The promotion of state capitalism encompasses a hybrid of domestic and foreign-invested firms that are willing to accommodate the doi moi policy as well as business practices that suit Asia.

The survey findings are presented in a very accessible manner and managers are taken to be individuals interacting with other individuals (workers) in a given environment. The authors’ socio-economic analytical framework therefore also incorporates interpersonal skills and relationships. This is further enriched by a discussion on: (i) Vietnam’s philosophical foundations found in Chapter 2 which covers Confucianism, Marxism-Leninism, capitalism and nationalism; and (ii) Vietnam’s historical evolution towards doi moi covered in Chapter 3.

The micro-firm aspects of the book are invaluable complements to the more well-known macro perspectives found in Chapter 4 on company contexts. In addition, Chapter 5 includes an insightful comparative analysis of other socialist models from the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and China — the authors draw on similar experiments in CEE and China to conclude what might be equally applicable in Vietnam. Chapter 6 on sense and sensibility discusses the various tensions that may emerge among various actors in Vietnam’s market-economy: SOEs; non-state entities such as households and domestic private firms; and foreign-invested firms (including joint ventures). Challenges and tensions vary and range from gender issues to the interplay of tradition and modernity, employer-employee relationships, local-foreign practices and state-private sectors (Figure 6, p. 53).

Three chapters (7, 8 and 9) on organizational insights to development and self-development in both the East and West discuss the crux of what works in Vietnamese management in terms of ideology and work culture (p 86). More of such examples are found in Chapter 10 which includes a neat characterization of Vietnamese managers and how their management styles compare to their American counterparts (pp. 98–99). The authors join other scholars in advocating for an optimistic developmental state, i.e., one that is not captured by special interest groups in the final chapter (Chapter 11).

The authors tell a “good” story following the earlier approach of Berliner (1957) who wrote Factory and Manager in the USSR. However, their findings are not entirely representative. While readers can appreciate brief anecdotal statements such as, “one respondent, who had worked in the same SOE for almost 30 years presented an analysis of the respective strength and weaknesses of SOEs …” (p. 34), this narrative approach based on twenty-one interviewee profiles of managers of SOEs and private companies (pp. 117–18) could perhaps have been complemented by a statistical one. Granted that the Vietnamese market economy in general, and its SOEs in particular, are politically sensitive, academic researchers and other professionals would nonetheless appreciate finer granulations in the authors’ research methods and questionnaire design (noted as open-ended, p. 6). The management of corruption and informal business practices is an equally sensitive issue that is of paramount importance to foreign investors and multinational corporations venturing into Vietnam.

Overall, this book makes an...