Why This Project
Understanding the purpose and vision behind the Vietnam Labour Research Portal
Vietnam Labour Research Portal is created to make scholarship on labour in Vietnam more visible to researchers, students, practitioners, and those who care about the world of work.
It is a voluntary initiative aiming to provide a supportive tool for researchers and students to discover existing work, learn from it, and advance this body of knowledge.
This initiative builds on earlier efforts of compiling bibliographies and research materials for training workshops, and connecting the Vietnam labour research community. With this portal, we aim to provide a more systematic and accessible platform for knowledge sharing.
We believe this resource is useful for these reasons:
1. Giving an overview of who's working on what
When early career researchers or PhD students start literature reviews, one of the key questions they often ask is: Who are the key people working on this topic?*
Our site brings together authors whose work is relevant to each topic, helping students and researchers get started. It's a way to see who have published in your area of interest, so you can read and cite more widely. Users can browse these scholars and decide for themselves which works to engage with.
We don't capture everything, but we hope this gives you a solid start.
For scholars who experience periods of career interruptions or have other commitments such as teaching, we hope to help you stay informed of the field. We will make changes and provide updates as new publications come out.
2. Enhancing visibility of Vietnam labour research
Scholars featured in our website work across different fields and/or countries. Some scholars study Vietnam as part of their comparative research; some publish in different fields of Vietnamese studies including labour. This platform helps foreground their research on Vietnam labour, which can be buried or overlooked in general profiles.
Early career researchers whose publications may not yet be widely visible, are also featured here.
Some important scholars in Vietnam labour studies have retired or are no longer active in academia. In some cases, their institutional profiles are no longer available. This platform helps preserve their contributions, ensuring their work remains accessible to new generations of researchers.
3. Promoting interdisciplinary knowledge
Labour studies are vibrant, diverse, and interdisciplinary. Scholars in law, anthropology, political economy, development studies, public policy, and human resource management can work on overlapping themes.
We organise topics around real-world issues, so researchers can find relevant work across different academic disciplines.
We believe that this cross-disciplinary journey matters. A scholar of labour law might learn from ethnographies of the shopfloor, and an anthropologist might benefit from reading legal scholarship to understand how formal institutions matter.
4. Supporting research integrity in an AI era
At a time when generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been used to write or search for academic work, this platform provides a reference point, manually organised by experienced researchers, for locating real, credible and quality research.
5. Connecting the media and practitioners with research
Journalists and practitioners sometimes need to identify experts to consult or interview about certain labour issues in Vietnam. This platform helps them locate relevant scholars and bring academic research to a broader audience.
* Why do search results show scholars rather than publications?
Knowing who is working on a topic is just as important as knowing which publications to read. Scholars shape debates, explain social reality, and offer practical insights. By highlighting relevant scholars and the key themes in their work, we aim to give researchers and students a solid foundation for navigating the literature.
This approach also reflects common academic practice. When you ask your supervisor/advisor or a friend for references on a topic, they tend to mention people, or sometimes books, more often than listing specific articles.
Our search results include senior, established scholars as well as up-and-coming researchers from across disciplines. This allows us to showcase contributions across career stages and promote interdisciplinary engagement.
This website is not a library or repository. We do not host full-text publications. Instead, we guide you to authors and keywords so you can continue your own exploration.