Building Families, Building Businesses

This chapter turns the book’s focus to the Vietnamese family and the model of family businesses. While cooperatives were the main economic units during the high socialist period, the family was promoted as the core for economic organisation in the aftermath of Đổi mới, leading to a massive surge of family businesses in the early 1990s. Unlike other studies on family businesses in East and Southeast Asia that portray family businesses either as exploitative or overly harmonious, this chapter shows a more complex picture by looking at different interests within and perspectives on family businesses in Ninh Hiệp, all the while keeping in sight generational and gender relations. (108 words)