FinancialLives | Bielefeld University

ERC Consolidator Grant Nr. 101169874

© Minh Nguyen
ERC Consolidator Grant Nr. 101169874
© Minh Nguyen
ERC Consolidator Grant Nr. 101169874
© Minh Nguyen

Finance and Risk in the Lives of Working People in Market Socialist Asia

Project duration: 2025 - 2030

In China, Laos and Vietnam, Asia’s three market socialist economies, ordinary people are turning to banks, credit organisations and insurance companies for consumer loans, mortgages or private insurance; many are trading on the stock market.

FinancialLives is an anthropological research project focusing on the expanding range of financial activities by working households to understand how they use financial instruments to manage risk, ensure social protection and fulfil their aspirations.

It also seeks to understand how financial institutions interact with working people in the promotion of financial products and services, and the social transformations generated by the use and promotion of these products and services.

Street scene at a busy market in Asia, likely Vietnam, showing many people, including factory workers in everyday clothes and face masks, shopping at stalls selling hats, shoes, and household goods — © Minh Nguyen

Latest News

02.02.2026 - Land Development, Labour Commodification and the Restructuring of Welfare in Post-reform China and Vietnam – Minh Nguyen's Presentation at Humboldt University of Berlin

23.09.2025 - The Anthropology of Risk in a Financialised World

04.09.2025 - Collaboration Possibilities in Southeast Asia

11.08.2025 - Vacancies in ERC Consolidator Grant Project FinancialLives: 3 Doctoral and 1 Post-doc Positions

11.08.2025 - FinancialLives Featured in ASEAN Ministerial Meeting and EU-ASEAN Dialogue

Upcoming International Workshop "Fictitious Commodities Revisited: Enquiries into the Great Transformations of Market Socialism"

Date: 08 - 10 April, 2026
Location: Bielefeld University
Participation is by invitation only.
View the poster here.
View the program here.

Overview

Objectives

FinancialLives inquires into the household and institutional processes that bind labour and finance in the management, distribution and governance of risk in the market socialist economy. Its central aim is to produce comparative knowledge about the role of financial risk in social, economic and political lives. Building on the notion of politics of risk, the project examines intertwining dynamics and processes pertaining to the areas of inquiry:

Financial householding: household strategies, motivations and negotiations around financial activities as well as household relationships to the financial system and labour market
Commercial banking: practices and rationalities of commercial banks in marketing financial products and maintaining relationships with working households, and how they are embedded in the financial system
Governing finance: policy frameworks around the operations of financial institutions and financial markets as well as public discourses and discussions around the role of finance.

Research Questions

Central research question

"How does the politics of risk mediate the relationship between labour and finance in the market socialist economy?"

This central question will be operationalised by four sets of open questions regarding:

The problematisation of risk by the working household, the state and financial institutions;
Governing through risk, i.e. how risk technologies or discourses shape subjectivities and personhood, social relations and state-society relation;
Financial householding, i.e how the working household turns to financial possibilities to deal with the risks of labour and sustain its reproduction; and,
Implications for labour and beyond, e.g the possibilities and limits for working households’ wellbeing and aspirations, the social lives of risk.

Methodology

Using an analytical approach drawing on cultural theory of risk, social constructivism and governmentality frameworks, this enquiry will be ethnographic and comparative, both multi-sited and multi-scalar. Empirically, the project encompasses ethnographic studies of financial householding and commercial banking in addition to documentary research and household surveys. Three doctoral researchers will carry out ethnographic studies of financial householding, one in each country.

Two post-doctoral researchers will conduct studies of the everyday practices of commercial banking in China, Laos and Vietnam. These ethnographic inquiries will strive for understanding of the phenomenon within a broader context by tending to the multiple social cultural, economic and political settings in which it is negotiated and the spatial reach of actions by ordinary people.

Milestones

Team

Principal Investigator

Prof. Dr. Minh Nguyen

Bielefeld University
Homepage

© Bielefeld University/Sarah Jonek
I am a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary orientation. My PhD, acquired in an interdisciplinary PhD program at the University of East Anglia, was centrally oriented towards anthropological theories and methods.

This anthropological expertise was further developed during my time at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) before I joined Bielefeld University’s Faculty of Sociology.

My current research focuses on labour, mobility and migration, care and welfare China, Vietnam, Southeast Asia and more generally. My publications analyze the social transformations generated by the mobility of labour and changing care and welfare regimes, as well as the implications of global processes on people’s daily economic practices and local systems of meanings.
The questions of how the movement of people intersects with the commodification of labour, how the labour force is cared for, and what notions of the good life motivate people in global societies have been central to this work.

Increasingly I am interested in the ramifications of financialization for labour and the lives of ordinary working people. The use of ethnographic research has been central to my understanding of how people experience and act on processes of change and real-world problems in their political, social, and moral contexts.

While exposing the multilayer of power relations and social inequalities, my works reveal the resilience and creativity of those at the margin of the national, regional and global economies whose actions have helped to form social, moral and economic networks that are central to the functioning of these economies.

Post-doc Researchers