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

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

Introduction

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

News

Professor Dr. Minh Nguyen presents at EURAXESS ASEAN webinar on ERC grant schemes

ERC Consolidator Grant: 4 Millionen Euro für Soziolog*innen

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

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

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:

A study of the everyday practices of commercial banks in China, where the financial system is more established, and
A study of commercial banks in Vietnam and Laos, both of which considered frontier markets.

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

Year 1

Research designs and comparative framework finalized

Researchers theoretically and methodologically prepared

Fieldwork plans and institutional set-up ready

Kick-off conference organised with ensuing publication
Year 2

Fieldwork for all finalized

Experiences exchanged during fieldwork

Project collection of policy documents and discussions underway

Policy Brief series started

Publication from kick-off workshop submitted
Year 3

First comparative results available

Series of articles from all studies submitted

Ring lecture series organised

International conference panels

Writing workshop for early-career researchers
Year 4

Further comparative results available

Further international conference panels

PhDs submitted

Further journal articles submitted

Monograph initiated

Podcast series started
Year 5

Final results available

Book proposals from PhD submitted

Further international conference panels

Further article submission

Final conference organised

Edited volume manuscript submitted

Team

Principal Investigator

© Bielefeld University/Sarah Jonek

Homepage
Growing up in northern Vietnam, I embarked on a transnational life in the early 2000s following a period working in international development after college.

I attended the University of Queensland, Australia for an MA degree, and completed my PhD on Social Research in International Development at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Before joining the Faculty of Sociology in 2018, I was based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) for more than six years.

My research lies at the intersection between social anthropology and international development.
Of particular interest to me are issues of care and welfare, migration and mobility, and gender and class in East and Southeast Asia.

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.

My works expose the multilayer of power relations and social inequalities, and reveal the resilience and creativity of those at the margin of the national, regional and global economies.

Their actions have helped form social, moral and economic networks that are central to the functioning of these economies.

Post-doc Researchers

Doctoral Researchers

Advisory Board