Abstract
In his vivid study on the current reconfigurations of the tourism sector, Jamie Gillen is striving to propose a critical cultural economy framework to question the entrepreneurial model of political governance in Vietnam. This perspective acknowledges the entanglement of culture and economy and the hybridity it produces through its daily basis’ production. In doing so, Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam offers a welcome theorization of cultural inputs in the entrepreneurial model of political and urban governance in the postsocialist Vietnamese context. This theorization is made possible by a grounded approach focused on relationships between economic actors through knowledge sharing, kinship, collaborations, and reciprocity, beyond the sole materiality of economic transactions. By claiming that culture is also “constructed” as a resource by tourism stakeholders to promote themselves in the fast changing market place, Gillen focuses on ongoing processes and everyday negotiations in the urban entrepreneurial field. This relational approach offers a stimulating counter narrative on the changing face of the Vietnamese economy. The main contribution of Gillen’s book is to rethink the state–society relationships in Vietnam specifically from the local city scale and the under-documented tourism sector.
Exactly 30 years after the launching of the Đói Mới reforms of 1986, Gillen acknowledges that Vietnam economy has reached a stage of maturity in the adaptation of its model of “market socialism.” Reading entrepreneurialism from Vietnam—a postcolonial and postsocialist country—participates in a most welcome effort to extend the understanding of urban political governance beyond the West. Grounded interpretations and inside–out perspectives allow for going beyond the binary frame of understanding that usually characterized Western urban theory, opposing for instance public to private actors and global to local forces. Thus, this book participates in the much-needed constitution of a more cosmopolitan academic world.
The Vietnamese context allows in particular for a compelling critique of David Harvey’s work on the entrepreneurial modelling of urban governance (1989; 2005), which has served as an unavoidable template in the neoliberal Western world. If most of the existing literature presumes that Asian countries have followed this neoliberal path, the hybrid postsocialist model of governance in Vietnam challenges fruitfully this assumption. Postsocialism in Vietnam remains indeed a structuring element in three ways. Firstly, because the contemporary and globalized economic period comes chronologically after a collectivist one. Secondly, the material legacies of this period are still prevalent in the contemporary making of the city—in more or less visible and direct ways—from political, economic, social, and cultural perspectives. Finally, the socialist legacy still participates in shaping actors practices, their modality of relationships, and thought patterns. While less visible in the production of contemporary urban spaces, these last two elements are fundamental when it comes to understanding local governance and interplays between economic actors in such a hybrid socialist market system.
Postsocialism should not be reduced to a transitional stage toward neoliberalism, this central point constituting the strongest argument of Gillen’s work. In that sense, chapter 4 on state–non-state coordination in the Ho Chi Minh City tourism industry contributes not only on renewing our understanding of urban entrepreneurialism from a non-Western perspective but also on a locally based understanding of the everyday governance in Ho Chi Minh City. Such a perspective complements previous studies on local governance in Vietnam (Gainsborough, 2010; Gibert, 2014; Kerkvliet and Marr, 2004; Koh, 2001, 2006; Labbé and Boudreau, 2015).
Strength and accuracy of the scientific argument are partially altered by the incomplete realization of the fieldwork project. This, of course, is partly due to the well-known complexity and uncertainty of the Vietnamese field, where access to many key actors remains difficult and random. I want here to stress the pleasure provided by reading lively interviews and their in depth analysis. Nevertheless, the state–society relationship approach of Gillen is undoubtedly weakened by the absence of any significant interview with state-owned enterprises tourism companies, such as Saigon Tourism, and a single one with the Vietnamese National Administration of Tourism. Saigon Tourism is a state organization created in 1975 and restructured in 1999 under the authority of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee to invest in tourism and leisure. The current diversification of its activities—as owner, manager, but also investor—illustrates well the evolution of the state strategy to profit from the economic growth in the tourism and leisure sector. It now operates in restaurants and hotels, as well as in transportation, sport, and culture. Thus, it remains more than ever a leading actor in the sector at the national scale despite the progressive liberalization of the economy. Furthermore, this state organization is quickly expanding its involvement into diversified partnerships with private companies, both Vietnamese and foreign, to maintain its supremacy.
We can also regret the absence of tourists themselves in the scope of the study, even though they are full actors of the tourism system. Through their practices, strategies, and tactics, tourists in their diversity participate in the current evolution of the tourism entrepreneurial model in Vietnam. By exclusively focusing on economic operators, Gillen’s work leaves out an important part of the relational cultural economy framework (Certeau, 2011). Chapter 6 sketches this hypothesis, yet doesn’t analyze it frontally. Peyvel’s work on domestic tourism in Vietnam is curiously absent of the reference list. Putting Gillen and Peyvel’s perspectives in dialogue would be a promising endeavor to enhance our understanding of political governance in the Vietnamese tourism industry. All the cultural products that are constantly both invented and reinvented by tourism economic operators—that Gillen describes and deciphers so vividly here—would indubitably gain to be understood not only in relation to the state actors but also to the consumers themselves.
It is refreshing to witness Gillen providing a myriad of themes, engaging the reader into such a complex relational object of study. On the other hand, this ambitious goal requires a clearer structure. For that reason, and despite its relatively synthetic development, Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam may be disorienting when it comes to articulating together all the themes covered by Gillen. For instance, in his initial acknowledgments, the author honestly explains the aggregative method he used in the writing of the book, joining together various articles he produced over his past 15 years of fieldwork in Vietnam. While some chapters constitute in themselves stimulating and coherent articles, their articulation is not always explicit enough in the book. Together with the development of his main argument on the evolution of entrepreneurialism in the tourism economic sector, Gillen questions in chapter 2 the meaning of culture through Vietnamese history and more recently in the course of liberalization economic reforms. Then, in chapter 5, he introduces the question of the commodification of war memory and the production of “warscapes” in South Vietnam. Moreover, this choice somehow illustrates Gillen’s dual perspective on culture, both understood as a means to propose new touristic products, with the commodification of many elements of the Vietnamese history, and as a lens through which we can renew our understanding of economic and monetary relationships. Playing successively on these two elements in different chapters probably complicates the reading of the book.
These critical remarks are only here to set out pathways to extend Gillen’s innovative work. Bridging approaches and disciplines—cultural geography, economy, and anthropology—offers indubitably pathbreaking ways of deciphering the fast changing Vietnamese social, economic, and political context.