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| 1 |
ID:
184146
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper provides a bottom-up analysis of law in daily life in Vietnam through an empirical study of low-income residents’ engagement in illegal housing activities in a peri-urban area of Ho Chi Minh City. Different from most existing studies of law and social change which take the formal institutional framework of law as their starting point, this paper examines the uses and meanings of law as products of interactions between citizens, local authorities, and intermediary actors. From an in-depth analysis of the residents’ stories, it argues that the role of law within daily life in Vietnam must be understood through the enactment of two opposing, but mutually connected, forms of legality. One form emphasizes informality and sentiment, while the other emphasizes violence and intimidation. The former accommodates and answers to people’s survival needs, while the latter constrains if not suppresses those needs. These forms of legality are mutually connected because they unfold in an ambiguous area of law enforcement that is largely subject to local authorities’ arbitrary discretion. These findings allow for a conceptualization of everyday legality in which law is both manipulable and emancipatory, but also disadvantageous and sanctioning.
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| 2 |
ID:
169211
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper contributes to the literature on precarity in Asia by examining the way in which state law interacts with social, political and ideological factors in shaping experiences of precarity. In contrast with studies of precarity that see law as a set of state regulations underpinning individual workers’ precarious economic and political status, this paper adopts a socially grounded view of law that incorporates workers’ understandings of and engagements with state law in commonplace settings. It also adopts a view of precarity as a complex dynamic of social, legal, and political processes shaping and reproducing workers’ experiences of insecurity and vulnerability at work, rather than a broad, identity-based category of non-standard and informal types of employment. Through an ethnographic study of former state workers’ working experiences in Vietnam, this paper sheds light on different aspects of workers’ collective and individual struggles against precarity and workplace injustice, and the role that law plays in these struggles. It argues that law contributes to reinforcing workers’ precarious experiences, which are underpinned by the tension between their expectations grounded in the socialist era and the realities of workplace injustice and insecurity in a market economy.
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