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Paper short abstract

This paper examines agrarian transition in Vietnam through a labour-centred lens. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, it analyses labour processes, differentiated labour regimes, and concrete working conditions shaping rural livelihoods across agriculture, services, wage labour and petty production

Paper long abstract

While dependency and developmental state scholarships offer contrasting accounts of development under globalisation, relatively little attention has been paid to concrete labour processes. Much research has focused on how labour outcomes deviate from normative development trajectories, with informal employment often treated as a pathological social outcome. Over recent decades, Vietnam’s integration into globalisation has been accompanied by a rapid decline in agricultural employment; yet rural people exiting agriculture were not absorbed into formal industrial wage employment but into service-sector activities. Much development research interprets this transition through formal–informal employment dichotomies, often implicitly assuming that service-sector employment, whether formal white-collar work or informal labour, represents a deviation from a teleological model of development. This paper argues that such perspectives obscure the real and concrete labour processes through which rural people sustain themselves in practice. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Central Vietnam, the study examines how rural livelihoods are concretely (re)organised across agriculture, wage labour, petty production, and service-sector work. The analysis traces how households move between different labour processes, how work is governed and remunerated, and how these arrangements shape everyday working conditions and social reproduction practices without predefined teleological assumptions. The findings show that people move across rural-urban continuum and that their working lives are characterised by overlapping labour regimes, complex employment relations, and differentiated working conditions. By foregrounding labour processes rather than employment categories, the paper contributes to development debates and calls for policy and research approaches that engage with the realities of work beyond formal–informal binaries.