An existential inquiry into Vietnamese women’s life-stories: on becoming a leader
Creators: name: Nguyen, Lan
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350799
subject: Strategy, management and organisational behaviour not elsewhere classified
classificationCode: 529999
subject: Other psychology not elsewhere classified

description: The existing literature on women’s leadership in Vietnam has mainly focused on identifying the socio-cultural and structural factors that constrain and enable their advancement in the workplace. Despite the important contributions this literature has made to date, it has yet to take a temporal approach and nor has it inquired into Vietnamese women leaders’ experiences beyond the workplace. The purpose of this study is to understand the formation of self-identity in Vietnamese women over the lifespan and its influence on their leadership development, paying particular attention to the nexus between gender and culture. To address these issues, the thesis employs concepts of self-identity from existential philosophy and psychology, which aligns with a narrative inquiry method. Although it was initially developed in Global North discourses, existential approaches to narrative inquiry nevertheless, when applied to the Global South, privilege research participants’ lived experiences and ways of being – their views of reality – as well as their own forms of knowledge production. Life-story interviews were conducted with five Vietnamese women leaders to co-construct and analyse their life and leadership experiences. 

Findings from the participants’ narratives indicate that their encounters with the conditions of existence - namely their situated freedom, their commitment to meaningful projects, and their experience of death anxiety - occupied their thinking during or shortly after important events and turning points in their lives. These encounters prompted a critical reflection on the role historical, cultural, political and economic forces played in their lives and the choices they made over the lifespan, at least partly shaping the formation of their self-identity. Transformations in self-identity and the role these played in the participants’ leadership development was conceptualised as a process of becoming, highlighting the fluidity and complexity of the participants’ experiences, which were embedded in their own particular social and cultural world. 

Employing an existential approach challenges the positioning of Vietnamese women as the exoticised Other, as non-agentic actors, pointing instead to their fundamental ability-to-be by which they become the editors of their life-stories. Existentialism’s focus on ontology and epistemology was found to be valuable for inquiring into leadership, gender and culture in the Vietnamese context. Existentialism, allied with aspects of phenomenology and hermeneutics, provided an incisive set of concepts for understanding Vietnamese women’s modes of being. Moreover, applying an existential analysis to their life-stories has potentially emancipatory implications for Vietnamese women by revealing what enabled them to create new explanations of reality. The participants’ life-stories suggest that their constructions of self-identity are based on conceptualisations stemming from their own unique life-stories, rather than being established by discourses and ideologies of Western feminism and leadership theories. In documenting Vietnamese women’s realities in this way, the study avoided epistemological violence and transcended the universalisation of male Western psychological constructs and the traditional social and gendered hierarchies in Vietnamese society.