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This study analyses the effects of firm efficiency on firm performance and how controlling shareholders moderate the link between the two variables.

This study employs data envelopment analysis to estimate firm efficiency and the panel regression method to assess the hypothesised relationships among 1,295 firm-year observations of publicly listed firms in Malaysia from 2015 to 2019.

The results indicate that firm efficiency (technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency) has mixed relationships with firm performance (return on assets, market-to-book ratio and operating cash flows), all of which are being moderated by controlling shareholdings.

This study highlights the importance of assessing firm efficiency as the key success factor for improving firm performance. Industrial managers should manage efficiently their resources or operating costs in achieving their corporate financial goals. Moreover, this study notes the presence of controlling shareholders, who can be either self-interested or company goal aligned.

This study suggests becoming efficient in transforming inputs into outputs is a prerequisite before investigating accrual-based and cash-based firm performance measures, and the presence of controlling shareholders matters in these regards.

This chapter provides information on the development of Vietnamese education under the influence of global forces based on the analysis of relevant education research and policies using Wolhuter’s frameworks. In the process of coming up with ways to develop education in the face of different influences of globalization, besides having reactions with patterns commonly found in countries around the world, Vietnam also has responses that reflect its own political, sociocultural and economic characteristics. The state still plays a controlling role in education at all levels and many culture-related features that have existed throughout the country’s history have hardly changed, namely aspects related to teachers, learners and teaching and learning methods. To sustain its education in the globalized era, Vietnam must make more efforts in various aspects such as the link between education and employment, the logic of education objectives, the feasibility and appropriateness of curricula, quality of education, especially of higher education and equality in education for underprivileged groups.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the way in which a popular ritual became one of Vietnam’s most important festivals, elevated as a celebration of national heroism and charts its gradual transformation in modern society.

This research focuses on the combination of a fertility rite and narratives of St Gióng based on nationalism or heroism created a special festival reflecting many traditional cultural characteristics of Vietnam and the Việt people and the transformation of St Gióng from a mythological to a national symbol of heroism in anti-invader history was recorded in texts.

The paper casts light on the mythologization and historicization of St Gióng in Vietnam’s particular historical context by decoding the Gióng symbol as a core element of the folktales and myths about St Gióng to understand the formation and development of St Gióng in the cultural history of Vietnam.

The paper is not exploring the Gióng symbol within a larger cultural context of nationalism and ethnosymbolic approach in a comparison of national symbolism and heroism.

The paper includes implications for advised scholars to conduct further exploration of the symbol and myth of not only St Gióng in Vietnam but also Kubera in India and Vaisravana in China to connect Kubera, Vaisravana and St Gióng under the connection of literal myth and heroic symbol.

The paper shows how processes of historicizing myth and mythologizing history are important features of Vietnamese socio-historical research.

The paper shows how a fertility rite became a historical festival and the figure of St Gióng became a symbol of patriotic heroism.

This paper aims to examine the levels of integrated reporting disclosure alignment in annual reports by listed firms in Vietnam and the factors influencing these disclosure levels.

Drawing on a sample of 200 listed firms in Vietnam in 2017, the authors constructed a disclosure index based on the content of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) Framework. Using this index, the study measures the extent to which Vietnamese listed firms’ annual reports include the content elements required by the integrated reporting (IR) Framework. The study performs ordinary least square regression to investigate the influencing factors.

The study documents that, on average, Vietnamese listed firms disclose about 43% of the information required by the IIRC Framework. The disclosure levels are positively associated with manufacturing firms, board independence, foreign ownership, government ownership, audit quality and firm size.

Integrated reports have been widely adopted in many countries, but it is still a new issue in Vietnam. This is the first paper providing some insights into the inclusion of the content elements required by the IR Framework by listed firms in Vietnam. It also contributes to the disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence on the factors influencing these disclosure levels. Deriving from the findings, the authors offer recommendations for policymakers on the issue of regulating and implementing IR in Vietnam.

Digital transformation continues to rapidly progress in higher education globally, spanning all aspects of higher education operations, values and culture. Despite expanding literature, guidance remains focussed on emergency application during pandemic lockdowns and/or on single organisational case studies. Digital transformation frameworks that move beyond these foci are heavily criticised for being commercially contextualised (outside of higher education) and are often too narrowly conceptualised. The purpose of this paper is to review the most common framework currently used in the UK, which takes a strategic and organisational perspective on digital transformation.

This is a technical review article that summarises key guidance for organisational digital capability and then reflects on its application in the UK (a developed economy and higher education system) and in Vietnam (one of the fastest-growing economies with a developing higher education committed to digital transformation) as an initial attempt to explore its applicability beyond the UK context. Vietnam has been chosen as a reference context, given its significant current digital transformation policy reform at the national level and as a collaboration partner with the UK in its digital transformation.

The guidance highlights six core areas to consider for digital capability: information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure, content and information, research and innovation, communication, learning, teaching and assessment and organisational digital culture. Although the framework is normative, findings suggest it is sufficiently open-ended to enable its users to determine practical steps to drive digital transformation. However, complementary tools are suggested to deal with the rapidly developing digital transformation policy context of Vietnam.

This is the first time a review has been conducted from the perspective of different countries, with a view to supporting leaders, managers and policymakers in the UK, Vietnam and other Association of South Eastern Nations (ASEAN) networks in their own digital transformation transitions.

Single-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) – rankings of provinces and districts – to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among officials. However, the evidence are sparse on their effects in this context. The authors argue that built-in incentive structures in centralized single-party regimes distort the positive impact of SPAs.

The staggered rollout of the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) created a natural experiment. Due to 2010 budget constraints, the first iteration of the PAPI survey covered only 30 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces before covering all in 2011. The PAPI team used matching procedures to identify a statistical twin for each province before randomly selecting one from each pair. The authors use randomization inference to compare the outcomes of these control and treatment groups in 2011.

Exposure to PAPI helped improve almost all aspects of governance; however, significant evidence of prioritization bias exist. The positive effects only persisted for the dimension of administrative procedures, which was the one area of governance that was prioritized by the central government at the time. Other dimensions only registered short-term effects.

Our study provides an examination of the impact of SPAs in a single-party regime context. In addition, the authors leverage the natural experiment to identify information effects causally. The authors also look past short-term effects to compare outcomes for five years after the treatment occurred.

This study aims to examine the impact of managerial use of motivating language on employee absenteeism, turnover intention, job satisfaction and job performance for employees from three nations: India, the USA and Vietnam.

Data is collected from 614 employees working in India, the USA and Vietnam. A variance-based partial least squares structural equation modeling technique is used to test the hypotheses. In addition, a statistical test is used to examine the statistical differences in the results across the three nations.

The findings are consistent with the motivating language theory, in that managerial use of motivating language can be an effective strategy in motivating employees. Specifically, motivating language is found to significantly decrease employee absenteeism and turnover intention, as well as significantly increase job satisfaction and performance across the three nations. The effect sizes indicate that, across all samples, motivating language has a medium effect for all employee outcomes, except absenteeism, which is shown to have a small effect size. Moreover, the results indicate that employees in different cultures perceive and interpret the leader’s use of motivating language in different ways. Whereas motivating language may receive greater success in promoting workers’ job performance in eastern cultures, it is also more effective in retaining employees in western cultures.

The study adds to the literature in three major ways. First, it provides evidence for two understudied relationships: motivating language and absenteeism and motivating language and turnover intention. Second, it assesses the generalizability of the motivating language theory by investigating data from India, the USA and Vietnam. Finally, this paper offers a statistical comparison of the three samples to analyze how the relationship between motivating language and worker outcomes differ among the three samples.

This paper aims to explore ethnic minority women’s gendered perceptions and processes of agricultural innovation in the Northern uplands of Vietnam. The key research question asks how women develop innovations and learn new agricultural practices within patriarchal family structures.

In-depth interviews including life histories were conducted with 17 female and 10 male farmers from different socio-economic groups; participant observation and key informant interviews were also carried out.

Women’s innovation processes are deeply embedded in their positions as wives and daughters-in-law. Their innovation tends to be incremental, small-scale and less technological, and they use innovation networks of women rather than those of the formal agricultural institutions, including bringing innovation knowledge from their birth family to the patrilocal household. Unlike men’s perceived innovation, women’s innovation is strongly linked to small-scale entrepreneurship, and it is a powerful approach in the sense that it strengthens the position of women in their families while improving the household economy.

Identifying socially constructed innovation processes helps policymakers to rethink the introduction of ready-made innovation packages, both in terms of content and delivery, and to facilitate innovation for women, as well as men, in marginalized positions.

Understanding the gendered processes of innovation instead of measuring gender gaps in innovation outcomes sheds light on women’s interests and preferences, which can inform policies for supporting women’s innovation and thereby lead to social change, including gender equity.

This paper contributes to the understanding of gendered innovation processes and entrepreneurship associated with agriculture in rural areas in non-Western ethnic-minority contexts, which is an area that past and current research on entrepreneurship has relatively ignored.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate a recent trend in climate change and its impact on livelihood of community living in Nam Dinh province, Vietnam. Further, it aims to increase the government attention for adaptation measures by providing awareness of climate change and its negative impacts on livelihood.

For study purpose, cross-sectional and secondary data sets were used. The community perceptions about climate change were recorded by face-to-face interviews of 500 respondents from Nam Dinh province, Vietnam in April 2015 by using a well-structured questionnaire, whereas secondary data were collected from the statistical yearbook of General Statistics Office of Vietnam. To accomplish the study objectives, Cobb–Douglas production function and Likert scale were used to estimate the community perceptions of climate change and impact of climate change on livelihood, respectively.

Results depict that climate change negatively impacted on the productivity of rice and livestock. Particularly, frequently occurring of droughts, floods and salinity intrusion negatively impacted on rice productivity, while livestock productivity is decreased by frequent occurring of flood storms in study area.

The study results suggest a government support is essential to achieve sustainable livelihoods for coastal communities living in the Red River Delta, particularly some adaptation measures in the context of climate change are required in study area.