| In three decades since the end of the Vietnam War (1975), Vietnam has transformed from a strictly socialist country with a subsidy economy to an increasingly civil society with a market economy. In this transformation, Vietnamese adolescents have been observed to shift from being the vanguards of revolutionary causes to being vanguards of consumption culture and also containers of problem behaviors. While the drastic shift in Vietnamese adolescents raises strong concerns within Vietnamese society, not much has been learned about the nature of the shift and its relation to social change. In this dissertation, I ask, (1) How has the discourse about adolescence changed in Vietnam over the last 30 years, and (2) What political, economic, and social factors ran parallel and possibly led to the change? Drawing on theories of adolescence and life course development (G. Stanley Hall, Margaret Mead, Jeffrey Arnett, Glen Elder Jr.) and theories on discourse, power, and knowledge (Michel Foucault), I reconstructed the history of the concept of adolescence in Vietnam in the last three decades using newspapers targeting adolescents, historical and cultural artifacts, and existing statistical data.;Overall, I found that within only three decades, the conceptualization of adolescence in Vietnam has transformed fundamentally through three phases that correspond somewhat to the three historical shifts in Vietnam during the same time. Specifically, between 1975 and 1986, when the Vietnamese government used Marxist-Leninism as the overarching ideology to guide and enforce perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the society, life course development was viewed in Vietnam as a process of political maturation, meaning the learning and practicing of Marxist-Leninism. As a result, adolescence was conceptualized during this period as a political stage that prepares young people to become the mature communists; thus adolescents, labeled as thieu nien, were portrayed as miniature communists. Between 1986 and 1995, when Vietnam adopted the market economy and favored economic development over the previous political commitment to the socialist cause in the world, life course development was viewed in Vietnam as a process of developmental growth; thus adolescence was conceptualized as a developmental stage in between childhood and adulthood and characterized by puberty, mood swings, and identity search. From 1996 to 2005, Vietnam went through a process of accelerating globalization, which essentially meant the import of Western consumerism and capitalism; as a result, adolescence in Vietnam was conceptualized as the Western idea of "teenage." In fact, the Vietnamese society had borrowed the English word "teen" to refer to their adolescents.;Together, the above-mentioned changes suggest a process of de-politicalization, commercialization, and democratization of the conceptualization of adolescence in Vietnam. This process indicates an evolving and integral relationship between social change and the formation of human identity. As such, the dissertation has several implications to social work and human development scholarship. First, the dissertation strongly illustrates the interaction between social environment and human behavior, which has been the foundation for social work research and practice. Second, it points out not only that adolescence differs across cultures and times, but also that adolescence is not inherently a universal distinct stage of development as is normally assumed in Western scholarship. Finally, the dissertation argues that social discourse is a powerful means of social control and intervention that needs to be taken into consideration by social work researchers and practitioners. |
