ABSTRACT
This chapter offers insights into communication practices in Vietnamese non-government organisations as civic actions. Drawing from wider research on community work in Vietnam, two examples are discussed. The first involves a volunteer community worker implementing a new teaching programme in a local community-based organisation. The second involves a national non-government organisation with an international counterpart in an incident of reputational risk management. Using Habermas’ theory of communicative action, the chapter explores citizens’ purpose and meaning making in communication practices within their NGOs and the broader contexts of everyday life. The chapter highlights that civic values are not always absent in authoritarian contexts like Vietnam; rather, civic actions are contingent on people’s political, cultural, and social contexts. These contexts are conditions for communication within a community group and with the state, which in turn shape people’s communication practices. To understand communication rationality that informs actors’ decision and choice to engage in civic actions or “activism”, particularly in authoritarian settings, it is important to identify these conditions and explore how people respond to these conditions. This chapter contributes to the literature on Habermas’ communication rationality and lifeworld and a fruitful way to understand “activism” in different contexts.
