Introduction

For the last few decades the East Asian region has been the home of substantial growth economies known as the ‘young tigers’. These include South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. More recently, China and Vietnam have added to this region’s attraction for the international community because of their dynamic transformation from socialist-planning to market-oriented economies. There has been an enormous amount of research in a variety of academic fields focusing on the region’s economic changes. Academic studies have also focused on the situation of individual countries and comparative studies of different nations have been conducted. The level of research, however, has varied across the nations within the region. In the field of employment relations (ER), most of the studies have been conducted on high-profile economies such as Japan, South Korea and China, while there are still few studies on Vietnam and its ER transition process.