Introduction and Foregrounding the Work: ‘New’ Players, ‘New’ Discourses, ‘New’ Practices, and “New Flavours”

Faculty evaluation in higher education: a theory-of-action case study in Vietnam

“…A few participants in my study followed their desire to act according to their own professional, ethical, and educational values. Despite being scarce, these findings were noteworthy because these participants' normative view and their so-called self-reliant 23 approaches to faculty evaluation counter the negative effects of the Vietnamese communist centralised governance (L. H. Phan & Doan, 2020) and the neoliberal value of performativity (Cherry et al, 2017;Sułkowski et al, 2020). For example, an administrator's collaboratively solving faculty members' SET underperformance reduced individual competitiveness resulting from centralised requirements combined with the neoliberal value for excellence and productivity.…”

“…Along with this substantial economic transition, Vietnam has transformed its higher education system from Soviet-style socialist models to market-oriented ones (K. A. London, 2010;L. H. Phan & Doan, 2020).…”

“…H. Phan & Doan, 2020). Vietnam's dualism in governance, which means the government's adoption of two seemingly conflicting ideologies (market orientation and communism), has made the Vietnamese higher education system a distinctive case within the global higher education context (L. H. Phan & Doan, 2020).…”

“…On the one hand, the higher education system in Vietnam sustains the communist Soviet principles commonly seen in China, Russia, or other post-Soviet nations (L. H. Phan & Doan, 2020). At the institutional level, most important decision making, such as development plans or managerial posts, are required to consult the institutional communist party committee (T. L. Pham, 2012).…”

“…Learning-oriented faculty evaluation with transformational purposes may work better in countries like New Zealand or Australia, where "issues of social justice and human rights are of central concern" (Mertens, 2010, p. 9). In the communistembedded context of Vietnam, this new concept might be challenged by the centralised leadership's political and social context and lack of institutional autonomy (L. H. Phan & Doan, 2020). However, the transformational purposes are worth investigating since lessons learnt from the Vietnamese case can hopefully help understand and resolve prevalent problems of the current accountability-and improvement-oriented evaluation approaches in similar contexts.…”