Priorities, Motivations and Expectations of Returnees

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how Vietnamese international graduate returnees confront traditional values with their changed attitudes and newly acquired knowledge and skills from overseas education. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus as an analytical framework of returnees’ values, noting the diverse and mutability of values systems – an idea shared with Sen’s notion of values and reasoning of values. Then, drawing on the findings from the survey and interviews with returnees and network members, the chapter discusses returnees’ priorities, motivations and expectations – referred to in Bourdieu’s notions of capital – and how they are shaped by returnees’ values and reasoning of values in connection with Sen’s concepts of capabilities. The discussion orients around returnees’ reflections about their self-development, family responsibilities and goals for work and community work. Their reasoning about the values that inform their priorities, motivations and expectations of their acquired overseas education suggests correspondence to as well as divergence from the dimensions of habitus set out in Chap. 5. The chapter concludes by identifying some broad implications for further research and policies for returnees and for using the Sen-Bourdieu framework as a theoretical bind of the book.