Culturally embedded MSMEs and inclusive development: Narrative evidence from ethnic minority entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s highlands

This study asks how ethnic minority entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s highlands make sense of enterprise alongside cultural continuity, community obligations, and inclusive development. It draws on narrative inquiry with 14 H’Mong, Dao, Ede, and Bahnar entrepreneurs in Ha Giang, Lao Cai, Dak Lak, and Gia Lai, supplemented by 22 site observations and four follow-up interviews. Two connected mechanisms recur across the accounts. Cultural identity and place-based obligations shape entrepreneurs’ sense of what makes a venture legitimate, while community social capital provides labor, knowledge, informal finance, and access to local markets. These resources help sustain enterprises and pass knowledge across generations, but they operate amid collateral and administrative frictions, remoteness, tourism seasonality, commodity-price volatility, commercialization pressures, and uneven formal recognition of women’s work. The findings refine humane entrepreneurship by locating human and social value partly in a relational sense of venture legitimacy, as entrepreneurs understand it in relation to family and community, rather than only in an individual or firm-level strategic orientation. Institutional conditions shape how these culturally embedded practices are associated with inclusive, uneven, or contradictory outcomes. The practical implications concern locally mediated and seasonally responsive finance, culturally and linguistically adapted business services, gender-sensitive formalization support, and market links that widen external reach without displacing community influence over cultural and economic value.