Tourism, social networks, and community development: a case study of a coastal Vietnamese village

Abstract This article examines how tourism becomes integrated into rural communities and how an isolated Vietnamese community explores and creates employment opportunities through social networks. The empirical investigation is based on a case study of local involvement in tourism employment in Viet Hai, a remote coastal commune. The results of forty in-depth, semi-structured interviews reveal that the involvement of locals in tourism employment is closely associated with the density of individual social networks. Particularly, villagers with dense networks with external tourism operators and stronger kinship relations are more likely to have better access and resources to participate in tourism employment. Our empirical findings also demonstrate that the popularity of social media in remote areas could bring more opportunities to establish and strengthen external relationships and generate more resources for tourism development. Interviews with local people also unveil that tourism can intensify the income gaps among villagers, causing increasing intra-village disparities in living standards. Based on these results, local governments should be more active in connecting local villagers and tour operators. Future research and policy work in tourism and community development would benefit from a more explicit focus on the relationships between social networks and new forms of inequality, kinship ties, agritourism, and more sustainable trajectories of local development.