non - state actors for the realisation of individual needs and wants ?

What is the purpose of taking norms and norm practices as primary unit of analysis for the investigation of socio-economic transformation? In the first instance, socio-economic change is driven by institutional (i.e. rule) changes and rules are made by economic actors: Codified institutions are established by the legislative authorities, generally the government, and implemented by an executive body. Informal institutions on the other hand, such as norms or conventions, emerge within the entirety of society and once practiced by a wider part of socio-economic actors i.e. reaching a certain degree of prevalence they may become formalised or codified by the government. Thus norms (generally upheld ways to achieve aspired values, i.e. needs & wants, ideals) can tell us a lot about economic preferences pursued by economic actors. Secondly, socio-economic transformation implies a change of the institutional scaffolding, e.g. when planned economic coordination becomes substituted by marked-based coordination. In this context also norm practices change, while the attributes of the norms themselves remain relatively stable. Given this content related constancy the analysis of changing norm practices is highly facilitated. Based on the above elaborations, the research question has been formulated correspondingly: ‘Which norms are used by state and non-state actors for the realisation of individual needs and wants in Vietnam?’ Subsequent questions were related to the dominance of certain norms and whether norms of state and non-state actors are intertwined in a mutually constituting dynamic. As for the research relevance it is argued that the present thesis attempts to apply a novel evolutionary institutional framework to analyse economic behaviour of actors in Vietnam during the pre-reform and ongoing reform period.