Highly-skilled migration, knowledge mobility, and knowledge mobility barriers: empirical evidence from Vietnamese migrants in the Lao construction sector

Although there has been an increasing growth of Vietnamese highly-skilled migrants in Laos for decades as a result of Vietnamese foreign direct investment (FDI), very little is known about how knowledge is shared between this cohort and their host counterparts. Empirically, this paper took the case of the highly-skilled Vietnamese migrants in the Lao construction sector to investigate this knowledge exchange process. The objective of this research was two-fold. First, based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 25 nationals of both the countries, this study examined the typology of five types of knowledge that were shared among the workers of the two countries including embrained, embodied, encultured, embedded, and encoded knowledge. Second, the barriers to this knowledge exchange process among these individuals were identified. The findings of this research revealed that much of knowledge was shared between skilled Vietnamese migrants and their host partners. On one hand, embrained, embodied, and embedded knowledge types were more shared from skilled Vietnamese workers to their Lao coworkers. Whereas, on the other hand, encultured knowledge was the most shared knowledge type between Vietnamese and Lao workers. In terms of the knowledge sharing barriers between the two sides, language, differences in the general and the business culture, and differences in the capacities of the Vietnamese and the Lao workers were most mentioned by the interviewees.