Doctoral Dissertation Research: How Transnational Markets are Maintained Across Cultural and Linguistic Divides

全球化为科学理解如何实现经济竞争力提出了新的挑战。这些挑战之一是，需要对新兴市场的样子以及是什么让它们成功或失败有一个细致入微的理解。一些用于分析新市场的最丰富的数据源位于存在巨大文化和语言差异的网站上，因为可以预见，在这种背景下形成的网络更难建立。这个项目培训一名研究生如何进行严谨、科学的实地考察，探索成功的跨国市场是如何在商家网络中出现和维持的。在斯坦福大学Sylvia Yanagisako博士的指导下，Viian Lu将探索在全球化时代，商人如何跨越语言和文化差异创建商业关系。该项目特别探讨了商人如何利用有限的资源(例如，正式合同、金融机构或翻译)成功地开展跨国进口业务。该项目提出，通过对亲情、友谊和伙伴关系的文化理解，全球化的商品流动和商业关系成为可能。商人之间的这些关系对于理解文化创新和人际信任是跨国市场蓬勃发展所必需的非常重要。这个项目将调查跨国商业经验如何改变来自非精英背景的年轻商人的经济可能性和社交网络。在12个月的时间里，使用传统的人种学数据收集技术，这项研究通过定期深入跟踪商人回归者的样本，对广泛的商人进行定性调查以获取背景数据，并进行研究访问以采访商人回归者的家庭。这个项目将有助于经济人类学中关于发展和全球化的辩论，以及关于跨民族主义和劳动力迁移的讨论。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将有利于发展规划者和政策制定者，他们正在努力理解经济竞争力是如何在新的市场中产生和保持的。

Globalization has presented new challenges for scientific understandings of how economic competitiveness can be achieved. Among those challenges is the need for a nuanced understanding of what emergent markets look like, and what makes them succeed or fail. Some of the most rich data sources for analyzing new markets are in sites where there are vast cultural and linguistic differences, since the networks that form in such contexts are predictably more difficult to establish. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, scientific fieldwork, explores how successful transnational markets emerge and are maintained across merchant networks. Vivian Lu, under the supervision of Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako of Stanford University, will explore how merchants create business relationships across linguistic and cultural difference in a globalized era. In particular, this project explores how merchants successfully conduct transnational importation businesses with limited resources (for example, formal contracts, financial institutions, or translators). This project proposes that globalized commodity flows and business relations are made possible by cultural understandings of kinship, friendship, and partnership. These relationships between merchants are important to understand how cultural innovations and interpersonal trust are necessary for transnational markets to thrive. This project will investigate how transnational business experience transforms the economic possibilities and social networks of young merchants from non-elite backgrounds. Over the course of 12 months using conventional ethnographic data collection techniques, this study follows a sample of merchant returnees through regular in-depth shadowing, qualitative surveys of a broad set of merchants for contextual data, and research visits to interview the families of merchant returnees. This project will contribute to debates in economic anthropology about development and globalization, and discussions of transnationalism and labor migration. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would be of benefit to development planners and policymakers struggling to understand how economic competitiveness emerges and is maintained in new markets.