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

全球化对如何实现经济竞争力的科学理解提出了新的挑战。在这些挑战中，需要对新兴市场的样子以及是什么使它们成功或失败有一个细致入微的理解。分析新市场的最丰富的数据来源是存在巨大文化和语言差异的网站，因为在这种背景下形成的网络可以预见更难以建立。该项目培训研究生如何进行严格的科学实地考察，探索成功的跨国市场如何在商业网络中出现和维持。 在斯坦福大学的Sylvia Yanagisako博士的指导下，Vivian Lu将探讨商人如何在全球化时代跨越语言和文化差异建立商业关系。特别是，这个项目探讨了商人如何成功地进行跨国进口业务有限的资源（例如，正式合同，金融机构，或翻译）。该项目提出，全球化的商品流动和商业关系是通过对亲属关系、友谊和伙伴关系的文化理解而实现的。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繁荣的必要条件非常重要。这个项目将研究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个月的过程中，使用传统的民族志数据收集技术，本研究如下样本的商人返回通过定期深入的阴影，定性调查的背景数据，广泛的商人和研究访问采访的商人返回的家庭。这个项目将有助于经济人类学关于发展和全球化的辩论，以及跨国主义和劳动力迁移的讨论。除了为培训一名人类学研究生提供资金外，该项目还将有益于努力了解经济竞争力如何在新市场中出现和维持的发展规划者和决策者。

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.