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，需要细致入微地了解新兴市场是什么样子的，以及是什么让它们成功或失败。分析新市场的一些最丰富的数据源是在有巨大文化和语言差异的地方，因为在这种背景下形成的网络可想而知更难以建立。这个项目训练研究生如何进行严谨、科学的实地考察，探讨成功的跨国市场是如何在商业网络中出现和维持的。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。本项目特别探讨了商人如何在有限资源（如正式合同、金融机构或翻译）的情况下成功开展跨国进口业务。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对于跨国市场的繁荣是多么重要。本项目将探讨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会网络。在12个月的时间里，本研究使用传统的民族志数据收集技术，通过定期深入跟踪，对大量商人进行定性调查以获取背景数据，并对商人返回者的家庭进行研究访问，跟踪了一个商人返回者样本。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决策者努力了解经济竞争力如何在新市场中出现和保持。

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.