Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Language in Human Capital and Entrepreneurial Development

政策制定者和经济学家经常将对一个国家年轻人的投资与其经济增长联系起来。他们认为，年轻人是国家的人力资本和未来的劳动力。这种观点影响了国际机构和政府管理新的资本和劳动力市场的整合和过渡的方式。政策和方案往往侧重于对青年的教育和培训，特别重视认知、社会行为和语言技能的发展。这个项目是一项民族志研究，调查年轻人如何应对这种压力，以发展他们的人力资本和创业能力。除了培训研究生进行数据收集和分析外，该项目还旨在通过提供关于在不断变化的政治经济地形下运作的日常行为者的动机、经历和文化价值观的描述性知识来促进科学理解。这些知识对于政策制定者和社会科学家理解经济和制度弹性的管理至关重要。通过对新兴语言企业家进行为期12个月的人种学研究，调查人员将考察转型背景下的人们通过开发人力资本来体验和管理融入全球经济的方式。这项研究的重点是媒体初创公司的年轻员工，在这个市场上，观察人士认为，像这样的中小企业对私营部门的发展至关重要，因为它们被广泛视为创新和增长的驱动力。调查人员将通过参与者观察、采访、语言分析和协作媒体收集来收集多角度的数据，以探索语言如何以及为什么成为年轻企业家经济和个人转型的场所。这项研究将语言人类学和经济人类学这两个经常分开的领域结合在一起，以调查人们如何将经济变化与日常实践中的语言使用联系起来。在许多社会理论家和经济参与者都将信息和通信过程视为推动市场力量的时候，这一点尤其关键。调查结果不仅将促进对各州和公民如何应对政治经济变化的理解，还将为以人力资本开发为重点的政策决策的后果提供新的见解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Policymakers and economists frequently link investment in a nation’s young people with its economic growth. Young people, they argue, are the nation’s human capital and future workforce. This perspective has affected the ways international institutions and governments manage the integration and transitioning of new capital and labor markets. Policies and programs often focus on the education and training of youth, placing special importance on the development of cognitive, socio-behavioral, and linguistic skills. This project is an ethnographic study that investigates how young people react to this pressure to develop their human capital and entrepreneurial ability. In addition to training a graduate student in data collection and analysis, this project aims to advance scientific understanding by providing descriptive knowledge of the motivations, experiences, and cultural values of everyday actors operating under changing political economic terrains. This knowledge is essential for policymakers and social scientists to understand the management of economic and institutional resilience.Through a twelve-month ethnographic study of emerging language entrepreneurs, the investigators will examine the ways that people in transitioning contexts experience and manage integration into the global economy through development of their human capital. The research focuses on the young employees of media startups, in a market where observers have determined that small and medium-sized enterprises like these are essential to private sector development, as they are widely seen as drivers of innovation and growth. The investigators will collect multi-perspective data through participant observation, interviews, linguistic analysis, and collaborative media collection to explore how and why language has become a site of both economic and personal transformation for young entrepreneurs. This research brings together the often-separate fields of linguistic and economic anthropology in order to investigate how people relate economic change to language use in everyday practice. This is especially crucial in a time when many social theorists and economic actors alike consider information and communication processes the driving market force. Findings will not only advance an understanding of how states and citizens react to changes in political economy, but will provide new insight into the consequences of policy decisions that take human capital development as their focus.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.