Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Significance of Intercultural Social Networks in Emergent Commercial Markets

经济人类学家和社会学家早已确定，商业关系“植根”于社会和文化过程中。随着各种经济体日益全球化，对于如何在企业家受到不同文化、社会和政治期望的影响的背景下建立和发展经济关系的科学理解提出了新的挑战。这个项目培训研究生如何进行严谨的、有科学依据的实地考察，探索在新兴商业市场中，不同国家出身的个人之间能够和不能导致更大信任和双方满意结果的实践和过程。Derek Sheridan在布朗大学Catherine Lutz博士的指导下，建议研究不同国家背景的商人和企业家之间的日常经济和社会互动如何塑造对国际关系的理解，以及这些关系对新兴市场中可行的商业网络的影响。为了回答这些问题，这位研究人员将花一年的时间关注在坦桑尼亚的中国移民。鉴于中国企业家在非洲日益增长的经济影响力，以及非洲资源和经济增长对中国崛起的巨大重要性，这是研究21世纪重要商业关系如何出现的理想背景。研究人员将关注中坦关系在不同背景和不同条件下的发展和演变。通过实地调查，他将追踪人们如何相互评价，如何建立对彼此的信任和/或不信任，并制定允许他们相互开展业务的日常道德和“游戏规则”。通过广泛的观察和采访相结合，研究人员将跟踪人们如何通过故事来理解他们的经历，以及他们如何与他人分享这些经历；在这个过程中，他们将为中国和坦桑尼亚关于中非关系的大众知识做出贡献。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将产生非洲与中国之间重要的商业关系的数据，了解这些关系对于经济竞争力至关重要。

Economic anthropologists and sociologists have long established that commercial relationships are "embedded" in social and cultural processes. As various economies become increasingly globalized, there are new challenges for scientific understandings of how economic relationships can be established and thrive in contexts where entrepreneurs are informed by different cultural, social, and political expectations. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, scientifically grounded fieldwork, explores the practices and processes that do and do not lead to greater trust and mutually satisfying outcomes between individuals of varying national origins in emergent commercial markets. Derek Sheridan, under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Lutz of Brown University, proposes to ask how everyday economic and social interactions between merchants and entrepreneurs of diverse national backgrounds shape both the understanding of international relations, and the implications these relations have for viable commercial networks in emergent markets. To answer these questions, the researcher will spend a year focused on Chinese migrants in Tanzania. Given the growing economic presence of Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, and the enormous importance of Africa's resources and economic growth to China's ascendency, this is an ideal context for studying how the emergence of important commercial relationships in the twenty-first century. The researcher will follow how Chinese-Tanzanian relationships develop and evolve in different contexts and under different conditions. Through fieldwork, he will trace how people evaluate each other, develop trust and/or mistrust in each other, and develop the everyday ethics and "rules of the game" that allow them to conduct business with each other. Through a combination of extended observation and interviews, the researcher will follow how people make sense of their experiences through stories, and how they share these experiences with others; and in the process contribute to popular knowledge in both China and Tanzania about Sino-African relationships. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would generate data significant commercial relationships between African and China, the understanding of which is critical to economic competitiveness.