Doctoral Dissertation Research: Crystallizing Value: Mining and Market Making

这个项目调查物质对象，可能有或可能没有实用价值，如何成为商品的商业价值。为了突出所涉及的过程，研究人员将重点关注一个随着时间的推移其重要性发生了变化的对象。这将澄清哪些特征是物品固有的，哪些是通过营销和消费者文化添加的。巴西开采的石英晶体曾因其压电性而销往美国，并因其在第二次世界大战军事无线电设备中的应用而受到高度重视。在过去的70年里，石英市场已经从为军事生产转向为次要宝石市场生产。这项研究询问了这种意义上的转变是如何发生的，以及哪些因素和动因参与了这一转变。这项研究的结果将与国际贸易的多种商品以及如何创造和维持价值的一般理论问题有关。这项研究将由加州大学欧文分校的博士生约瑟夫·威兰德进行，他的导师是威廉·M·毛雷尔博士。威兰德将在巴西矿产丰富的米纳斯吉拉斯州进行研究，该州是巴西矿业的中心。考虑到该地区近100年来一直是世界上许多战略性矿产资源的最大生产国，这是一个适当的研究背景。研究人员的目标是确定巴西和美国的哪些因素在商品网络中产生了哪些类型的经济、文化和社会价值，以及这些因素如何更广泛地影响全球石英市场。为了衡量价值变化，研究人员将跟踪石英从矿场到消费者的过程。他将采访生产商、加工商、批发商、贸易展供应商和消费者，他们构成了从巴西农村矿山到国际市场再到北美销售点和消费者的石英商品链。他还将在商品链的不同地点进行观察，并对巴西过去一个世纪的石英业进行档案研究。通过研究当地环境政策、社会历史和全球需求对矿产价值的影响程度，这项研究的结果将提供对创造和维持价值的因素以及促进矿产市场稳定的因素的洞察。稳定地获得矿产资源很可能是二十一世纪最突出的国家安全和社会生态问题之一。

This project investigates how material objects, which may or may not have practical utility, come to have commercial value as commodities. To highlight the processes involved, the researcher will focus on an object whose significance has changed over time. This will clarify which features are inherent in the object and which are added through marketing and consumer cultures. Quartz crystals mined in Brazil were once marketed to the United States for their piezoelectric properties and highly valued for their use in World War Two military radio equipment. Over the past 70 years, the quartz market has shifted from producing for the military to producing for semiprecious gemstone markets. The research asks how this transformation in meaning has come about and what causative factors and agents are involved. Findings from this research will have relevance to multiple commodities that are traded internationally as well as to the general theoretical question of how value is created and sustained. The research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, doctoral student Josef Wieland, who is supervised by Dr. William M. Maurer. Wieland will base his study in the mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, the epicenter of Brazil's mining industries. This is an appropriate research setting given that this region has remained the world's largest producer of many strategic mineral resources for nearly 100 years. The investigator's goal is to determine what factors in Brazil and the United States generate what types of economic, cultural, and social value in the commodity networks, and how these factors affect global quartz markets more broadly. To measure value transformation the researcher will track quartz as it passes from mines to consumers. He will conduct interviews with the producers, processors, wholesalers, trade show venders, and consumers who comprise the quartz commodity chain that stretches from rural Brazilian mines through international markets to North American sales points and consumers. He also will carry out observations at different sites in the commodity chain and do archival research on the quartz industry in Brazil over the past century. By examining the extent to which local environmental policy, social history, and global demand impact mineral values, findings from this research will provide insight into the factors that create and sustain value as well as those that promote the stabilization of mineral markets. Stable access to mineral resources will likely be among the most salient national security and socio-ecological issues of the twenty-first century.