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

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

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.