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

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.