Wenhong Chen
PhD Candidate,Sociology

KMDI Fellow:

Research: The impact of the Internet and other ICTs on transnational entrepreneurship, particularly their effect on the knowledge management, communication, and collaboration that are critical to entrepreneurship./span>

Supervisor: Barry Wellman (SOC)

 Entrepreneurs gather and the networking begins at a Chinese business association meeting in downtown Toronto. Some are hoping for tips and contacts, others for a more immediate interest in their goods and services. And then there's Wenhong Chen, Sociology PhD candidate. She's here doing research.  

This was an intensive year of fieldwork, from summer 2003 on, building the basis of interview guidelines and survey questionnaires by gathering ethnographic observation, both online and off, monitoring Chinese chat rooms and web sites in Toronto and China, and attending countless community functions. Her study could hardly be more important, but Wen is aware of the lighter side. There are a lot of Chinese business associations, she comments, displaying one of her most charming attributes: a sense of humour completely free of sarcasm. She's been mistaken for a reporter (until she reveals 16 pages of notes instead of 1), and shes had, not surprisingly given the milieu, a few business propositions, including offers to film a documentary or write a book about her efforts. 

With supervisor Barry Wellman at the Netlab, Wen is conducting the Transnational Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project (TIE), a study funded by SSHRC's Initiative in the New Economy that examines how immigrants use social and communication networks to engage in transnational entrepreneurship. Recent literature allows entrepreneur to mean simply business owner, but the TIE resurrects the original criterion of innovation, answered in the immigrants case by a proficient use of ICT (information communication technology), and by doing so it fills a sizeable research gap. Immigrant transnationalism studies recognize the diffusion of new technologies, but without examining the extent to which use transforms immigrant entrepreneurship. ICTs are conceptualized as backdrops rather than potential catalysts. Wens preliminary results are already painting a picture of profound influence on information gathering, networking and resource mobilization. Completing that picture, however, is a tall order. The TIE is an ambitious multi-faceted study, involving quantitative and qualitative research in Canada, China, and, in projected post-doc work, the US, and that means first of all a busy summer itinerary 

Her work in Beijing, starting this May, won't be the first time shes returned to China. Last December she was invited by the Chinese Professional Association of Canada (CPAC) to join a Canadian delegation of entrepreneurs and scholars to meet in Zhongguancun with other Chinese nationals from around the world. That reception had the familiarity of a home-coming (expats starved of authentic cuisine took pictures of the dishes they were served), but this home is becoming increasingly unrecognizable. China's Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun hosts 39 universities and 213 research institutes, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), the countrys most concentrated cluster of national technology labs and research centers, and its largest base of software R&D and production. It is the vanguard of an emerging Chinese economy that will have profound repercussions globally. And that provides the key context for Wen's research, a project that substantively addresses vital questions for China, 21st century commerce and entrepreneurship in general, its North American component relieving the insularity that often limits analysis of Chinese society.

 A celebrated member of U of T's graduate community with a list of distinctions on her vitae (including a Connaught Scholarship and a Vivienne Poy Chancellors Fellowship), Wen has a track-record of topical, incisive research. Her publications already cover Internet use, entrepreneurship, and social networks. She is a congenial collaborator with a clear value-add. When Barry Wellman consulted her for a chapter on social networks of Guanxi,he couldn't have been expecting what he got--advice so expert, complete with a theoretical analysis linking Guanxi to Habermas, that he named Wen a co-author, incorporated the material directly into the text, and then made sure the book editors knew where to direct their compliments. Among her other collaborations, Wen took the lead in the Global Villagers article, an analysis of Internet use and users that showcased a different set of her skills: exhaustive, innovative SPSS data analysis using a cumbersome dataset of 20,000 respondents in over 100 countries to which she located and linked OECD-like development indicators.

Relocating from the University of International Business and International Economics (Beijing) to the University of Munich to U of T, Wen shares many of the characteristics of the high-tech nomads she studies. Personable and adaptable (fluent in 3 languages), she can knit herself into any community, but there is something about her inveterate curiosity that sets her apart, as ifwhether noticing an unconscious Canadian quirk or bringing to light potential connections in a students paperher perspective is too broad to fix her in any particular scene. She has just been invited to the UCLA Summer Institute in International Migration, a highly selective program that accepts only 25 participants world-wide. Such international attention will continue to grow. For one thing her dissertation will make her the leading authority on a little-understood topic, exactly the sort of world-class intellect the Governing Council of Zhongguancun hopes to entice back to its new economy. Wherever she goes, there will be opportunities for contact and collaboration--she knows all about ICTs--but for her friends and colleagues in Toronto, the famously small global village wont seem small enough.