Abstract book, BIOMED2024, 2024, Shekvetili, Georgia

Many artists, writers, and other creative people do their best work when collaborating within a circle of likeminded friends. Experimenting together and challenging one another, they develop the courage to rebel against the established traditions in their field. Out of their discussions they develop a new, shared vision that guides their work even when they work alone. In a unique study that will become a rich source of ideas for professionals and anyone interested in fostering creative work in the arts and sciences, Michael P. Farrell looks at the group dynamics in six collaborative circles: the French Impressionists; Sigmund Freud and his friends; C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings; social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; the Fugitive poets; and the writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. He demonstrates how the unusual interactions in these collaborative circles drew out the creativity in each member. Farrell also presents vivid narrative accounts of the roles played by the members of each circle. He considers how working in such circles sustains the motivation of each member to do creative work; how collaborative circles shape the individual styles of the persons within them; how leadership roles and interpersonal relationships change as circles develop; and why some circles flourish while others flounder.

This dissertation examines the prevalence of friendship and its effects on productivity in academic science from the perspective of networked social capital. It seeks to understand what friendship is in the context of the professional environment, what distinguishes it from other professional relationships, and how it affects the function and the outcomes of science. The study was motivated by the increased emphasis of collaboration as a means of fostering research competitiveness. The research reported here was performed as part of the National Science Foundation project "NETWISE I: Women in Science and Engineering: Network Access, Participation, and Career Outcomes" (Grant # REC-0529642). The importance of friendship in the context of academic science has often been implied and anecdotal, but it has not been elucidated or empirically tested. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. The unit of analysis in the model is the individual. The dissertation conceptualizes friendship as one aspect of a collaborative relationship and thus an important determinant of a scientist's social capability of pool relevant resources for the purposes of productivity. It hypothesizes that professional and personal roles form an integrative relationship within collaborative ties and that such complementarity benefits individual goal attainment, specifically with regard to publication productivity. The results of the study show that friendship has a strong positive effect on an individual's publication productivity, which is comparable to the effect of collaboration across organizational boundaries. The results also show that while friendship is fairly prevalent in collaborative relationships, some groups of scientists are more likely to have friends among their closest collaborators than other groups; that friendships differ from other collaborative relationships in that they more often form between individuals of the same status, provide a greater variety of productivity-relevant resources such as knowledge, advice, endorsements of one's reputation, and introductions to potential collaborators; and that friendship facilitates the mobilization of these resources from personal collaborative networks for productivity purposes.

This volume presents work from an international group of writers who explore conceptualizations of what defined "East" and "West" in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production. They reveal that the roots of an East/West cultural divide were present many years prior to the rise of socialism and the Cold War. The chapters offer insights into the complex stages of adoption and rejection of Western ideals in areas such as architecture, travel writings, film, music, health care, consumer products, political propaganda, and human rights. They describe a process of mental mapping whereby individuals "captured and possessed" Western identity through cultural encounters and developed their own interpretations from these experiences. Despite these imaginaries, political and intellectual elites devised responses of resistance, defiance, and counterattack to defy Western impositions. Socialists believed that their cultural forms and collectivist strategies offered morally and materially better lives for the masses and the true path to a modern society. Their sentiments toward the West, however, fluctuated between superiority and inferiority. But in material terms, Western products, industry, and technology, became the ever-present yardstick by which progress was measured. The contributors conclude that the commodification of the necessities of modern life and the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century made it impossible for communist states to meet the demands of their citizens. The West eventually won the battle of supply and demand, and thus the battle for cultural influence.