In the frame introduction to Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918), an unnamed author encounters her childhood friend Jim Burden on a cross-country train. Jim asks the author why she has never written anything about their mutual friend Ántonia. To answer Jim's criticism, she proposes they both write stories about Ántonia, but only Jim honors the agreement. The rest of the novel is put forth as Jim's manuscript "substantially" as he brought it to the author (xii). This scenario is but one of several ways My Ántonia evokes Cather's experience ghostwriting S.S. McClure's My Autobiography (1914) for, just as the authorial voice in My Ántonia dissolves into Jim's, Cather had to adopt McClure's perspective to write her former employer's life story. Going further, Cather worked closely with her book editor Ferris Greenslet and the production editor R.L. Scaife to be sure Houghton Mifflin would paginate the introduction with roman numerals and thereby produce the effect of a true authorial preface. The introduction recalls the preface of McClure's autobiography, which acknowledged Cather for "cooperation" that contributed to "the very existence" of his book. Interpreting My Ántonia and My Autobiography as projects connected by authorial process, textual allusion, and even typesetting suggests the complicated and elusive nature of collaborative labor in the literary marketplace, as well as the extent to which modern literary texts responded to those complexities. Working on a task or project with a partner or in a group can frustrate, energize or empower those involved, but whatever feelings it inspires, interactive labor often has a life of its own. This is the idea of collaborative momentum. My dissertation examines relationships among authors, agents, editors, publishers, and unofficial "middle men" to argue that supportive and adversarial cycles of interactive labor in the modern American literary marketplace created the basic parameters of modern authorship. I show that as professional specialization becomes more rigid and institutionalized, the literary field paradoxically created new spaces for nebulous but crucial cooperative labor. In particular, the effect I call collaborative momentum facilitated the exchange of economic and symbolic capital. Additionally, I show that narratives of the modern period are inextricably invested in corporate and institutional labor systems that surround them and can be interpreted as rhetorical attempts to reform and improve those systems. By analyzing the author's cultural identity in relation to rising institutional collaborators of the modern era, I contribute to the steadily growing field of authorship studies while adding to ongoing scholarly conversations about individual authors and texts. My chapters analyze the systemic production of literary identity, reciprocal relationships between editors and authors, the modern apparatus of literary debut, and the role bibliophilia and book collecting played in the production of The New Negro. I therefore highlight four paradigmatic examples of interactive labor while simultaneously emphasizing that collaborative momentum as I describe it was crucial not only to those with privilege but also to individuals and groups struggling against inequality, whether it was Salish novelist D'Arcy McNickle, Alain LeRoy Locke, or self-employed literary agent Flora May Holly. My work helps scholars see a power structure that granted disproportionate credibility to white men as literary creators and publishing industry insiders, yet it also shows a modern American literary culture shaped as much by the experience of marginalized individuals and groups negotiating a discriminatory publishing industry as it was by aesthetic contests between popular fiction and high modernism. My first chapter, Character, Personality, and the Editor Figure: William Dean Howells and the Institution of Image-Building establishes that the same cultural logic that allowed Samuel Clemens to develop a public persona as a fictional character also empowered William Dean Howells to create his literary identity as the nation's foremost editor figure. Further, I argue that image-building was a collaborative affair; Howells and many others helped define Mark Twain, and countless authors and critics came to define Howells as the Dean of American Letters in the 1890s and as America's "pious old maid" after his death in 1920. I argue that Howells' persona-work extends to his novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The main characters--co-founders of a fictional literary magazine--have contrasting identities: one is ostentatious but lacks substance; the other is so unsure he hardly has an identity. Labor crises at the magazine and in the city streets gesture at the problematic nature of a personality-driven culture that had come to define selfhood without emphasizing a moral or ethical element. In chapter two, "Reciprocity and the `Real' Author: Willa Cather as S.S. McClure's Ghostwriter," I trace a cycle of debt--monetary and symbolic--from McClure's rise as magazine editor to a moment of financial crisis in 1912 that led his corporate board to oust him from his own magazine. To pay off his debts, he asked Willa Cather to author his autobiography. I read the ghostwriting project as an example of how mutual debt is generative, for Cather accepted the role out of personal loyalty and took no money for her work. Cather's fictional works, including My Ántonia and The Professor's House (1925), engage with the cycle of debt and indebtedness and imagine a narrative exchange unclouded by any question of money but tied, instead, to a dream of self-sacrificing friendship. My article "It's Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It: Profit and Prestige Shared by Cather and Her Literary Agent," in Cather Studies Volume 9, "Willa Cather and Modern Cultures," draws on material from this chapter. My third chapter, "Discovery of the Month: D'Arcy McNickle and the Apparatus of Literary Debut" takes up as its interpretive focus changing institutions of literary career-launching. My approach brings together two scholarly conversations, one preoccupied with McNickle's refinement of his perception of Native cultures and the other, informed by a history of the book methodology, concerned with the cultural systems that codified twentieth-century authorial identity and credibility. McNickle is an important example of how institutions of discovery functioned. The exceptional aspects of McNickle's story--the nine-year duration of his effort to publish his first book, his outsider identity, and the number of avenues he tried in order to become established make him an ideal example. To better understand McNickle's relationship with literary agent Ruth Rae, I frame my analysis with the story of the literary agent's rise as an integral figure in literary debut. Turning to McNickle's fiction in the second part of this chapter, I analyze his The Surrounded as a reaction to cultural institutions of literary discovery. McNickle narrates the tragedy of failed mediation and gestures at an alternative model of interaction. He embeds this thematic exploration in his allusions to the Salish oral tradition, so that the text itself mediates an experience of cultural discovery. Chapter four, "Irrepressible Anthologies, Collectible: Bibliophilia and Book Collecting in the New Negro," continues my analysis of the literary middle man's collision with American modernity by tracing the intersection of anthology, book collecting, and bibliophilia as they pertain to The New Negro's book design, artistic form, and multi-generic content. While recent studies have linked the anthology to Boazian ethnography and modernist collage, I provide a more immediate reading of the philosophies of collecting inherent to modern and African American print cultures. I read The New Negro as a book production process structured by efforts to produce an object worthy of being collected. My also analyzes of how the anthology's book design interacts with the positions on materiality and collecting at play in its collected prose and poetry. This case study of the creator-intermediary as collector historicizes modern book collecting and appreciates African American bibliophiles as an alternative to the dominant white American and European book collecting traditions. Appreciating these distinctions suggests, ultimately, that a significant aspect of the exchange of economic and symbolic capital in the modern age was to mediate a contested present day by refashioning ideas about the past.

We have never stopped in the pursuit of science. Standing on the shoulders of the giants, we gradually make our path to build a systematic and testable body of knowledge to explain and predict the universe. Emerging from researchers’ interactions and self-organizing behaviors, scientific communities feature intensive collaborative practice. Indeed, the era of lone genius has long gone. Teams have now dominated the production and diffusion of scientific ideas. In order to understand how collaboration shapes and evolves organizations as well as individuals’ careers, this dissertation conducts analyses at both macroscopic and microscopic levels utilizing large-scale scholarly data. As self-organizing behaviors, collaborations boil down to the interactions among researchers. Understanding collaboration at individual level, as a result, is in fact a preliminary and crucial step to better understand the collective outcome at group and organization level. To start, I investigate the role of research collaboration in researchers’ careers by leveraging person-organization fit theory. Specifically, I propose prospective social ties based on faculty candidates’ future collaboration potential with future colleagues, which manifests diminishing returns on the placement quality. Moving forward, I address the question of how individual success can be better understood and accurately predicted utilizing their collaboration experience data. Findings reveal potential regularities in career trajectories for early-stage, mid-career, and senior researchers, highlighting the importance of various aspects of social capital. With large-scale scholarly data, I propose a data-driven analytics approach that leads to a deeper understanding of collaboration for both organizations and individuals. Managerial and policy implications are discussed for organizations to stimulate interdisciplinary research and for individuals to achieve better placement as well as short and long term scientific impact. Additionally, while analyzed in the context of academia, the proposed methods and implications can be generalized to knowledge-intensive industries, where collaboration are key factors to performance such as innovation and creativity.

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Professional burnout refers to the development of negative emotions, cynical thoughts, and physical and mental exhaustion as a response to stressors associated with one’s career. Within the teaching profession, professional burnout has been associated with an increase in teacher attrition. In an effort to promote a positive school environment where teachers feel supported and committed to the profession, many administrators have implemented structured collaborative opportunities within their buildings. While personal relationships within the school network can provide a mitigating effect against professional burnout, the possibility exists that teacher leaders can be overcentralized and negatively impacted by the maintained relationships. By potentially forcing centralization on critical team members and emphasizing them as the “go-to” person for collaboration, schools may be inadvertently putting their best at risk for burnout. Using a mixed-methods design, the following study investigates the perceived benefits and constraints of centrality within the school network on reported burnout. The social networks at four elementary schools were analyzed to determine the level of connectivity for each certified staff member. Participants were asked to identify the colleagues with whom they collaborate. Using Social Network Analysis, the level of centrality (as measured by number of network connections both received and directed) was calculated for each participant based on number of network ties both received and directed. Centrality scores were included with previously identified variables associated with teacher burnout including level of perceived stress, perception of school environment, principal support, and other demographic data in a series of hypothesis tests to assess the relationship between network connectivity and reported burnout. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with a selection of participants to further explore the impact of network connections on participant burnout. The results of this exploratory study found that not all collegial relationships are beneficial. A significant positive relationship between number of collaborative ties directed toward a teacher and their depersonalization score on the Maslach Burnout Inventory was identified, indicating that individuals who are frequently identified as a collaborator report higher burnout. The findings from this study produce a unique perspective on collaboration within the school network. As has been reported previously, level of connectivity within the school network as measured by the number of teachers one can identify as collaborators appears to mitigate (or not significantly increase) a teacher’s risk of professional burnout. However, being identified as a collaborator by a large number of teachers (in-degree) significantly increases one’s risk for depersonalization behaviors.

Nos travaux de thèse concernent l’´étude de l’interopérabilité dans un environnement collaboratif et dynamique d’entreprise. Elle est considérée comme un facteur clé de collaboration qui doit être pris en compte tout au long du cycle de vie du produit. Ceci est particulièrement important en ce qui concerne les réseaux d'entreprise collaboratifs, tel que DMN, où un groupe distinct de partenaires est connecté dans un modèle en forme de chaîne et où la coopération est cruciale pour atteindre un objectif spécifique. Ce contexte a fait émerger la nécessité de faire inter-opérer une multitude de systèmes d’information, distribués, autonomes et hétérogènes. Sur la base d'une analyse approfondie des problèmes d'interopérabilité au sein du DMN, ces travaux ont abouti `à une approche générique conceptuelle d’interopérabilité multi-niveaux. Cette approche repose sur le standard ISA95 et l’approche d’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (IDM), notre démarche vise à contribuer à l'amélioration de l'interopérabilité des systèmes d’entreprises au cours de la phase de fabrication du produit dans un DMN collaboratif. En s’intéressant aux trois niveaux d’interopérabilité, cette approche permet de s’assurer que les informations sont physiquement échangées (l'interopérabilité technique), sont comprises (l'interopérabilité sémantique) et sont bien utilisées pour atteindre le but pour lequel elles ont été produites (l'interopérabilité organisationnelle). La qualité et l'efficacité de l'approche proposée ont été confirmées par une application sur un cas concret de collaboration entre ERP et MES dans une usine de fabrication de stylos DEKENZ. / Our thesis work deals with the study of interoperability in a collaborative and dynamic enterprise environment. Interoperability is considered as a key factor for collaboration that must be considered throughout the life cycle of the product. This is particularly important for collaborative enterprise networks, such as DMN, where a group of partners is connected in a chain model and where cooperation is crucial to achieve a specific goal.This context has led to the need for inter-operate a multitude of distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information systems.Basis on a thorough analysis of the interoperability problems within the DMN, this work proposed a generic conceptual multi-level approach of interoperability. This approach relies on the use of ISA95 standard and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) method. It aims to contribute to the improvement of the interoperability of information systems during the manufacturing phase of the product in a collaborative DMN. By focusing on the three levels of interoperability, this approach ensures that information is physically exchanged (technical interoperability), is understood (semantic interoperability), and is well used to achieve the purpose for which it have been produced (organizational interoperability). The quality and effectiveness of the proposed approach were confirmed by an application on a concrete case of collaboration between ERP and MES in a DEKENZ pen manufacturing plant.

Professional Learning Community (PLC) structures require focused sessions of teacher collaboration as part of developing effective instructional practices leading to improved student performance outcomes. The PLC structured collaboration model has been implemented in schools across the country, however the current body of research regarding PLC structures has been focused on student performance and rather than the teacher learning processes that occur within the model. Teachers must learn throughout the PLC model, as they collaborate, plan instruction, create assessments, analyze data, and adjust implementation to improve results. A mixed-methods approach was used to explore correlations between PLC structure ratings and teacher self-identified learning preferences, with Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Theory as the basis for determining learning preferences. The study included 115 elementary teacher participants from a school district that has prioritized PLC structures for nearly 10 years. Significant correlations were identified between PLC structural elements and teacher learning preferences, with qualitative results providing additional descriptive analysis regarding teacher perceptions of their learning within PLCs. The findings within this study indicate that teacher learning preferences may be a key consideration for school site administrators as part of PLC team construction and development.

Educational attainment in the United States is at the highest levels since recording started, yet large numbers of students are not completing education at the secondary and postsecondary levels. This lack of education impacts their long-term prospects for living wage careers, stable housing and the ability to support both themselves and their families. A growing response to this crisis is the development of cross-sector collaborative partnerships to address educational attainment resulting in an educated and skilled workforce that will ultimately improve prosperity in a community or region. This collaborative work has expanded as a result of growing recognition that all sectors of the economy have a stake in education as a way to create strong communities and regional prosperity. While evidence of the challenges in educating all students abounds, evidence of success in collaborative partnership efforts to improve education is sparse. This constructivist grounded theory research study was developed to explore the collaborative behaviors leading to success in improving educational outcomes for all students. Leaders at the executive and operational levels of collaborative partnerships participated in this study through a three-phase process of semi-structured interviews. Data collection and analysis for this study used a process of constant comparison and occurred simultaneously with a comprehensive literature review. Participants in this research study represented collaborative partnerships from across the United States that are focused on improving educational attainment at the secondary and postsecondary levels. Four findings from this research study support an overarching substantive grounded theory that explicates the importance of moral purpose as the underpinning for achievement of collaborative outcomes. The findings further describe the behaviors necessary for success in crafting strong relationships, building trust, and communicating for impact. These interpersonal behaviors can be supported by the presence of psychological safety at the group level to maximize the efficacy of collaborative partnerships to achieve systems improvements in education. This study also encourages all collaborative partnerships to consider using a continuous improvement approach to their work grounded in intellectual humility. The study concludes with recommendations for future research to further explore the implications of psychological safety in the context of collaborative partnerships, noting that both intellectual humility and curiosity are aligned with the concepts of psychological safety and continuous improvement or improvement science.

Path is a collaborative system that developed over the course of five months of studio activity and continued through the duration of the exhibition. The system’s main collaborators were a land snail native to eastern North America (Neohelix albolabris), myself, and a digital cellular automaton. These prime agents interwove processes and exchanges between one another into a complex network of folded fractal feedback loops. Cyclic processes produced artifacts and infrastructures to support communication between the components and agents of Path. As a whole, Path spoke to the possibilities for interspecies, cyber-physical, and ecological collaboration to create an emergent landscape. The iteration of Path that follows in this document extends the collaborative system onto the space of the page. Path.txt is a concrete poem drawn from personal notes and observations from field and studio research. The composition of the text was generated through one of the processes at play in the production of Path as a gallery installation. The arrangement of text follows an algorithmically determined sequence initiated by the slime trail of N. albolabris. Following this textual iteration, a section of images and text outline the processes that operated in Path as a gallery installation.

The literature shows that collaboration is a critical part of a professional learning community and leads to higher student achievement. However, there is limited research on what collaboration actually looks like in a school setting. The purpose of this study was to examine the beliefs and strategies of elementary teachers and elementary administrators of three high achieving elementary schools utilizing a weekly common planning period for collaboration. Research questions for the study inquired strategies utilized by classroom teachers and principals to capture specific actions and beliefs regarding collaboration to increase student achievement. A phenomenological qualitative method was utilized through interviewing 9 elementary teachers and 3 elementary principals to capture the essence of the phenomenon of collaboration. Coding was completed and data analysis with the assistance of AtlasTi Results showed that teachers build capacity through dialogue that revolved around data analysis, strategies to teach lessons, and creating common assessments. Principals noted data analysis and shared leadership as to leading to increased student performance. Implications for social change is for universities and districts by providing effective strategies to implement effective teacher collaboration leading to higher student academic achievement and greater opportunities for students in a global economy.

Faculty members at a rural elementary school in a southeastern U.S. state have implemented a student leadership program called Leader in Me (LIM) in order to address increased behavioral disruptions and declining academic achievement scores and also better prepare students for the workforce. To determine the efficacy of the intervention, a mixed methods bounded case study of LIM was conducted. Watson's and Hull's theories of behaviorism support the objectives of the program. The focus of the research questions was on determining whether students' behavior, academic achievement, and leadership skills had changed based on their participation in the program. Quantitative data consisted of standardized test scores in the areas of reading and mathematics, administrative records, and a faculty survey. Qualitative data consisted of 10 interviews, which were conducted with a stratified purposeful sample of 3rd through 5th grade teachers participating in the program at the school. Quantitative data were analyzed using analysis of variance while qualitative data were coded and analyzed for common themes. Using these methods, a significant decrease in the instances of negative classroom behaviors was noted in relation to an increase in leadership behaviors of students in the LIM program. Interview data revealed the presence of a positive culture of leadership and learning in the classroom. Based on study findings, a policy recommendation paper advocating adoption of the leadership program was created. Adoption of the LIM program may help educators in better preparing students to be responsible individuals who use their leadership skills to positively impact their own learning and school and community cultures.