This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the following question: can scientific prizes affect the trajectory of discovery? Prizes, not to be confused with grants, work well in a couple of ways. Firstly, there is often an economic incentive to winning them. Sometimes the funds can be used in a personal capacity, other times the prize money is earmarked for future research. The other benefit is the prestige they bring. This prestige can increase the likelihood that their future papers and research will be highly cited, particularly immediately after publishing new research - much like the added hype that a famous artist or musician might be able to generate prior to the unveiling of new work. Prizes also seem to celebrate existing pursuits and create positive exposure, resulting in an influx of scientists from other fields. But how effective are prizes in steering research in new directions? Prizes seem to amplify achievements, probably reward those pursuing riskier hypotheses, and often identify scientific areas likely to grow in the future, but their ability to shift the trajectory is less likely. The reasons for this are elaborated upon in the rest of the chapter.

This chapter investigates why a competitor would want to become a member of one of the ecumenical synods. What could the associations do for them after they had paid the relatively high entrance fee? A major preoccupation of the synods was obtaining and safeguarding privileges for their members. There were three main types: privileges providing personal security, financial privileges and honorary privileges. A special category were the so-called opsonia, pensions granted to victors in a select category of games. Another aspect was the legal status of synod members. There are indications that synodic lobbying protected their members from the Roman infamia laws that targeted people performing in shows. The second section of this chapter focuses on the support offered by the synods during festivals. They ensured, for instance, that their members were well lodged and fed. This chapter argues that in securing privileges and offering local support, the synods relied on their extensive social networks, which reached out to local elites as well as to Roman administrators and the imperial court.

So far, the book has explored different problems in the life cycle of a vaccine. First, it surveyed the pathways to bring new vaccines to market against a backdrop of lacking incentives to R&D, in spite of the recognized public health value of vaccines and the widespread use of intellectual property rights as an incentive to vaccine R&D. Second, it examined the allocative disparities that result from the commodification of vaccines, especially in situations of product scarcity, in which lower-income populations often face considerable hurdles in obtaining access to vaccines. This section examines possible solutions to alleviate these problems. It considers proposals that would take effect at the incentives level, by increasing funding for vaccine-related R&D work; proposals that would operate at transactional level, facilitating the transfer of vaccine technology through the use of patent pools and patent pledges; and proposals to expand and fine-tune the role of vaccine-dedicated public–private partnerships as instruments for the promotion of equitable access to vaccines by populations irrespective of their socioeconomic status.

In her 1949 article ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’, Jamaican writer Una Marson alludes to the lack of exposure of Caribbean writers to potential readers and bemoans the lack of interest in reading. She also implies that Caribbean writers might be scarce or unproductive because they lack financial support. As the second decade of the twenty-first century closes, it is clear that the cultivation of a Caribbean reading audience as well as a market for Caribbean literature has gathered momentum since 1949. This essay considers the role of literary prizes and festivals in stimulating new writing, in growing a global audience for Caribbean literature and in supporting the careers of Caribbean writers in the region and in the Caribbean diaspora.

This chapter offers a framework for understanding how the work gathered under the sign ‘J. M. Coetzee’ has reached – and been received – by multiple publics, from agents, editors, and publishers to a range of readers including critics, censors, interviewers, and literary prize judges. It considers the role of institutional mediation in the processes of making meaning, also highlighting some of the ways in which Coetzee has had to navigate amongst complex local and global value-conferring operations in the service of making a career, yet has sought too to disrupt the terms under which cultural capital accrues. Addressing the circuitous routes through which his first books, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, reached their first readers (and elicited a range of responses), the chapter also considers a number of controversies in the 1980s that served as flashpoints for Coetzee’s negotiation of the demand that a writer speak, in certain circumstances, in their own person. Finally, it assesses the impact of these processes and contexts for such later works as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year and occasions such as Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and his many public readings and other interventions since.

This essay discusses the evidence for rhapsodic performances in the Panathenaia during the Archaic and Classical Period.

In this chapter we discuss standards as forms of partial organization. Standards are defined as decided rules for common and voluntary use. Taking the example of CSR and corporate governance standards, we show that the degree of partiality of standards can vary widely – ranging from a single element of organization, i.e. decided rules, to all five elements of organization, i.e. decided rules, hierarchies, membership, monitoring and sanctioning. We demonstrate that in some cases partiality is the result of restrictions in the design of standards, while in other cases it is the result of an explicit choice. We also demonstrate that the degree of partiality of standards can change over time, as there are often pressures for standards to adopt additional organizational elements. Furthermore, we discuss the dispersed nature of many standards, showing how different actors often provide different organizational elements of standards without any central coordination. We close with an outline of an agenda for future research.

In this chapter, we analyse prizes as forms of partial organization, particularly focusing on prizes as one way to organize approval procedures. A basis for this view is that prizes are based on decisions and thus constitute a sanctioning mechanism to actors. Our aim is to explore the characteristics and potential effects of prizes as partial organization. We use prizes in the fields of science and sports as empirical examples to answer these questions. Based on our definition of prizes as publicly communicated decisions of approval, we explore three ways in which prizes vary: the uses of rules; membership; and communication of prizes and prize decisions. From this, two main strategies for prize giving are identified: one more organized and the other more ‘mystical’. The first uses elements of formal organization to formulate rules or membership criteria, and to communicate them to both the potential prize recipients and the audience. The second lacks these elements, which engulf prizes in an aura of mystery. From this finding, we explore some potential and observed effects of prizes on actors’ behaviours, on status and status positions in fields in which the actors operate, and on prize givers themselves.