Influences in community culture

The class reading this week on Organizational Challenges speaks to team vs. individual play and seeks to suggest constructive ways to positively change the culture within the genomic research community. In my semi-spiral career, I've witnessed many different cultural styles and have come to believe that culture is strongly influenced by what is scarce and how we compete for these resources. As a grad student studying nuclear physics and later when working closely with computational science I was exposed to the highly collegial culture of nuclear and particle physics. The scarce resource in that community is lab time. Labs are much more expensive than what can be obtained by an individual researcher. Collaborative teams are required to do anything in particle physics research. When I began doing network research, I found a very different culture. Projects small team oriented, and the scare resource is funding. The culture is captured by a favorite quote, "when the settlers are under attack, they circle the wagons and shoot out at the attackers. Network researchers circle the wagons and shoot in at each other." Early in my career at Bell Labs, funding was abundant, but recognition and credit was scarce. The culture was one where a favorite tactic was to prove how smart you were by pointing out, in the most public way, the fatal flaw in a presenter's thinking.