This paper gains insight into the role of gender in interpersonal networks, which is largely neglected in research on networking. We do so by exploring the concept of ‘practising gender’, the spatial‐temporal accomplishment of gender practices, when people build, maintain and exit social networks. The paper is based on a study of male‐dominated technological collaboration projects between universities and industry. Our analysis of observations of project meetings and interviews with project participants demonstrates how people in real time and space draw from culturally available gender practices in their networking with each other. This practising of gender was found to be done largely unreflexively, sometimes through humour, within allegedly trivial activities such as pouring coffee and socializing as well as in critical activities such as composing the network. The exploration of the practising of gender in relation to culturally available gender practices enabled us to examine how those gender practices are reproduced, stretched or challenged when people network. We show how focussing on the dynamic side of gender allows us to get better insight into how gender inequalities in networks are reproduced or countered on the micro‐interactional level.
Finland and Estonia had unusually close connections for a Western and a Soviet state following the Khrushchëv Thaw. This chapter addresses the question of how Finnish architecture and planning influenced the development of multifamily housing, including large housing estates, in Soviet Estonia. The chapter shows how information on architecture and planning was exchanged through travel, professional publications, architecture exhibitions and personal contacts. However, inspiration drawn from Finnish examples could influence Soviet Estonian multifamily housing only selectively. The influences, which mainly refer to Finnish modernism from the 1950s and the 1960s, can be identified solely in individually designed and constructed housing projects, which offered more flexibility and room for individual architects to express their visions. Such projects could be developed, for instance, by collective farm construction companies (KEK), not as large state-led projects. Soviet planners borrowed, in many ways, planning ideas from the West, for example, the principle of the mikrorayon, which was applied in the large housing estates. To Estonians, it was particularly the Finnish concept of the 'forest-suburb' that came to be idealised. The development of large housing estates was nonetheless dictated by the Soviet state bureaucracy and extensive use of mass construction technology, especially standardised precast buildings, created a monotonous built environment. Yet some Finnish influence can be recognised in Tallinn's first large housing estate's shopping and service centres, designed and built as separate projects.
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