Milo Shaoqing Wang and Christopher Steele trace how China's private entrepreneurs went from politically suspect to officially celebrated, and how a second-year PhD paper became a decade-long study of state-led destigmatization.

Invited to write on diversity for ASQ's 50th anniversary, Damon Phillips and Aruna Ranganathan took on a harder question: why does a field built on studying elites still struggle to see everyone else?

Xu Li's Berlin apartment sat amid the clubs, which got him wondering how DJs land jobs at all. With Amandine Ody-Brasier he followed the puzzle into the scene, where breaking the law can win community support.

An acquaintance heading to Paris for hypnosis training stopped Nishani Bourmault cold: anesthesiologists are supposed to be evidence-based. She and Michel Anteby recount how French doctors reboot deeply technical professional work.

Bryan Spencer and Claus Rerup studied a learning arms race between market manipulators and the community they exploited. The scammers had the early advantage, so why did they lose? Profit made them ignore the cues.

Melanie Prengler, Anthony Klotz, and Chad Murphy on digital nomads and what return-to-office mandates get wrong: the choice was never between a structured office and an unsupported home.

A reviewer suggested measuring passion hourly. Emma Frank, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu, and Jon Jachimowicz explain why even three surveys a day strained organizational reality in their 20-day study of passion contagion in teams.

Mathijs De Vaan and Toby Stuart on the downside of trust in referrals: once you trust an intermediary, that person becomes the default, and the other options quietly stop getting considered.

Anna Kim hand-plucked tea leaves alongside Kenyan farmers to earn conversations during fieldwork. When one community refused to fit her nine-site Fairtrade study, it became its own paper on social impact.

Why did the analog synthesizer come back? Andrew Nelson, Callen Anthony, and Mary Tripsas, all musicians themselves, on the pleasures and pitfalls of studying a context you love, sometimes with synth music playing while they coded.