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, ...

How do you get a coworking space to treat you like any other tenant? Eliana Crosina describes months of hanging out at OfficeCo, ...

James Chu gained access to a Chinese migrant school by volunteering as an English teacher and stayed connected for fifteen years. He explains ...

The literature is riddled with the dead bodies of failed DEI initiatives, Summer Jackson jokes. So she chose a company trying to do ...

Christopher Myers went into the field expecting to study mentoring among air medical crews. What he found instead was storytelling doing work that ...

Anna Mayo arrived at the hospital expecting bounded teams and found shifting rosters that somehow synced. She describes learning medicalese on the fly ...

Ruthanne Huising on studying 71 university research labs within a decade-long team ethnography, staying neutral among lab cliques, and why professionals gain authority ...

A departmental retreat at a Detroit incubator handed Suntae Kim his dissertation site. He describes three years of fieldwork amid the city's crisis ...

How does a leaderless swarm of hackers get anything done? Felipe Massa and Siobhan O'Mahony recount years of watching Anonymous organize in open ...

Hatim Rahman had spent a year embedded in an online labor platform when it switched to an opaque rating algorithm. That accident of ...

Matthew Beane discusses shadow learning in robotic surgery, why the risk that matters for learning is socially constructed, and how the robot made ...

How do you pick sites for a comparative ethnography? Katherine Kellogg explains why she only studies hospitals matched on everything the literature already ...

It takes a village, says Beth Bechky: phone calls from field sites, years of presentations, friendly readers of half-baked drafts. She describes how ...

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf admits open innovation initially struck her as unserious: click a button, problem solved. On this podcast episode, she recounts the fieldwork ...

Julia DiBenigno on comparative ethnography in U.S. Army mental health care: a year of pilot fieldwork across seven posts, then four carefully matched ...

Why would an Indian artisan charge a discerning customer less? Aruna Ranganathan argues that makers who identify with their work grow attached to ...

Alexandra Michel spent nine years studying investment bankers who work 100-hour weeks, and explains why organizations control employees most effectively through their bodies, ...

Vaughn Tan had been hanging around cutting-edge culinary R&D teams since 2003 before realizing they were a research site. People there contribute enormously ...

What began as a marketing study of a natural food co-op turned into something else once idealists and pragmatists started fighting. Blake Ashforth ...

Julia DiBenigno and Katherine Kellogg matched two nearly identical hospital units and found that nurses and patient care technicians collaborated well on only ...

How does a researcher get nearly unlimited access to a Chinese phone factory, including permission to run a field experiment? Ethan Bernstein describes ...

Chad McPherson and Michael Sauder didn't enter the drug court with institutional logics in mind. They describe how the frame emerged halfway through ...