Hong Lian is a PhD candidate in sociology at Peking University and a current visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. His main area of research is on institutional operations and changes, with a focus on governmental institutions and organizations in China.

Lian is researching bureaucratic environmental regulations. He is utilizing in-depth participatory observations to understand how institutions affect government officials' behaviors, how officials respond to institutional changes, and how institutions are created and altered.

His most recent publication is the forthcoming article "The Limit of Bureaucratic Power in Organizations: The Case of the Chinese Bureaucracy" (with Xueguang Zhou and Yun Ai), in Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Dr. Chung-Jen Chen is Professor in the Graduate Institute of Business Administration, College of Management, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He received his doctorate in Strategy & Technology Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. His current research interests include knowledge management, innovation behaviors, cooperative and competitive interactions inside and across organizations. Dr. Chen was ranked as the Top 50 Researcher in the technology and innovation management field and received the Technology and Innovation Research Award in 2009 from the International Association of Management of Technology. He has published more than thirty papers in academic management journals and is currently the area editor of "NTU Management Review" and "Organization and Management".

Joon Nak Choi is the 2015-2016 Koret Fellow in the Korea Program at Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). A sociologist by training, Choi is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research and teaching areas include economic development, social networks, organizational theory, and global and transnational sociology, within the Korean context.