Rafael Burgos-Mirabal

Ph.D. Candidate in Organization Studies

Email: rburgosm@som.umass.edu

I am a Ph.D. student in Organization Studies. Prior to starting my doctoral work at UMass, I worked in the textbook industry for ten years (1996-2006). My participation in processes whereby pedagogical technology is co-shaped and transferred back and forth among heterogeneous actors and institutional constituencies, has led me to explore further some inter-organizational aspects of innovation and commercialization. Before pursuing textbook publishing as a career, I was studying aspects of knowledge transfer that were somewhat farther removed in time: the translation of Arabic (and Greek) scientific and philosophical works in Western medieval Europe via processes of individual and institutional collaboration taking place in Spain from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. This is graduate work that I was pursuing at Harvard (1989-1996). I entered that program after having completed my bachelor's degree in medieval Spanish literature, also at Harvard.

My research interests are taking shape around topics of scientific innovation and commercialization, using insights from the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies. Specifically, I am exploring the adoption of the theoretical-methodological developments of actor-network theory (ANT) in observing these types of organizing and in writing accounts about them.

Currently I am teaching the introduction to organizational behavior class at the School of Management.

I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and have been in Massachusetts since I left Puerto Rico to attend college.