I am a Senior Scientist at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC) and Dean of Escuela de Organización Industrial (Spain's School for Industrial Organisation). My areas of interest are the production and management of knowledge in organisational contexts. I am especially interested in the connections and articulations between research, scholarship and knowledge-management in contemporary liberal institutions, including universities.

Today arguments about the relevance and importance of certain modes of organising knowledge are often expressed in terms of 'public value', 'social responsibility', 'distributive justice', even 'political ethics'. So I have found myself writing about these things too.

I first did anthropological fieldwork among the nitrate mining communities of the Atacama desert in Antofagasta, Chile. For most part of the twentieth century, the history of nitrate mining in Chile was a history of corporate paternalism. The role of mining corporations as supplanters of the state and guarantors of social life mimicks in intriguing ways the new paternalism of universities. Or at least this is how I have explained to myself my jump from the Atacama desert to the world of corporate (academic) knowledge.

More recently, I have carried out research among humanities scholars at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid and among management consultants in Buenos Aires.