Welcome - Murillo Wiki (original) (raw)

My name is Enrique Murillo, I live in Mexico City, and I'm an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at ITAM. This is my webpage at Academia.edu. I recently finished my PhD in Management at the University of Bradford in the UK. My thesis was in the field of Knowledge Management, more specifically, I set out to examine the issue of whether or not true Internet-based Communities of Practice (CoPs) exist. I used a two-stage research strategy, first to detect vibrant professionally-focused communities through comprehensive searches of the Usenet network, second, to rigorously assess the presence of the constitutive dimensions of CoPs as defined by Wenger (1998), namely, Mutual Engagement, Shared Repertoire, Joint Enterprise, Community, and Learning/Identity-acquisition. (Wenger himself provides a brief introduction to CoPs in his home page.)

A 1000-word summary of the thesis is available (click on Files, below), as well as the complete 80,000 word thesis (minus the 17 appendices!). If anyone wonders why my doctoral thesis is so long, it is because my supervisor, David Spicer, never told me to stop! (Of course I'm very grateful to him.)

As for publications, I co-authored a paper with David, describing the results of the detection strategy and the survey, and presented it at the 2007 Academy of Management Meeting in Philadelphia, where it was selected for Best Papers Proceedings. The published paper, in six-page abridged format can be downloaded from Files, as well as the full 39-page paper. A summary of the thesis was recently published by Information Research.

As an intermediate step to the PhD, I wrote a 20,000-word MRes dissertation where I explored the use of Social Network Analysis to detect online communities in Usenet. This too is available under Files.

Murillo, E. (2002) Using Social Network Analysis to detect cohesive subgroups in Usenet newsgroups: an initial approximation to the study of “virtual” Communities of Practice. MRes dissertation. University of Bradford.

Murillo, E. (2006) Searching for virtual communities of practice in the Usenet discussion network: combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory. PhD thesis. University of Bradford.

Murillo, E. and Spicer, D. (2007) Searching the Usenet network for virtual Communities of Practice. In George T. Solomon (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (CD), ISSN 1543-8643.

Murillo, E. (2008) Searching Usenet for virtual Communities of Practice: using mixed methods to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory. Information Research, 13(4) paper 386. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper386.html]