Professor John Mingers

John joined Kent Business School in 2003 as Director of Research. He was originally an operational researcher at British Leyland and Unilever. John joined Warwick Business School in 1987 and became a Professor in 1998. He was head of the OR and Systems Group (1998-2003) and member of the Dean’s Board (2000-2003). John received his BSc and PhD from the University of Warwick and MA from Lancaster University.

Many of John’s research themes have been explored in two books:

• 'Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas' - Routledge, 2014
• 'Realizing Systems Thinking: Knowledge and Action in Management Science' - Springer, 1996.

He has also written and contributed to several pieces of work:

• Self-producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis, published by Plenum in 1995 (Author)
• Multimethodology: Towards Theory and Practice for Mixing and Matching Methodologies – (Editor with Anthony Gill, published by Wiley in 1997
• Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited: Problem Structuring Methods for Complexity, Uncertainty and Conflict – (Editor with Jonathan Rosenhead, published in 2001)
• Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems – (Editor with Leslie Willcocks)
• Analysed the 2008 RAE results for Business and Management using a mathematical model to try and reconstruct the grades that were awarded by the Panel 
• Carried out a statistical analysis of the peer-reviewed journal rankings in the Harzing database 
• Produced papers on the h-index, and on stochastic modelling of the dynamic behaviour of citations 
• In the light of the credit crunch John investigated whether one should invest in tracker funds when the stock market is falling (See KBS working paper 183) 
• More technique-oriented OR work such as developing algorithms for the equitable partitioning problem and applying DEA to marketing. 

John currently teaches Philosophical Issues and Paradigms in Management Research (PhD Training module). Previously John also taught Managing Complexity: the Systems Approach (MBA module), Complexity and the Systems Approach (Postgraduate module), Multivariate Statistics (undergraduate module) and Business Modelling (MBA).

Current supervisees

• Jane Christie: Consulting with executives in the UK government: Use of multimethodology to support strategic decision-making
• Jacqueline Aldridge: The continuing crisis in business school education

Past supervisees

• Wei Wang: Performance Management in Public Hospitals in China
• Wasfi A A Al-Rawabdeh: The emergence of E-Commerce in the Arab world: A comparison study
• Evangelia Lipitakis: The Use of Bibliometric Methods in Evaluating Research Performance In Business and Management: A Study of Three UK Business Schools
• Aijie Xie: Changes in Housing Structure in Canterbury as Reflected Through the 1981, 1991 and 2001 Censuses
• Fang Xu: Measuring Research Quality by using Bibliometric Methods

• Elected as an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences (2009)
  
• Visiting Erskine Professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2003)
  
• Visiting Professor at Edith Cowan University, Perth (2014)
  
• Member of the Council of the OR Society (1991-1994)
  
• Chair of the UK Systems Society (1996-1998)
  
• Member of the Committee of Professors of OR (COPIOR) since 1998 (Secretary since 2009)
  
• Member of the Committee of IS Professors (CISP) since 2004
  
• Member of the Editorial Board of MIS Quarterly since 2009
  
• Senior Editor of the International Journal of Information Technology and the Systems Approach since 2006
  
• Member of the Editorial Board of European Journal of Information Systems, Systems Research and the Behavioural Sciences, Journal of Mixed Methods Research.