John Mingers

• PhD, University of warwick
• Professor at University of Kent

This chapter contributes to the book by questioning one framework—that of sociomateriality—and developing and advancing another—an integrative semiotics framework—as a product of theorizing.

The Leiden Rankings can be used for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not statistically significantly different as homogeneous sets. The groups and intergroup relations can be analyzed and visualized using tools from network analysis. Using the so‐called “excellence indicator” PPtop‐10%—the proportion of the top‐1...

Purpose To design and test a method for normalizing book citations in Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach A hybrid citing-side, cited-side normalization method was developed and this was tested on a sample of 285 research monographs. The results were analyzed and conclusions drawn. Findings The method was technically feasible but required...

The goal of this paper is to raise the level of discourse surrounding paradigms by drawing out a number of observations on how paradigms are interpreted in the IS field, and to reclaim the transformative potential of the Kuhnian paradigm concept in encouraging novel, interesting and relevant research and theorizing. After positioning the contributi...

Open systems theory purports to offer many benefits related to developing an innovative and sustainable organization. In this paper, we examine if collaborative tools afford a move towards a more open‐orientated organizational form that can support innovation capability and the issues that need to be managed in the process. Constructs that characte...

Information systems are a strong and ever-growing discipline of enormous relevance to today’s informated world, and yet, as recent reviews have shown, there is still not an agreed and explicit conceptualization or definition of information. After an evaluative review of a range of theories of information, this paper develops and defends a particula...

Previous research has drawn on critical realism to highlight diverse forms and types of knowledge. Scholars have also sought to assess the practical relevance and ethical dimensions of knowledge being produced across the world. This chapter offers a critical realist perspective on relevant and ethical research within the field of management. In par...

Managing performance is a major concern within the public sector. Many systems for performance management, such as the balanced scorecard, have been developed in the private sector but these tend to focus on financial targets and a small range of stakeholders, primarily shareholders. The public sector has a much wider range of objectives and of sta...

The Leiden Rankings can be used for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not statistically significantly different as homogeneous sets. The groups and intergroup relations can be analyzed and visualized using tools from network analysis. Using the so-called "excellence indicator" PPtop-10%--the proportion of the top-...

In recent years, the extent of formal research evaluation, at all levels from the individual to the multiversity has increased dramatically. At the institutional level, there are world university rankings based on an ad hoc combination of different indicators. There are also national exercises, such as those in the UK and Australia that evaluate re...

Events happen within the organizational world not by chance but for reasons. It is surely the task of management research to try to explain why these events occur. This requires us to understand the nature of causality but, in general, this is seldom discussed in the management or IS literature. The standard, positivist view underlying statistical...

Using bibliometric data for the evaluation of the research of institutions and individuals is becoming increasingly common. Bibliometric evaluations across disciplines require that the data be normalized to the field because the fields are very different in their citation processes. Generally, the major bibliographic databases such as Web of Scienc...

Demetis and Lee's paper outlines criteria for constructing theory in accordance with systems science. This is a laudable aim but in this comment I suggest that their view of systems thinking is both narrow and somewhat dated. Demetis and Lee equate systems science with only one aspect of it - General Systems Thinking (GST) - and they discuss in det...

Semiotics studies the production, transmission and interpretation of meaning represented symbolically in signs and messages, primarily but not exclusively in language. For information systems (IS) the domain of semiosis consists of human and non-human interactions based on technologically-mediated communication in the social, material and personal...

Evaluating the quality of academic journal is becoming increasing important within the context of research performance evaluation. Traditionally, journals have been ranked by peer review lists such as that of the Association of Business Schools (UK) or though their journal impact factor (JIF). However, several new indicators have been developed, su...

Research in information systems includes a wide range of approaches which make a contribution in terms of knowledge, understanding, or practical developments. The measure of any research is, ultimately, its validity: are its finding true, or its recommendations correct? However, empirical studies show that discussion of validity in research is ofte...

Research in information systems includes a wide range of approaches which make a contribution in terms of knowledge, understanding, or practical developments. The measure of any research is, ultimately, its validity: are its finding true, or its recommendations correct? However, empirical studies show that discussion of validity in research is ofte...

Evaluating the quality of academic journal is becoming increasing important within the context of research performance evaluation. Traditionally, journals have been ranked by peer review lists such as that of the Association of Business Schools (UK) or though their journal impact factor (JIF). However, several new indicators have been developed, su...

This paper presents a systemic methodology for identifying and analysing the stakeholders of an organisation at many different levels. The methodology is based on soft systems methodology and is applicable to all types of organisation, both for profit and non-profit. The methodology begins with the top-level objectives of the organisation, develope...

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the h...

The evaluation of the quality of research at a national level has become increasingly common. The UK has been at the forefront of this trend having undertaken many assessments since 1986, the latest being the Research Excellence Framework in 2014. The argument of this paper is that, whatever the intended results in terms of evaluating and improving...

This paper addresses the issue of truth and knowledge in management generally and knowledge management in particular. Based on ideas from critical realism and critical theory, it argues against the monovalent conceptualization of knowledge implicitly or explicitly held by many authors and aims instead to develop a characterization that recognizes t...

The world faces major problems, not least climate change and the financial crisis, and business schools have been criticised for their failure to help address these issues and, in the case of the financial meltdown, for being causally implicated in it. In this paper we begin by describing the extent of what has been called the rigour/relevance deba...

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least two reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. Firstly, for the purpose of normalizing ci...

This paper presents a systemic methodology for identifying the stakeholders of an organization at many different levels. The methodology is based on soft systems methodology and is applicable to all types of organization, both for profit and non-profit. The methodology begins with the top-level objectives of the organization, developed through deba...

Philosophy and Systems Thinking seeks to re-address the whole question of philosophy and systems thinking for the twenty first century and provide a new work that would be of value to both systems and philosophy. This is a highly opportune time when different fields – critical realism, philosophy of science and systems thinking – are all developing...

Combinations of problem structuring methods with hard OR methodologies are seldom described in the literature. This chapter reflects on the barriers to such combinations that can be seen at the philosophical level - paradigm incommensurability - and cognitive level - type of personality and difficulty of switching paradigm. The chapter examines the...

The Leiden ranking methodology (LRM), also sometimes called the crown indicator, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard...

The paper argues that semiotics, the theory of signs and symbols, is at the heart of the representation and transmission of information and meaning, and is thus central to communication and information systems, but especially in their contemporary, more virtualized forms. The paper is distinctive in eschewing post-structuralist uses of Saussurian s...

A review of Theories of Information, Communication and Knowledge: A Multidisciplinary Approach edited by Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan and Thomas Mark Dousa. Volume 34 in the series Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Published in 2014 by Springer.

The quality of the journals of the received citations of a set of publications for evaluating the research performance in the case of individual researchers, research groups and academic departments is investigated. An adaptive model incorporating and examining variables, such as the journal quality rankings of the journals of the citing articles w...

Information systems, as a discipline, is concerned with the generation, storage and transmission of information, generally by technological means. As such, it would seem to be fundamental that it has a clear and agreed conceptualization of its core subject matter – namely “information”. Yet, we would claim, this is clearly not the case. As McKinne...

Brown (and later commentators) also claimed that it could represent Aristotelian syllogistic logic although, as he showed in his book, at least one invalid syllogism appeared to be valid. This paper explores the extent to which the laws of form can correctly deal with all syllogisms. There are in fact 256 possible syllogisms and only fifteen of the...

In this work, we report on the aim, approach, design, outcomes, and issues of a major project ranking the academic impact of world national research institutes (NRIs), carried out by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The evaluation of national research institutes has always been a controversial issue. Although related studies may be found in t...

Critical realism offers exciting prospects in shifting attention toward the real problems that one faces and their underlying causes. As such, it offers a robust framework for the use of a variety of methods in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and significance of information systems in the contemporary world. One of the interesti...

Luciano Floridi has been very active in helping to develop both the philosophy of information as a discipline and an actual theory of the nature of semantic information. This paper has three purposes. First, to demonstrate that Floridi’s information theory was largely prefigured by work carried out by Mingers and published some ten years earlier. T...

The article critically examines how work is shaped by performance measures. Its specific focus is upon the use of journal lists, rather than the detail of their construction, in conditioning the research activity of academics. It is argued that an effect of the ‘one size fits all’ logic of journal lists is to endorse and cultivate a research monocu...

The Leiden methodology (LM), also sometimes called the “crown indicator”, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard scienc...

The quality of the journals of the received citations of a set of publications for evaluating the quality performance in the case of individual researchers, research groups and academic departments is investigated. An adaptive model incorporating and examining variables, such as the quality of journals of the citing articles within the set of publi...

Luciano Floridi has been very active in helping to develop both the philosophy of information as a discipline and an actual theory of the nature of semantic information. This paper has three purposes. First, is to demonstrate that Floridi's information theory was largely prefigured by work carried out by Mingers and published some ten years earlier...

The economic crisis created major problems for a successful, hi-tech Chinese company – Tonsan. They already had in place a performance management system based around the balanced scorecard which worked successfully in times of growth and high demand. However, with the world downturn they suddenly found that their current system was not able to cope...

This paper considers the use of the h-index as a measure of a journal’s research quality and contribution. We study a sample of 455 journals in business and management all of which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and the Association of Business School’s peer review journal ranking list. The h-index is compared with both the traditional...

Over the last forty years, new methods and methodologies have been developed to deal with wicked problems or "messes". They are structured and rigorous but non-mathematical. Prime examples are: soft systems methodology (SSM), cognitive mapping/SODA and the strategic choice approach (SCA). Collectively they are known as Soft OR, Soft Systems, or Pro...

T his paper reflects upon the teaching of soft systems methodology (SSM) to undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive students. The paper presents SSM as an all-purpose approach to tackling complex situations, which can be conceived as an experiential learning cycle. SSM adopts a participative approach to problem solving and uses systems modeling...

Critical realism, especially as developed by Roy Bhaskar, embodies at its heart systemic and holistic concepts such as totality, emergence, open systems, stratification, autopoiesis and holistic causality. These concepts have their own long history of development in disciplines such as systems thinking and cybernetics, but there is an absence in Bh...

Operational researchers help managers decide what they ought to do and yet this is generally evaluated in terms of efficiency or effectiveness, not ethicality. However, the combination of the tremendous power of global corporations and the financial markets, and the problems the world faces in terms of economic and environmental sustainability, has...

The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK involved the peer review of over 12,500 research outputs in Business and Management, of which 92% were journal articles. Each output was graded on a 4-point scale from “world leading” to “national” with a fifth point being unclassified. These grades were accumulated for each department to provide an o...

This article raises important philosophical and practical issues in undertaking research in the pursuit of knowledge, including some of the questions and debates that are of interest within the philosophy of information system (IS). It presents five propositions concerning high-quality research. They are adopting a systemic and holistic approach to...

Ethics is important in the Information Systems field as illustrated by the direct effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on the work of IS professionals. There is a substantial literature on ethical issues surrounding computing and information technology in the contemporary world, but much of this work is not published nor widely cited in the mainstream...

The systems approach, or systems thinking, has been intimately connected with the development of OR and management science initially through the work of founders such as Churchman and Ackoff and latterly through innovations such as soft systems. In this paper we have undertaken a review of the contribution that systems thinking has been making more...

Many people invest regularly in sinking funds that track stock market indices. When stock markets themselves sink significantly, as in the current credit crunch, investors face a decision as to whether they should continue paying into a falling fund, or switch payment to a risk-free deposit account until the market recovers. Most financial advice i...

: Assessing the quality of the knowledge produced by business and management academics is increasingly being metricated. Moreover, emphasis is being placed on the impact of the research rather than simply where it is published. The main metric for impact is the number of citations a paper receives. Traditionally this data has come from the ISI Web...

In this paper, many cases significant citation counts are wasted in computing the g-index and being an integer it often lacks discriminatory power. This paper also introduce several indices using different extension approaches. Empirical studies are provided to compare these indices in some bibliometries rankings.

Within the discipline of operations research and management science, many methods and techniques have been developed. Initially, these were generally based on mathematical or computer models. However, it was found in practice, particularly with complex, “wicked” problems, that many aspects of the situation, especially those concerning peoples' view...

The number of citations is becoming an increasingly popular index for measuring the impact of a scholar’s research or the quality of an academic department. One obvious question is: what are the factors that influence the number of citations that a paper receives? This study investigates the number of citations received by papers published in six w...

Methods currently in use for generating performance indicators have limitations, especially when applied to public sector organizations. This article presents a new methodology for constructing a set of indicators, which was developed as part of a project to evaluate the performance of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The methodology is illustrated...

This article takes a critical realist perspective to understand the research–practice gap in the field of business and management. To investigate issues surrounding the rigour versus relevance debate, we examine how the divergent perspectives of scholars and practitioners can be bridged by a critical realist approach in relation to: (1) the researc...

This article takes a critical realist perspective to understand the research–practice gap in the field of business and management. To investigate issues surrounding the rigour versus relevance debate, we examine how the divergent perspectives of scholars and practitioners can be bridged by a critical realist approach in relation to: (1) the researc...

There is an increasing emphasis on the use of metrics for assessing the research contribution of academics, departments, journals or conferences. Contribution has two dimensions: quantity which can be measured by number/size of the outputs, and quality which is most easily measured by the number of citations. Recently, Hirsch proposed a new metric...

Until recently, businesses and corporations could argue that their only real commitments were to maximise the return to their shareholders whilst staying within the law. However, the world has changed significantly during the last ten years and now most major corporations recognise that they have significant responsibility to local and global socie...

This paper reports on an innovative combination of hard and soft methods—soft systems methodology (SSM) with data envelopment analysis (DEA). Problems in defining and agreeing appropriate inputs and outputs for DEA led to the use of SSM as a way or producing a comprehensive and systemic database of performance indicators. The contributions of the p...

This book deals with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management. It weaves together material from some of the pre-eminent thinkers of the day. In doing so it creates a coherent path from fundamental work on philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology through spe...

This paper reports on an exploratory analysis of the behaviour of citations for management science papers over a 14-year period. Citations often display s-curve type behaviour: beginning slowly, rising in response to previous citations, and then declining as the material becomes obsolete. Within the context of citation research such functions are k...

Information is fundamental to the discipline of information systems, yet there is little agreement about even this basic concept. Traditionally, information has been seen as ‘processed data,’ while more recently soft, interpretive approaches have taken information to be ‘data plus meaning.’ This paper provides a coherent and consistent analysis of...

This paper describes a proposed framework for linking soft systems methodology (SSM), a problem structuring technique for use in messy, ill-defined problem situations, with Jackson System Development (JSD), an information system development methodology which has object-oriented characteristics. The approach taken has been to embed the modelling pha...

This paper addresses the issue of truth and knowledge in management generally and knowledge management in particular. Based on ideas from critical realism and critical theory, it argues against the monovalent conceptualization of knowledge implicitly or explicitly held by many authors and aims instead to develop a characterization that recognizes t...

The aim of this article is to outline some of the key themes that I believe are important, first, in applying the systems approach to produce high quality IS research in general and, second, to consider more specifically some of the questions and debates that are of interest within the philosophy of IS and of the systems approach. Four themes are i...

With globalization, environmental problems and significant failures in corporate governance, business ethics is perceived to be of increasing importance. This is particularly so for IS because of the huge social effects of new technologies. Yet there has been relatively little discussion of ethics in the IS literature and no clear consensus has eme...

The aim of this article is to outline some of the key themes that I believe are important, first, in applying the systems approach to produce high quality IS research in general and, second, to consider more specifically some of the questions and debates that are of interest within the philosophy of IS and of the systems approach. Four themes are i...

Creating rankings of academic journals is an important but contentious issue. It is of especial interest in the U.K. at this time (2007) as we are only one year away from getting the results of the next Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) the importance of which, for U.K. universities, can hardly be overstated. The purpose of this paper is to presen...

The Co-Plot technique has become stereotyped in the form of a series of steps that are automatically followed with little regard for the characteristics of the data and the type of analysis it supports. While there are obvious extensions to this type of analysis, the methodology has remained unchanged over many years. Here we argue that the applica...

Citation rates are becoming increasingly important in judging the research quality of journals, institutions and departments, and individual faculty. This paper looks at the pattern of citations across different management science journals and over time. A stochastic model is proposed which views the generating mechanism of citations as a gamma mix...

Combinations of problem structuring methods with hard OR methodologies are seldom described in the literature. This paper will reflect on the barriers to such combinations that can be seen at the philosophical level—paradigm incommensurability—and cognitive level—type of personality and difficulty of switching paradigm. This paper examines the comb...

This chapter has made a case for the contribution of critical realism as an underlying philosophy for management science as a practical discipline. It has approached this by showing that critical realism addresses the unresolved problems within the philosophy of science, whether it be natural or social. In particular: the impoverished view of expla...

Management science was historically dominated by an empiricist philosophy that saw quantitative modelling and statistical analysis as the only legitimate research method. More recently interpretive or constructivist philosophies have also developed employing a range of non-quantitative methods. This has sometimes led to divisive debates. 'Critical...

The comments on the work done by Ulrich on the nature and development of critical systems thinking (CST) are discussed. The significant limitations of quantitative modeling within social systems are also discussed. Ulrich has developed a critique of hard or instrumental rationality and looked for an enlargement of the notion of rationality that see...

This paper examines the application and usage of the idea of autopoiesis—a theory of living systems—within the context of viable systems theory. In recent years the term autopoiesis has extended beyond the domain of cellular biology where it originated and is now used extensively across a range of different disciplines, fields of enquiry, and profe...

The theory of autopoiesis, that is systems that are self-producing or self-constructing, was originally developed to explain the particular nature of living as opposed to non-living entities. It was subsequently enlarged to encompass cognition and language leading to what is known as second-order cybernetics. However, as with earlier biological the...

This paper presents a personal overview of the history of the IS discipline over the last 20 years. It highlights two particular strands of development over which there has been much controversy – the so-called paradigm wars which were an epistemological battle between positivism and interpretivism; and the related debate over a critical approach t...