Emeritus Professor Ray Cooksey

Biography

- Retired September 1, 2014

Ray holds a PhD in Environmental/Social Psychology from Colorado State University and works primarily in the organisational behaviour and managerial decision-making areas. He held positions in three different departments/schools at UNE over the past 32+ years: Centre for Behavioural Studies in Education, Department of Psychology and the UNE Business School - a diverse set of experiences that informed both his teaching and research. Ray also served an 18-month period as Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at UNE from 2009-2010 and a four-year term as Chair of the UNE Academic Board from 2001-2005. He was part of the team that created the PhD.I program in 2009.  His research is focused mainly in the areas of decision-making and cognition, chaos and complexity theory organisational and behavioural systems theory, cause mapping and multivariate statistics. However, Ray has also worked on more diverse research projects such as multivariate analyses of criminal psychological profiling data and analysing teacher judgements when making student assessments. He has consulted with several Australian and US-based industries and government departments in areas such as ergonomics, performance measurement, survey design and analysis, and change management. Ray has written or co-authored six books (Judgment Analysis: Theory Methods and Applications (1996, Academic Press; Ray's most highly cited book worldwide), Illustrating Statistical Procedures: Finding Meaning in Quantitative Data, 3rd Ed (2020, Springer Nature), Surviving and Thriving in Postgraduate Research, 2nd Ed (2019, Springer Nature), Unity from Diversity: Pluralist Systemic Thinking for Social and Behavioural Research (2024, Springer Nature); Enhancing Climate Change Communication: Strategies for Profiling and Targeting Australian Interpretive Communities (2013, NCCARF) and Science, ICT and Mathematics Education in Rural and Regional Australia: The SiMERR National Survey. National Centre of Science, ICT and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia, University of New England (2006, DEST) as well as 14 book chapters and over 75 articles in national and international refereed journals.

He has supervised 36 doctoral students  (PhD, PhD.I, EdD, DHSM), masters and honours students (27) over the years in areas such as: managerial intuition, marketing (service recovery evaluation, consumer involvement, brand equity models, organic food purchase and food preferences), leadership (public sector and tertiary education), data mining methods, community attitudes toward police, innovation adoption, organisational citizenship, commitment and culture (including research for a Professional Doctorate in Health Services Management in hospitals in the United Arab Emirates), self-efficacy and GNH values education in Bhutan, quality of financial reporting information, path dependency and flexibility in farming systems, determinants of mathematics anxiety, computerised adaptive testing models, complexity perspectives on organisational and group processes and policy implementation, organisational decision making, vocational interests, workplace influences on sustainability practices away from work, HRM practices in Saudi Arabia, performance of Australian TAFE institutions, hazard perceptions on farms, chaos models of work performance, innovation in fire-fighting in WA, e-commerce strategies in small business, and women in management.