Researching John Mathews

Mathews' first book was a history, Wah'kon-tah: The Osage and The White Man's Road (1929), which was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club as their first by an academic press; it became a bestseller. His second book, Sundown (1934) is his most well known, an exploration of the disruption of the people and their society at the time of the oil boom, which also attracted criminal activities by leading whites in the county and state, including murder of Osage. In 1951 Mathews published a biography of E. W. Marland, noted oilman and governor of Oklahoma in the 1930s. His book The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961) was a life work, preserving many collected stories and the oral history of the Osage.

In 1996 Mathews was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame. The cabin in the Osage Hills where he did much of his writing was acquired about 2014 by the Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma. His gravesite is next to it. Both will be preserved within the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

John Mathews is the Secretary of the St. Thomas Orthodox Vaideeka Sangam, the Association of all Priests of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church as well as the publisher of Purohithar, a magazine published by the St. Thomas Orthodox Theological Group from Kottayam. He is the Co-Secretary of the joint commission between the Catholic Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.

He teaches New Testament at the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Kottayam. He pursued doctoral studies in New Testament at the Fordham University, New York City. His doctoral dissertation was titled The Spirit-Paraclete in the testament of Jesus according to Saint John's Gospel. He was President of the Society for Biblical Studies in India from 2002 to 2004.

He was consecrated in 2010 with the name Yuhanon Mar Demetrius.

Mathews has focused on the dynamics of technological catch-up by East Asian countries in high-tech industries, semiconductors, flat panel displays and most recently in alternative energy industries, solar photovoltaics and LEDs. He has developed dynamic strategy frameworks for analyzing these processes, and formulated a strategic synthesis in terms of the fundamental categories of resources, activities and routines. His most recent work applies this framework to explicating the reasons for success of industrial clusters, particularly those found in Taiwan, China and India.

His book published in 2006, Strategizing, Disequilibrium and Profit (Stanford University Press), took these issues as framework to explore the evolution of industries and strategizing behaviors of firms theoretically. Strongly influenced by Joseph A. Schumpeter, Mathews viewed the disequilibrium and the dynamics of the economic system as both a setting and outcome of firms’ strategizing behaviours. Entrepreneurship plays a central role in creating the bundles of resources, activities and routines.

His work (in 2010/11) focuses on the intersection between the development of new low-carbon industries and renewable energies; the rise of China and India and their pursuit of an East Asian model of development and highly-focused industrial clusters; and the adaptation of the capitalist economic system with its enormous growth and innovation potential to the demands of operating within natural ecological limits – such as within the framework of a ‘Circular Economy’ as advanced in China.

Joining Vesper Boat Club in 1974, Mathews won U.S. National Championships in the coxed four in 1975 and the coxed pair in 1975 and 1976, as well as winning in the coxed four at the Canadian Henley Royal Regatta in 1974 He won Head of the Charles Boston, MA first place medals on the same day in the elite eight (Boston Globe Trophy) and elite four with coxswain (Schaefer Trophy) in 1975 and repeating the wins again in 1976 for Vesper Boat Club, Philadelphia, under coach Dietrich Rose.

Mathews coxed pair placed second in 1975 in the Lucerne International Regatta, the first time on the world stage that he and Darrell Vreugdenhill, along with coxswain Kenneth Dreyfus rowed the pair with together. Later that fall, they won a gold medal in the coxed pair event at the 1975 Pan American Games at Mexico City.thumb|left|John Mathews, Gold Medal, Pan American Games, Mexico CityIn the Spring of 1976, his pair with coxswain trained at the Ratzeburger Ruderclub in Ratzeburg, GE, the center for elite rowing in West Germany, under Karl Adam. At the International Wedau Regatta in Duisburg, GE, they won the coxed pair event and received a medal of the seal of Duisburg in their event.

In 1978, Mathews joined the Boston Rugby Club as a second row forward, and also played for the Hartford Wanderers Rugby Club. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserves in 1986, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Civil Engineer Corps, serving in Naval Mobile Construction Battalions 12, 13, and 27 (the Seabees), as well as the 7th Naval Construction Regiment, and as a Contingency Engineer for U.S. European Command Headquarters in Stuttgart, GE.

As a member of Yankee Rowing Club and in 2007, at age 56, he won the Blackburn Challenge, Gloucester, MA, rowing in the Touring Class Single, Sliding Seat in a 20+ mile open ocean race circumnavigating Cape Ann. He worked at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, MA as a Facility Manager and an Associate Faculty member, where he retired in 2019.