[BITList] Man and machine

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-12-23



Mumford  [née McFarland],  Enid Mary  (1924-2006), social scientist, was born on 6 March 1924 at Iona, Groveland Avenue, Wallasey, Cheshire, the daughter of Arthur McFarland (1893-1966), a hospital secretary, and later a prominent barrister and chief stipendary magistrate of Liverpool, and his wife, Dorothy, nee Evans, a headteacher. Her family and intellectual heritage were in the north-west of England. She attended Wallasey high school before joining the social sciences department at Liverpool University, where she took a special interest in social psychology and graduated BA in 1946. She then went to work in industry, first with Rotol Ltd, aeronautical engineers, as a personnel manager responsible for industrial relations strategy for a large number of female staff, and subsequently with the Liverpool clock and watch maker J. D. Francis as a production manager. The experience of working in industry close to the shop floor proved invaluable for her later academic work as a teacher and researcher. On 28 July 1947, at the parish church of St Nicholas, Wallasey, she married James Muir (Jim) Mumford, a dental surgeon one year her senior (son of James Montgomery Mumford), who was later to become professor of operative dental surgery at Liverpool University. They made their home at 4 Windmill Close, Appleton, Warrington, Cheshire, situated conveniently between the universities of Liverpool and Manchester. They had two children, Michele and Colin.

Much of Enid Mumford's intellectual development and identity was forged in the social science department of Liverpool University which she joined as a research associate in 1948, working with some of the key figures then making Liverpool University one of the foremost centres in the world for the study of industrial sociology, including Joan Woodward, Olive and Joe Banks, A. H. Halsey, and Tom Lupton. She became interested and involved in research on technical change and its impacts in a variety of industries including coalmining, steelmaking, and the Liverpool docks. In particular, one of the problems faced by the UK after the Second World War was that, despite heavy investment in machinery to make industry more efficient, productivity did not get the expected boost. Mumford discovered that researchers at the Tavistock Institute were at this time developing an understanding of the importance of a socio-technical approach: that investment in technology alone was not sufficient to gain the benefits of new technology, social factors being as important as technical factors. But what equally attracted her to the approach espoused by the Tavistock Institute researchers was their insistence that the object of technical change was more than financial benefit, and had to include the enhancement of the quality of working life. She was also influenced by the writings of Mary Parker Follett, the pioneering American management teacher of the early twentieth century, whom she regarded as having helped to inform her own thinking and values. Follett's ideas on negotiation, power, and employee participation became a critical component of Mumford's own methodologies. Throughout her life as an academic and researcher she placed her values and beliefs at the centre of her work. This was reflected most clearly in one of her last books, Systems Design: Ethical Tools for Ethical Change (1996). Her work with the Tavistock Institute led to her becoming a council member of the institute.

From her experience of working in industry Mumford realized that if she were to understand properly how technical change in industry could be made to achieve its objectives she had to immerse herself in the workplace, to soak up the attitudes, preconceptions, capabilities, and desires of the workforce at all levels. Thus when she studied the coalmining industry to analyse why the investment in mechanization by the National Coal Board had not yielded the expected increases in productivity, she went down the mines for several months to watch and talk to the face workers as well as to the deputies who acted as supervisors. Again, when studying industrial relations at Liverpool docks in the context of changing work practices in the 1950s, she first enrolled as a catering assistant in order to get closer to the stevedores without her becoming suspect as a management spy. Her account of these experiences in her later book Redesigning Human Systems (2003) made fascinating reading.

A year at the University of Michigan followed in 1956-7, when Mumford studied at the university's bureau of public health economics. On returning to England she took up a lectureship at Liverpool and took her PhD at the University of Manchester, before in 1966 joining the staff of the new Manchester Business School (initially as a lecturer, then as a senior lecturer, reader, and from 1979 as professor of organizational behaviour and director of the computer and work design research unit). In the 1950s and 1960s computers began to be used to support and automate business processes. Once again there were questions about the impact of these new technology-based systems, and this was a problem Mumford set out to address. In 1967 she published, with Olive Banks, The Computer and the Clerk, their study of the impact of computers on the workforce of an Irish bank. This was one of the first studies of the way computer systems affected work practices, and crucially also of the response of the workforce at all levels to the use of computers. Computers: Planning for People (1968), co-written with Thomas Ward, demonstrated the values she held to all her life.

More studies followed, at Turner and Newall, the asbestos manufacturers, Rolls Royce, ICI, and many other places. Mumford's earlier studies had convinced her that the accepted methods of introducing computer systems were oriented towards the technology rather than the people who had to use that technology as part of their everyday jobs. She turned her attention to devising an improved methodology for introducing computer systems into organizations. Her methods were based on the socio-technical approach espoused by the Tavistock Institute and the ideas she had inherited from Mary Parker Follett. They included the conviction that if computer systems were to deliver both financial value and improved working conditions and job satisfaction, all those involved, and in particular those who had to work with the new systems, had to participate in the design process. Her experience in industry and her earlier research studies had convinced her that the capability for designing systems was not confined to 'experts' but could be learned by employees at all levels, and that often design ideas stemming from members of the workforce were more radical (and realizable) then those put forward by the experts.

These new ideas for design were encapsulated in Mumford's book Effective Systems Design and Requirements Analysis: the ETHICS Approach (1995), a restatement of work first published in 1979 with her co-author Mary Weir. The acronym ETHICS stood for Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems. Her ETHICS approach evolved through its use in many action research studies, mainly in the UK but also including a major study with the Digital Equipment Corporation in the USA. In the evolution of ETHICS Mumford drew on many sources. Thus she took on the different notions of 'job satisfaction', re-examined all of them, and synthesized her own, more comprehensive model. To test the validity of new designs emerging from the ETHICS approach she adopted the 'viable systems model' developed by the cybernetician Stafford Beer and the notion of 'requisite variety' from Ross Ashby. She was a scholar who quickly got to the heart of practical concerns, but at the same time never forgot the humanistic values she espoused. Each of her many action research studies was carefully documented in a monograph or paper in a journal. These provided examples of her participative approach, its rationale, and a narrative that included the voices of the participants themselves. At the same time difficulties encountered were recorded and the lessons that could be derived from their analysis were spelled out. Nevertheless most of the action research projects had successful outcomes. She was a superb facilitator. Her charisma, her smile, and her arguments persuaded hardened managers of the old, more authoritarian, top-down school to give her methods a chance.

Mumford retired in 1988, with the title of emeritus professor. But retirement did not end her contributions as a scholar, and a stream of articles and books followed, including, in 2003, Redesigning Human Systems, in which she provided a reprise of her most important studies. Her work was recognized internationally, and she received many honours, including the J. D. Warnier prize for her contribution to information science, the Association for Information Systems top prize, the LEO award for her lifetime contribution to the study of information systems in 1999, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in 1996. She was also made a companion of the Institute of Personnel Development, and a fellow of the British Computer Society. Perhaps the clearest indication of her reputation was the publication in 2006 of 'Enid Mumford: a tribute', with contributions from leading scholars from many parts of the world, in the Information Systems Journal, followed in 2007 by a special edition of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems devoted to analysing her contributions.

Throughout her career and into retirement Mumford worked for the improvement of the position of women in a variety of situations. She was affronted by the treatment of women in her local golf club, which led to a long campaign to gain recognition and culminated in her appointment as club captain. She was interested in modern art and became an accomplished artist herself. She died at Riverbank Nursing Home, Egerton Street, Howley, Warrington, Cheshire, on 7 April 2006, after a massive stroke, and was survived by her husband, Jim, their daughter, Michele, a businesswoman based in Australia, and son, Colin, a consultant neurologist in Edinburgh.

Frank Land 

Sources  The Guardian (3 May 2006) + 'Enid Mumford: a tribute', Information Systems Journal, 16 (2006), 343-82 + Journal of the Association for Information Systems (Sept 2007) [special Mumford edition] + www.enid.u-net.com,  accessed on 5 May 2009 + WW (2006) + personal knowledge (2010) + private information (2010) + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Likenesses  photograph, repro. in www.enid.u-net.com · photograph, University of Manchester, Manchester Business School [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £378,774: probate, 27 July 2006, CGPLA Eng. & Wales