Enid Mumford: a tribute

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKISJInformation Systems Journal1350-1917© 2006 The Authors; Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd200616343382Original ArticleEnid Mumford: a tributeD Avison et al.

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Enid Mumford: a tribute David Avison, Niels Bjørn-Andersen, Elayne Coakes, Gordon B Davis, Michael J Earl, Amany Elbanna, Guy Fitzgerald, Robert D Galliers, Rudy Hirschheim, Juhani Iivari, Heinz K Klein, Frank Land, Marco de Marco, Andrew M Pettigrew, Jaana Porra, Bernd Carsten Stahl, Carsten Sørensen, Bob Wood & Trevor Wood-Harper

INTRODUCTION

In this edited article, we look at the many contributions of Enid Mumford: as a worker, teacher, colleague, researcher, but most of all as a human being, written by those who have been influenced by her, many of whom knowing her personally. Andrew Pettigrew first encountered Enid as an undergraduate, later becoming her first Research Fellow and then Enid supervised his PhD. His tribute introduces us to both her work and humanity. Frank Land is often associated with the work of Enid and in his tribute he discusses the roots of Enid’s views in socio-technical design, her influence on the National Computing Centre and through her many roles in practice where she acted as facilitator for humanistic as well as successful change using technology. Michael Earl first met Enid as a lecturer at Manchester Business School in 1974. His contribution recognizes her special personal qualities as a teacher as well as her impact on practice. Like many authors of this paper, Gordon Davis will be well known to readers and it says much for Enid’s standing in the field that he writes of her impact on himself and his understanding of information systems (IS) and IS research. In his article, Niels Bjørn-Andersen refers to Enid as the ‘Florence Nightingale’ of IT and he suggests that ‘no other researcher has contributed so much towards influencing the practice of systems design in the direction of giving higher priority to humanistic values and democratization’. This very worthy achievement of Enid is also highlighted by other writers in this article. Trevor Wood-Harper and Bob Wood suggest that Enid, like Frank Sinatra, did it ‘my way’, but perhaps unlike Frank Sinatra, Enid’s way is also a humanistic way to the future. They provide a useful overview of Enid’s contribution to the literature. Bob Galliers refers to Enid’s vision as well as her humanity, suggesting that her vision was much broader than most, much more heroic. For her, IS had to speak of societal problems as well as organizational and technical ones. David Avison describes how Enid changed his life and reflects on how her friendliness, openness and kindness that she showed in personal relationships are evidenced in her work that remains with us. Heinz K. Klein suggests that Enid was a leader in the ‘informal college’ of paradigm change and advocates her as a role model for junior faculty. Indeed he shows us how as a junior member of faculty at the time he learnt ‘three lessons’ from Enid. Rudy Hirschheim reflects on Enid as both a mentor and a colleague, telling us the story of the ‘Amazing

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Mumford’. Guy Fitzgerald tells us how Enid charmed even the most hard-nosed practitioners and opened their minds, and suggests that she will not only be greatly missed but also prove irreplaceable. Marco de Marco looks especially at development post Mumford and suggests that the design ideas emerging from actor-network theory, such as cultivation, are unlikely to have been developed, were it not for Mumford’s fundamental work. Jaana Porra makes a call inspired by Enid to solve global, wicked problems (as well as introducing us to a mouse called Gruffalo). Elayne Coakes has developed Enid’s ideas into what she calls the ‘New Sociotech’ and she also recalls how Enid herself was influenced by Mary Parker Follett. Bernd Carsten Stahl reinterprets the work of Mumford as a critical scholar allowing a differentiated understanding of her achievement along with an analysis of some of the weaknesses of her work, thus providing a theoretical platform to develop this work further. Juhani Iivari discusses the impact of Enid’s writings in his own research beginning in the early 1980s, and also refers to his daughter’s thesis which has also been influenced by Enid’s work. This is particularly appropriate as it suggests that Enid’s legacy will indeed last through generations of researchers, teachers and practitioners. Finally, Amany Elbanna describes her thoughts when she was an MSc student on seeing Enid for the first time.

ANDREW M. PETTIGREW

This is a brief, personal and certainly partial view of Enid Mumford as a scholar and a person. Enid’s intellectual identity and contributions are clear. She is an internationally renowned management scholar who helped create worldwide interest in the human and organizational impact of information and computer systems. Although she produced many journal articles, her most notable work has appeared in research monographs. In these monographs, she had the space to reveal the best of her theoretically informed empiricism and her philosophically and empirically based approaches to the practice of systems design and development. Through her long career she bridged theory and practice and effectively engaged with managers, specialists and policy makers wrestling with the implementation of early generations of computer systems. She did all this with an openness, directness, warmth and optimism that drew many students, colleagues and managers to her point of view. I first encountered Enid as an undergraduate in the Social Sciences (Sociology) Department of Liverpool University in 1964. She taught me in a postgraduate year at Liverpool in 1965/66 and when she left Liverpool in 1966 to become the first lecturer in Industrial Sociology at the newly created Manchester Business School, she asked me to accompany her as her first Research Fellow there. This is an opportunity I shall forever be grateful for. We both arrived at the very outset of the new industry of business school education in the UK. More importantly for me, I had the chance to learn the basics of how to conduct social science research in business from a person who by that stage had had approaching 20 years of experience of front line management research from working with her Liverpool colleagues. Enid supervised my PhD at Manchester Business School (Pettigrew, 1970). This was eventually published as The Politics of Organizational Decision-Making (Pettigrew, 1973).

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Thereafter, we published a book together (Mumford & Pettigrew, 1975). But by this time our paths had begun to diverge. I left Manchester in 1969 to go to Yale and then London Business School and began to establish my own intellectual identity as Enid’s contribution became more and more associated with the socio-technical aspects of IS design. But the roots we shared in the innovations and tensions of the industrial sociology group at Liverpool were foundational to both of us and as such warrant some attention in any appreciation of the life and work of Enid Mumford. Enid’s family and intellectual heritage were in the North West of England. She was born in 1924 on Merseyside, attended Wallasey High School and then the Social Sciences Department at Liverpool University. Her father was a barrister who became a prominent local figure as the stipendiary magistrate of Liverpool. In 1947, she married Jim Mumford, later to become a professor of Operative Dental Surgery at Liverpool University. Their long-term home at Appleton near Warrington was conveniently equidistant between Jim’s career post at Liverpool and Enid’s 20 plus years at the Manchester Business School. After her undergraduate education at Liverpool, Enid spent time in industry, first as a personnel manager at an aircraft factory and later as a production manager at a factory manufacturing alarm clocks. These were important experiences for a teacher and researcher of management. Enid’s intellectual identity was built as a member of the exceptional group of industrial sociologists who worked in the Social Sciences Department at Liverpool University from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Enid joined this group in 1948. The Liverpool group in the late 1940s to 1960s included most of the key figures of British Industrial Sociology: Joe and Olive Banks, A.H. Halsey, Tom Lupton, W.H. (Bill) Scott and Joan Woodward, among others. Their studies of technical change in the steel, coal and docks industries pioneered the theoretically informed empiricism which helped to shape what is now known as management research. Key published studies in this tradition include Scott et al. (1963; 1965), Scott (1962; 1965) and Mumford & Banks (1967). Enid played a key role as an observer in some of these studies, notably as a canteen assistant on the Liverpool docks and then as an interviewer/observer underground with the miners of the North West coal industry. As the daughter of a Liverpool barrister, these must have been notable encounters for all the parties. Looking back now from a 2006 vantage point, it is hard for us to appreciate the very limited intellectual context faced by these pioneering social scientists in industry then located at Liverpool. In the UK in the 1950s, the only parallel experience was the Tavistock Institute in London. There were no business and management school departments in university settings which engaged in management research; few sociology and psychology departments which had business or organizational interests; no tradition of publishing in academic journals and few if any management journals; and no accessible communities of intellectual companionship for business and management research. The life experiences of the Liverpool group were also somewhat different from later generations of management scholars. W.H. (Bill) Scott, the leader of the group, was a formidably hard man who had spent a great part of the Second World War fighting the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. Tom Lupton started life as a fitter in the shipyards of the North East of England. He had the good fortune to be evacuated from

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Dunkirk in 1940 with the remnants of the British Army and as pacifists Joe and Olive Banks had served in the land army for much of the Second World War. Enid had come into this group from the comfortable surroundings of a middle-class life on the Wirral. This experience had been tempered by her undergraduate education in sociology at Liverpool and then by industrial employment in Merseyside factories. But the key to understanding her intellectual roots is to appreciate the path breaking empirical studies of the Liverpool group. These studies were centred on one of the biggest problems of the day, technical change and industrial relations. They were focused on the old industries of steel, coal and the docks and they involved primary data collection from surveys and detailed ethnographic work. They were also theoretically informed drawing upon the general sociological theory of Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Merton and Parsons and the very early industrial sociology writings of Gouldner, Selznick and Mechanic. The creativity of pioneering groups can be fragile and dependent both on collective feelings of success and on sound perpetuation strategies for the groups. The Liverpool group managed neither of these challenges well and by the mid-1960s, many of the group (including Enid) had been offered opportunities elsewhere. The Liverpool group also had a signal intellectual tension which even I as an undergraduate at the time remember. Interestingly, the tension was posed as a dichotomy between social science founded on ‘fact’ and social science founded on ‘value’. Were we as social scientists here to theorize, observe, analyse and explain – the ‘fact’ position, or are we here as citizens and not just as scientists, where as citizens we can take a value position and even an interventionist position on that which we observe and explain? It is typical of Enid that she interpreted the above intellectual debate not as a dichotomy of either/or but as a duality of fact and value. As we now know, Enid post-Liverpool became a champion of fact and value. She continued with the Liverpool tradition of management research founded on primary data and theoretical analysis, but complemented that with a strong value attachment to humanistic and democratic values and the potential enabling power of action research (Mumford, 2006b). I think Enid’s move to the Manchester Business School in 1966 had a liberating impact on her work. In this new context, enriched by business education and management research, she was quickly able to build stronger business contacts, widen her national and international network of colleagues and generate a sustainable pattern of research funding for her Computer and Work Design Research Unit. While at Manchester Business School, she developed a close working relationship with members of the Tavistock Institute and became a follower of their democratic socio-technical approach. Through successive action research projects, she tried to apply this to the design and implementation of computer-based systems and information technology. One of her largest socio-technical projects was with the Digital Equipment Corporation in Boston. In the 1970s, she became a member of the International Quality of Working Life Group. In a paper written near the end of her life and published in this issue of the ISJ (Mumford, 2006b), she was open enough to recognize that the humanistic values and democratic ethos of the socio-technical approach to IS design was ill-suited to the more punishing business context of the 1980s and 1990s. But her deep-seated optimism about humanity led her to continue to believe that

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humanistic values and democratic processes at work were still possible in pockets of use in a few enlightened firms and communities. But Enid was so much more than a careful, accomplished scholar with an interventionist point of view. She was a libertarian who gave her son Colin and daughter Michele space to develop. She had left-wing political leanings and like many of her generation had a brief encounter with the Communist Party. In the 1950s, this led her visa application to the USA to be queried until she informed the US Immigration Authorities that her invitation to the USA had originated from their Department of Defence. She was a strong believer in women’s rights and felt that in academia she had an uphill battle in a male-dominated world. She publicly tackled discrimination against women members in the golfing world and was eventually rewarded with first the Club Captaincy and then Presidency of the Frodsham Golf Club. But above all, it was her capacity to think and act with optimism that made her special in her world. She believed that in creative endeavours, always taking the positive, optimistic view was the key to the energy which would deliver ideas with impact. Every novice needs a mentor. Enid was my mentor when I needed intellectual and personal support the most. We share a common intellectual tradition which I knew of but had not had first-hand experience. Enid was the pioneer. I learnt from her my intellectual standards and my personal standards of dealing with people in field work. She taught me how to deal with fractional situations in complex field work settings. She taught me how to do ethnography and to write up empirical work. But the most important thing that I learnt from Enid professionally was founded on her great optimism in life. Her attitude was that everything is possible unless proven otherwise. Now we all know that not everything is possible in life, but it is a much more fulfilling life if one starts with a belief founded on optimism. The research and scholarly pathway can be unpredictable and stressful. Creativity requires structure; it also demands sustainable energy built on optimism. Thank you Enid for providing me with this powerful insight at such an early and formative part of my own life and career.

FRANK LAND

In 1967, I joined the London School of Economics (LSE) to establish teaching and research in what was then called Systems Analysis. I had worked in the computer industry since 1953, primarily involved with the design and implementation of business systems for British industry and commerce. In that time, I had developed a considerable amount of practical know-how, but had little knowledge of what was being said in the academic world about the kind of systems I had been involved with. The little I did know suggested that for the academic community, the only proper approach had to be through explanations which on the one hand were couched in a language which verged on the obscure and on the other hand seemed unaware of the reality of what took place in the workplace. The approach seemed to me to smack of the ‘ivory tower’. Then around 1970, the National Computing Council of the UK invited a group of academics and practitioners to set up a study group to review the way IS were being evaluated and to suggest improved methods. The group included Enid Mumford from the Manchester Business

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School, John Hawgood of Durham University, Michael Reddington, then Treasurer of Liverpool Council and John Dorey, chief information officer of Pfizer Ltd. Enid (with Olive Banks) had by this time published her study of an Irish bank’s attempt to introduce computing to support its back office functions, and had completed a study of Turner and Newall’s use of computers for data processing. She had began a work on Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer Systems (ETHICS), with the assistance of Mary Weir, a methodology for the design and implementation of IS which was based on sociotechnical ideas and incorporated the notion that those affected by a system had to be involved in its design. Underlying the methodology was the socio-technical ideal that the object of good design of a system is an improvement in the quality of working life and job satisfaction of those who had to work with the new system. I was immediately struck by the way Enid tackled the issues we had come to review. Here was a scholar who quickly got to the heart of practical concerns, but at the same time never forgot the humanistic values she espoused. Nor did she come with an idée fixe – she rapidly assessed the value of contributions from other group members and played a major part in forging a consensus. This led to a long-term collaboration between Enid, John Hawgood and myself. Later some of the ideas we developed became embedded in ETHICS. Enid’s approach to problems was to immerse herself in the environment which had given rise to the problem. She could not understand academics who pontificated on the basis of first principles without testing the validity of these principles in real-world situations. If the problem arose via the introduction of new coal mining technology, then she had to study the problem underground in the coal mines themselves, face to face with miners and the deputies who managed them. If the problem arose through the introduction of computing technology in the offices of ICI, she had to study the situation first-hand in the office in order not only to understand the management’s objectives in installing the technology but also to note how the technology would impact the individual members of the work force and how that workforce could and would respond. She had a profound belief that the understanding and knowledge of each stakeholder at any level in the organization could contribute to the design, implementation and operation of systems even if the new system was based on a technology which itself was evolving. Indeed, she argued that without the contribution of all stakeholders, new or changed systems had a high risk of failure. In a series of case studies published over the decades, she demonstrated that the contribution and even the leadership of members of the workforce led to the implementation of effective systems which combined an improvement in the quality of working life while meeting the managerial objectives of improving the effectiveness of the business. In her last book published in 2003 when she was nearly 80 years old (Mumford, 2003), she sets out a reprise of her work and at the same time provides a practical and masterly step-bystep guide on how to set about redesigning organizations to make use of new technology. The guide is based on a series of case studies representing her life’s work, with each case contributing lessons on redesign. But the voices which are heard in each case study are the voices of the participants themselves, telling their story of how they perceived the issues and the way they worked to achieve a solution. The cases are described realistically, warts and all. The

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book is an essential reading for all those preparing to engage in change using new technology – students as well as managers. Inevitably she had her critics. Perhaps some of the most disturbing criticisms to her came from those who shared her humanistic values. In particular, those who espoused critical theory were concerned that in the end she simply provided managers with new tools for achieving their objectives without really changing the domination of the ruling caste and the ultimate exploitation of the workforce. The most wounding criticism suggested that all she had achieved was to permit the prisoner to determine the direction of the stripes on his prison uniform. There is no doubt that she appreciated the criticism. But her response might be called Fabian. Her role was not to foster revolution. We live in a complex world. She felt that her role in that world, with her abilities and the insights she had gained, and her faith in the knowledge and creativity of people, was to encourage gradual harmonious change which satisfied as many stakeholders as possible. Through this approach, ‘win/win’ solutions could be achieved in a way utopian ideas never can. She worked on each of her many studies with evangelical zeal. To be in her presence was enough to be convinced that her new approach had to be tried. Hard bitten managers of the authoritarian school were persuaded to try her participative methods, provided she was there to coach the team and guide the team leaders. Was she successful in fulfilling the role she played as facilitator? The success of her cases was in part based on the principles she espoused, but equally it was her personal qualities as a facilitator which played a critical part in the success. Enid Mumford was a phenomenon. We in the discipline which grew up in the past four or five decades around the new information and communication technologies owe her an immense debt. She is no longer with us. But her research and teaching will feed our discipline for years to come.

MICHAEL J. EARL

Others will write about the significant contribution to IS knowledge made by Enid Mumford. I would like to recognize her special personal qualities and her impact on practice. The two are in many ways interrelated. I first met Enid at Manchester Business School in late 1974 when I had started my academic career as a lecturer in Management Control – a post conceived as a small investment in IS as a subject, but financially justified by a substantial accounting teaching load. As an initiate, I went in search of Enid, only to find she was on sabbatical. I also discovered that she was a member of the Organisational Behaviour Group alongside such influential names as Tom Lupton, Dan Gowler, Karen Legge, Angela Bowey and John Morris. Given the immaturity of ‘our subject’ and Enid’s orientation, this should not have been a surprise. The labels we might have put on Enid then were management of change, work design and job satisfaction, and sociotechnical systems.

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We met when Enid risked a visit to the School in mid-sabbatical. She had been working on an action research (another apposite label) project in a bank, following previous engagements in retailing. She sensed that there was a need to help managers in banking not only to design and implement computer systems which met organizational and individual goals better, but also to make improved and more strategic decisions about which systems to develop. A course was born; Enid covered the former question and I the latter. But this was not a programme of lectures. Enid wanted a workshop format. We would design exercises and case studies which would stimulate vicarious learning on our twin objectives – materials based on real-world experience in the banking sector. Enid was not content with lecturing; she wanted to work with managers and encouraged me to do likewise. This, of course, was what she did in her action research: jointly analyse what could be done better, jointly design systems (or make strategic decisions) and jointly evaluate outcomes and learning. But she did this by getting to know people through the process. Employees, managers and colleagues responded not only to her search for better systems – in a socio-technical sense – but also to her human, personal warmth, care and attention to the details of workplace reality. The period just described perhaps marked an evolution in Enid’s work from a consultative framing on systems design and decision-making to a more participative approach. Consultation in those days was for many a bold strategy. I remember a systems manager of that era when I asked ‘What about the users?’ replying ‘Bother (I think that was the verb) the users; they take what we give them’. Participation, that is to say active and legitimized involvement in, and influence on, systems design, could be seen as a breach of managerial prerogative and thus Enid had some interesting political moments with senior executives. However, results often spoke louder than rhetoric. Enid’s subsequent experimentation with stakeholder analysis and involvement in systems planning and design at the Trustee Savings Bank and the later development of her ETHICS method marked a further evolution towards democratic strategies. The ‘management overhead’ required is substantial, but the reward can be real ‘return on management’. It takes faith by managements to invest time and resources in the all-important initial decisions on IT resource allocation and systems design as well as on careful processes of implementation and learning. This is still a handicap to effective IS management in organizations and Enid achieved considerable success in her action research and action learning on these fronts. Some 20 years after I first met Enid, I organized a conference on the Information Society for European Research Councils. Enid agreed to be a keynote speaker. A well known continental professor opined ‘But we all know what Enid does – just one thing’. What an outrageous comment, which I have never forgotten! If socio-technical systems design was the one thing, she continuously developed the field. She remained a beacon citation for the social design questions of IS in the literature. She bridged organizational behaviour and IS. She had valuecreating impact on real organizations, where value was based on different and all stakeholder values.

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And above all, perhaps, she was admired, respected and loved not only by her students and colleagues, but by those she wanted to work with – ‘real people in the real world’. I have met so many in recent years who would ask ‘Do you know Enid Mumford?’. My reply now would be ‘Yes, and wasn’t I fortunate!’

GORDON DAVIS

I had two unique opportunities to speak for many in the field who believe Enid was making remarkable, consistent contributions to the development of IS as an academic discipline. I was on the committee that awarded her the Warnier Prize for contributions to the field of computers and information processing. I was also part of the committee in 1999 that recommended her for one of the first four AIS LEO awards for lifetime significant contributions to the field of IS. These award committees gave me the opportunity to review her career and her contributions, and they were impressive. In looking at the impact of Enid Mumford, I could write about her impact on the academic discipline of IS and her impact on the practice of system design (with her ETHICS method), but instead, I am going to focus on her impact on me and my understanding of IS and IS research. My own exposure to Enid Mumford began early in my career, but especially with her involvement in IFIP Working Group 8.2. As stated by the charter for the group, the working group was concerned with ‘the relationships and interactions between information systems, information technology, organizations, and society. The word “organizations” covers the social group, the individual, decision making, and the design of organizational structures and processes.’ I attended many 8.2 working conferences. I sponsored two 8.2 conferences in Minnesota. Enid and others brought new insights to me about the nature of IS in organizations. This was a gradual process in my education, and Enid was at many of the conferences adding her insights and increasing my understanding. She was one of a small band of interpretive researchers who enlarged my view of research methods. In 1984, while Enid was the chair person for the 8.2 Working Group, they sponsored a landmark conference on research in IS. It is often referred to as the ‘Manchester Conference’ after the venue for the conference. The proceedings are an important milestone (Mumford et al., 1985). I had a research epiphany at the 1984 Manchester conference. Up to that point in time, I did not really comprehend the issues of positivist versus post-positivist research. My education and training had emphasized positivist research with hypothesis testing. I was aware of interpretive research, but it was not part of my thinking. The conference altered my world view of research. The light went on in my head. I began to appreciate interpretive research. I even did a study with Allen Lee using hermeneutics! What was begun at Manchester with Enid’s leadership was continued. Other research conferences by 8.2 were held in 1990 and 1997. In 2004, Working Group 8.2 held another Manchester conference to look at the 20-year impact of the 1984 meeting and the current status of research methods in IS (Kaplan et al., 2004).

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I speak as one who was part of the same early period of development as Enid. She was a pioneer in the field. She was a teacher, a mentor and a great colleague. She was a nice person. She influenced many; she influenced me.

NIELS BJØRN-ANDERSEN

In the autumn of 1969, when I had just started on my PhD scholarship, I was approached by a Danish publisher asking me to do a review on a new book in Danish, a translation of a work by Mumford and Ward: ‘Computers, Planning for People’, published originally in 1968. It was my very first book review, and it is still very clear in my mind. I did not find the first half written by Ward particular interesting, but the second half written by Enid Mumford opened a whole new world for me. Never before had I seen an articulation of concepts like job satisfaction, change agents and the role of personnel departments in relation to systems analysts. Accordingly, I was thrilled when Rolf Høyer in February of 1970 invited me to a seminar with Enid Mumford at a ski resort near Oslo. I could not afford the flight, but took the night train and arrived safely at the hotel, where I was shown in to a room to where Professor Mumford was supposed to be. Silhouetted against a bright window through which could be seen beautiful sunshine on the snow, to my great surprise, was a lovely, fair-haired woman standing in a blueand-white checked dress, with a belt above the waist. A woman! Until that moment I had thought that Enid was a man’s name. She looked like what I had always imagined Florence Nightingale would be – a comparison that to me seemed more and more fitting over the years where we became friends, and I had the good fortune to collaborate closely with her. Just like Florence Nightingale, Enid Mumford had a very strong sense of compassion for people and a deep urge to relieve suffering and improve human conditions. Enid’s efforts were not located on the battlefield of war, but she had a similarly challenging environment to struggle with. At the time, computers were being introduced in all organizations almost exclusively applying a technocratic, Tayloristic, top-down approach, where the goal was the optimization of computer functionality, and the role of the human being was no more than a designated bundle of manual tasks lumped into work baskets of 8 hours a day. No wonder that the systems introduced in the 60s and 70s had huge negative implications for staff including the monotonous machine pacing of punch card operators, the lack of workers’ autonomy as a result of enforced working procedures, the monitoring of work performance, and the invasion of privacy. The most important part of the work of Enid Mumford is, in my opinion, her development of job satisfaction measurement instruments, the many incisive studies on the impact of computers, and her normative methodologies and guidelines on how to carry out socio-technical systems design. It is not easy to point to her single most important publication, not least when faced with her extremely extensive list of writings, each of which found new audiences, but let me very briefly characterize each of the three areas. In order to measure the impact of computers on job content and job satisfaction, it was necessary to develop a new set of research instruments suited for characterizing job content and

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job satisfaction in white-collar work. The basis was the socio-technical research at the Tavistock Institute, but Enid transferred this philosophy to the job of computer specialists and a range of clerical jobs in relation to computer systems. These research instruments have been used by a large number of researchers in some version or other (see especially Mumford, 1972). Her work on computer impacts started with a field study in the insurance sector with Olive Banks (Mumford & Banks, 1967), which was probably the first empirical investigation of computer impacts, and continued with a number of other studies. The largest of these was initiated by Enid in 1972 and included a comparative study in banks in four countries (Bjørn-Andersen et al., 1979). I think it is fair to say that with the completion of these studies and of course other work inspired by Enid, we now had a pretty good understanding of the way in which computer systems potentially could change the job of users, and it became possible and unethical not to take that into account in designing new jobs. In line with this, Enid was not satisfied by ‘just publishing’. Her strong dedication to the improvement of working conditions led to a constant stream of normative publications, most of which reporting on action research, where Enid redesigned work environments together with the employees. The basis for this was the ‘ETHICS’ method, which exists in many versions, and is now even available online (see Mumford, 2006a). The ETHICS method has been used in many settings. But the largest impact has been more indirectly in many classrooms, user environments and systems development functions, where the ideas and the philosophy of the ETHICS method have modified traditional systems development methods. Getting towards the end of this small intervention, I think I did manage to make up for my male chauvinistic faux pas at my first meeting with Enid, thinking it was a man’s name. This was in the academic year of 1974/75, when I was a visiting scholar at Manchester Business School, and where Enid very generously lent me her spacious office and the use of her secretary Emily. During the stay, I took part in a survey of social scientists, who were asked by the British Social Science Research Council to nominate the ‘three most influential men (my bolding) in British Management research’. I nominated Enid Mumford, Rosemary Stewart and Joan Woodward. Now more than 30 years later, I am convinced that the impact of Enid Mumford cannot be underestimated. No other researcher has contributed so much towards influencing the practice of systems design in the direction of giving higher priority to humanistic values and democratization. There is no question that Enid Mumford is the founder of the ‘socio-technical systems design school’, and its most prolific contributor. She leaves a research legacy that will continue to inspire and light the way (in a true Florence Nightingale way) for many IS students, researchers and practitioners.

TREVOR WOOD-HARPER AND BOB WOOD

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Enid Mumford’s career was that she was the first full professor in a UK business school at a time when such schools were largely dominated by men

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and when her chosen research area was not considered to be a mainstream topic within management. Forty years on her achievement can be seen to be all the more noteworthy given that both of these conditions still prevail. Enid’s desire to investigate and understand the human and organizational impact of computer-based systems came at a time when most people were still fascinated by the nature of this new technology and had an almost slavish belief in the benefits that it would bring, particularly to the fast emerging business and industrial sectors that emerged during the 1960s. She wrote: ‘But, in addition, there is another and equally serious problem. That is the inability of many British managements to plan effectively for computer introduction . . . This planning inadequacy is to some extent a consequence of our traditional approach to technical innovation – that this is an engineering problem which must be made the responsibility of the technical specialists [our emphasis]. Unfortunately this approach no longer works. It is increasingly apparent that the problems of innovation have more than a technical content. They also contain economic factors, organizational factors, human relation factors and so on’ (Mumford & Ward, 1968). Almost 40 years later, these words still ring true as we read about the continuing failure to harness the benefits of advanced information and communication technologies in pursuit of the goals of organized human activity. Much of the writing about such technologies is still infused with simplistic models of human behaviour and naïve assumptions about the relationship between the changes that may be brought about by introducing these technologies into complex patterns of individual, group and organizational life. It is precisely the importance of this relationship that Enid Mumford identified so early on and continued to reflect upon and write about for the whole of her professional working life. There are two main interlocking themes that run through Enid Mumford’s work, namely participation and socio-technical systems design, and these themes are combined in the ETHICS method (Mumford & Weir, 1979), and which was influential to the design of Multiview (Avison & Wood-Harper, 1990; Vidgen et al., 2002). Much of the motivation for this work lay in the belief that work systems of all kinds, but particularly computer-based application systems, should be designed with the explicit goal of increasing job satisfaction. Mumford identified a number of key drivers at the time that were creating a greater awareness of the need for a better ‘fit’ between the expectations that employees bring to a job and the actual requirements of that job. These drivers were: 1 the need to create a work environment better able to meet the needs of an intelligent, striving, twentieth-century workforce; 2 the movement towards shared decision-making and industrial democracy; and 3 the increased change in the work situation brought about by modern information technologies (Mumford & Henshall, 1979). We shall return to consider the continuing relevance of these forces later. The five ‘Fits’ that were identified were: Knowledge, Psychological, Task-Structure, Efficiency and Ethics, the latter seen as the degree to which the values or philosophy of the employer are compatible with those of the employee (Mumford & Weir, 1979). Thus, it was not just a neat convenience that

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a suitable acronym for the method developed to accommodate the principles espoused by Mumford turned out to be ETHICS! In ETHICS, a system is designed primarily from the perspective of the user(s) and therefore it is paramount that they work closely with developers to specify socio-technical requirements. Users are also allowed to change work practices and organizational structures so as to enable the smooth transition of the new system. Participative design is seen as being consultative, democratic and responsible in nature, thus fitting with the ethical stance that individuals have an inherent right to take part in changes that take place within their own work situation. Although no one can doubt the contribution that Enid Mumford has made to our thinking about the ways in which computer-based application systems can be developed and deployed more efficiently and effectively, questions may be raised about the continuing relevance of her work in the twenty-first century. Let us return to the original drivers described earlier and try to assess the validity of the socio-technical systems approach in light of some major changes that are taking place in the way in which modern societies are organized. First, the developments brought about by wireless technology are one of the main factors blurring the difference between work life and social life. Thus, when wireless technology is deployed, there are individual consequences for all as well as organizational impact. The necessary emphasis on the development of complex technical software often overshadows the social and personal needs of the users and the consequences. The ever-increasing mobile work environment therefore leads not only to new commercial opportunities, but also to new challenges for organization, management, computing, communication and work itself (Sørensen et al., 2005). In considering the future of work, a key determinant is that, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the Web, employees have the freedom to make decisions by obtaining the information that they require from unlimited sources around the world. This leads, potentially, to empowerment, motivation, creativity and flexibility at an individual level. At an organizational level, on the other hand, this type of information sharing and freedom on the part of employees can result in much looser organizational hierarchies, democracies and markets. These kinds of changes are happening because we want to communicate more efficiently and more effectively in almost everything that we do, whether in the workplace or at home. So as mobile technology becomes more important, we should expect to see organizations of all kinds become more decentralized, thus leading both managers and employees alike to move from a culture of ‘command-and-control’ to one of ‘coordinate-and-cultivate’ (Malone, 2004). Therefore, it would seem that the trends in both technological development and organizational structure and extra-structure offer us the opportunity to achieve the kind of ‘fit’ between human aspirations and managerial performance that Mumford strove to achieve through her own work. Appropriately, however, the most difficult barrier to break through may be the ethical one as we constantly seek to reconcile the values and philosophies of ‘employers’ with those of ‘employees’ in the face of an ever-expanding global capitalism fuelled by an apparently limitless ability to create, capture, store, retrieve interpret and manipulate information about every aspect of human existence (Capra, 2003).

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ROBERT D. GALLIERS

The worlds of Information Systems and Organisational Behaviour have been lessened by the passing of Enid Mumford earlier this year. It is our duty to take up the challenges she met headon throughout her illustrious career, so that her many contributions and the crucial lessons she brought to our attention are not allowed to be forgotten. And it is our duty to continue down the trans-disciplinary paths she opened up to us. Enid was quintessentially ‘action woman’. Not for her the confines of the university. Her research was always applied – and most importantly, relevant and action-oriented. From her background in industry, such as when she was a personnel manager in an aircraft factory, she sought out and examined real-world problems in situ. Whether it was at the coal face, or at Liverpool docks, or more recently, confronting the problems of drugs and cyber crime (Mumford, 1998; 1999), Enid’s focus was on doing research that impacted theory and practice. Her approach was not only with an eye to the practical, however, but also with a view to the ethical and the emancipatory. While at Manchester Business School, she worked closely with the Tavistock Institute, adopting and adapting the socio-technical school of thought that ‘the Tavvy’ had championed (for a recent account of the socio-technical approach, see Coakes et al., 2000). With this in mind, she developed the ETHICS approach to the design and implementation of computer-based IS – Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems (emphasis added). This is described in, for example, Mumford & Weir (1979) and Mumford (1995). While others appeared more intent on improving the ‘bottom-line’ of corporations with the astute utilization of IT, Enid was more concerned about the everyday workers and IT’s impact on their working lives (see, for example, Mumford, 1983a). Indeed, she championed the participative approach to IS design at a time when it was more common to see top-down, data-driven, hierarchical approaches that had a tendency to dehumanize the process (Mumford, 1983b). But I have thus far talked in the abstract; I have unwittingly dehumanized this tribute. Let me talk therefore about the person, the human being. I recall three events in particular that epitomized Enid for me. The first was in 1984, the second in 1998, and the third in 1999. In September 1984, Enid organized the first conference ever to really question the widely differing conceptions of what constituted IS research (Mumford et al., 1985). This was a seminal moment for the field. The approaches were many and varied – we were, quite frankly, ships in the night. Expressions of incredulity passed across faces of colleagues from different parts of the world – colleagues whose weltanschauungen were sometimes not only widely different, but widely divergent. Picture philosophers from Finland, experimentalist information systems professors from the States, action researchers from the UK and Scandinavia – all coming together to discuss what they had until then thought to be a coherent field of interest. Picture, too, a (relatively) young Brit, ‘fresh off the boat’ from Perth, Western Australia at only his second international conference, trying to make sense of it all. How naïve we all were! But how serene, cheerful and helpful Enid was, rising above the ‘Tower of Babel’ that we had created for ourselves. Her smiling face gave me the impression that she knew precisely what was likely to happen, and that this discussion was occurring not before time!

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At the International Conference in Information Systems (ICIS) in Helsinki, December 1998, Enid presented a paper concerned with solving complex problems (see Mumford, 1998). Rudy Hirschheim kindly asked me to be the discussant for that paper. If I may quote from my remarks made at the time: ‘In reflecting on Enid’s paper, I have been thinking of two things, one serious, the other somewhat flippant. First the more serious comment. What I have always respected about Enid’s work is the fact that she makes us think, and brings an ethical dimension to our discourse, whether it is the need for an emancipatory, inclusive dimension to systems design . . . or, in this case, drawing our attention to complex, pervasive and worrying problems against which societies, across the globe, appear defenceless . . . The more flippant thought is a quote from Somerset Maugham: “It is bad enough to know the past – intolerable to know the future.” But that attitude, while entirely understandable, is inappropriate given the threatening nature and devastating impacts of the problems to which Enid draws our attention. And not only do we need to recognize those problems . . . we need also to anticipate them, and the “ability to analyze the present and forecast the future [is] always a difficult task” as Enid notes’ (Galliers, 1998, p. 271). What I found particularly wonderful about the experience was not so much our presentations at ICIS, but our communication before and after the conference – having the opportunity to discuss the points that Enid was making and to relate them to the directions in which our field should be heading. Not for her – or me – the focus on the IT artefact alone or on design, narrowly defined. Her vision was much broader, much more heroic. For her, IS had to speak to societal problems as well as organizational or technical ones. When I was president of the Association for Information Systems in 1999, I helped institute the LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems. There were four recipients of the award in the first year: C West Churchman, J Daniel Couger, Börge Langefors and Enid Mumford. No one could doubt how deserving Enid was of that recognition by the academy. I can recall to this day the standing ovation each received. I had tears in my eyes, then – as I do now. Enid expressed to me surprise that the IS academy would deem her work worthy of such recognition. For her, IS was truly egoless. We owe so much to these giants of our field, and we should never forget their contributions. Thank you Enid, for your vision, and for your humanity.

DAVID AVISON

It is fair to say that Enid Mumford changed my life. I studied social sciences at university (it was in the 1960s!). I loved every moment and found the topics discussed interesting and relevant. As an aside, I have found the material interesting and relevant ever since (I wonder if those people studying vocational IT courses later have found the topics discussed so useful in their future life). But it had to come to an end, as I did not have the finance for further study – I had to get a job. I worked in computing because I thought it would be exciting, and I worked for a number of companies for 4–5 years. I found Cobol programming very difficult for about 2 months, inter-

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esting for 2 months and boring for the rest of the 2 years. Systems analysis was indeed more interesting, but the goals of the firms I worked for, an oil company, a property company and a ‘food-manufacturing’ company did not coincide with my own goals. I had to get out and by then I could afford to do a Masters course, where I met Guy Fitzgerald for the first time as a fellow student. It was a way of getting into teaching and I was delighted to get a job as a lecturer a year later and I met Trevor Wood-Harper – he also started as a new lecturer at the same time at Thames Polytechnic. I wanted to research. I did so in data modelling and databases. I have nothing against this as a research topic for others, but for me it was arid and a price to pay for being a lecturer. The conferences I attended were about database modelling. I did this for some years, but I was never passionate about the topic. Some time later, Trevor suggested that I come to the now famous Manchester 1984 conference. The fact that I did was somewhat serendipitous. Thanks to Enid Mumford I could see that research in our area could be interesting. Somehow Enid attracted so many interesting people doing interesting research. I heard such words as ‘Marxism’, ‘philosophy’, ‘metaphors’, ‘Habermas’, ‘ethics’ (to name only a few) that I had not heard since being a student and we had critical debate about interesting things (at least in my eyes), intellectually challenging and yet good fun – just how it should be. Of course, in so doing I was introduced to Enid’s world and the world of IFIP Working Group 8.2, of which she was chair. (I became chair of this superb group many years later.) I do not know how she managed to get such people together in Manchester (I guess it was a mixture of hard work, her charm, powers of persuasion and feel for the subject matter, along with her sheer enthusiasm). She was an inspiring person and the conference was electric. There was a high level of intellectual debate and yet we all felt ‘at home’ among friends. In the book of the Manchester proceedings that she edited, she added a chapter containing guidance for the inexperienced researcher, showing how research (including action research) could be done. It is such a helpful and practical guide. Action research was not an obvious choice to a young researcher, indeed a forbidden one in some academic cultures and here was a guide to help us. Many years later at another IFIP Working Group conference at Philadelphia, I was part of a panel on action research. Scarily Enid was in the audience. The first panel member presented a survey of published action research in IS. Enid got up and pointed out strongly (but in the kindest fashion) that he had failed to represent action research well as it was not to be found in MIS Quarterly, IS Research and the like, as his survey had limited itself, but in the less traditional European journals and even more in books (she did not say, but I will say, in particular in her excellent books). It is not a surprise that action research was her preferred research approach. At least the way she practised action research, it facilitates the cooperative development of systems, which the stakeholders may comfortably live with, showing us and them that technological change can be positive. She was such a good communicator. I remember at one IFIP Working Group 8.2 conference, a leading researcher could not attend and asked Enid to present his paper, and she did. Indeed, she may have presented it too well as that evening a group of us agreed that it was the first time we had fully understood (or at least thought we had understood) this research. Well it is true that we were sharing a drink together, but I think there was some truth in the claim.

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Of course, Enid has also inspired me through her ETHICS methodology for IS development. It is one of the cornerstones of the Multiview framework. It is a methodology based on the participative approach to IS development and its inclusion in the original edition of ‘Avison and Fitzgerald’ in 1988 was important because it made a contrast with the conventional approaches at the time such as the Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method and the structured school. The methodology and the philosophy it embedded remain in the 4th edition (Avison & Fitzgerald, 2005). In addition, it encompasses the socio-technical view that for a system to be effective the technology must fit closely with the social and organizational factors. The philosophy of ETHICS is thus different from most IS development methodologies and is also explicitly stated, which is also not common in most methodologies. The philosophy is one which has evolved from organizational behaviour and perceives the development of computer systems not as a technical issue but as an organizational issue which is fundamentally concerned with the process of change. What a legacy, to be associated with a humanizing approach to what has, sadly, often been a dehumanizing change in practice! I have been based in France for 6 years. Last year, I did my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. This is a French postdoctoral qualification that gives the right to supervise research and researchers in French universities. Notwithstanding the fact that I have been directing research for many years, I was pleased to do it as it enabled me to discuss my research to a largely French audience. In the presentation, I reflected on my research and it was an honour to see three people in the audience who were at the Manchester 1984 conference. Unfortunately Enid was too unwell to come. I took the opportunity to discuss the work of those people that had influenced me. Of course, Enid’s photograph loomed large as a major influence. I was pleased to do a review of her (sadly) last book, Redesigning Human Systems. This book is a very useful resource for academics and students. It can also be seen as a book for practitioners as it provides guidelines about how to develop effective systems. There are a number of case studies in the book written partly from the point of view of the practitioner that are based on her work with many organizations, both large and small. In most of the cases, Enid acted as facilitator as well as researcher. I recommend this book without hesitation. The description of a number of case studies of managing change at Liverpool docks (where the author worked as canteen assistant), for the coal industry (where a both very amusing and harrowing description is given on what it was like to be a woman researcher interviewing miners down a pit) and a multinational study in the car industry are particularly fascinating along with more recent experiences. At the end of the book, we look at her most recent work in crime prevention (designing for security rather than for development) and her reflections on designing for an uncertain future. It need hardly be stated that these are not simplistic descriptions of cases (which I fear form the basis of some IS teaching) but well-rounded discussions of real problem situations experienced by the author. All the work presented evidences the highest ethical values. In 1999, Enid Mumford gained the LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement. Redesigning Human Systems looks at her many contributions over the years, proves to be a good summary of her work, and shows why her award was so richly deserved. It would be wonderful to think that the content of this book might influence all IS practitioners, academics and

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students. If taken on board, these reflections on past experience of managing change can only improve the way we introduce new technology and the quality of working life in the future. Let us hope that we have indeed ‘moved from the macho nineties with their focus on financial success at any price’. If so, this book will be one contribution that enables a more humanistic vision. I find it inspiring that Enid had been involved in so much varied research in so many organizations, which has made such a major contribution, and yet maintaining her ethical stance never varied. Happily, her friendliness, openness and kindness that she showed in personal relationships are evidenced in her work that remains with us.

HEINZ K. KLEIN

It was a sad day when the news reached me that one of the great researchers and teachers of our field had passed away. It is a welcome opportunity to express long overdue thanks and recognition. The influence of Enid Mumford as a researcher, teacher and role model for junior faculty cannot be overstated. Many others have already given sufficient testimony to this. Therefore, I will here recall some personal experiences with Enid that are little known, yet were formative for the IS discipline and with it for my own career. They are connected to the 1984 IFIP Working Group 8.2 Conference (now often affectionately called the ‘1984 Manchester Conference’) and the subsequent publication of its proceedings. The events are worth telling not only for the sake of celebrating the personal contributions of Enid Mumford, but because they illustrate the important influence of subjectivity in academic work. From this perspective, the following could be read as a belated confessional, in the sense defined by Schultze (2000), that could have and should have been formally reported as the author’s ‘informing practices’ in some of the publications referenced below. However, the primary interpretation intended is that of a tale of Mumford’s leadership in the ‘informal college’ that brought about mental paradigm shifts in the IS research community. From the mid-1980s forwards, these shifts lead to a considerable broadening of the field in both substance and methods. The result of this was that scientific enquiry today is concerned with a much broader range of significant meanings than was originally anticipated when the classical, ‘Popperian’ methods of the social sciences were introduced into IS research. I do not know exactly how the seminal theme of the 1984 Manchester conference ‘Research Methods in Information Systems’ emerged, but I can testify that its revolutionary impact (in the sense of Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts) must be attributed to Mumford’s efforts. The pivotal resource on which she, and probably only she, could draw were her personal relationships with prominent representatives of the most important and divergent streams of IS research at the time and her persuasive talents to induce their active participation. This was critical, because many of these leading spirits of IS research at the time were recognized only in some parts of Europe, but were completely unknown on the west side of the Atlantic from where other seminal contributions with contrasting paradigmatic assumptions were emerging.

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Indeed, the 1984 Manchester conference was a watershed event, not only for the field of information systems, but also for the future of my own career. In the fall of 1983, when the two papers (Klein & Lyytinen 1985a,b) were drafted which later were published in the proceedings, neither of the two junior authors understood the geographical, social and intellectual ‘lay of the land’ that during the next decade would become the bedrock of the newly emerging IS discipline. The importance of paying close attention to the intellectual-social structures of the field and with them the significance of reflecting the impact of these structures on research priorities, goals, strategies and detailed methods was the first major lesson that we learnt from Enid’s organizing vision. She enabled many of the participants to bring together in their minds what belonged together, but what was still separated by both geographical distance and invisible intellectual walls. Of course, geographical distances in the early 1980s did contribute to intellectual barriers more than nowadays, because the beginnings of email in the form of Bitnet were not yet commonplace; the instant retrieval powers of today’s Internet were still ‘science fiction’. Brought physically together at the conference, the participants collectively sketched a road map to the future of IS research, maybe unbeknown to them yet definitely guided by Enid’s intuitive vision of the future. Within the short time span of a few years, this road map led to the so-called paradigm debate overcoming the pre-conference tunnel vision, which dominated the field. With this tunnel vision, we as junior authors were in the good company of many senior members also present. Even worse, neither one of us at the time had a sufficiently comprehensive grasp of the immense importance of recognizing alternative research methods both for the sake of fruitful academic debate and for the external academic legitimacy of the discipline. This was the second major lesson for us. It paid off well in later publications, now well known – but Enid Mumford’s input was critical for motivating us and pointing us in the right direction (see Hirschheim & Klein, 1989; 1994; Hirschheim et al., 1996; Klein & Hirschheim, 2001). Finally, we as junior authors had not yet sufficiently internalized and reflected the insight in our drafts that the rhetorical form of a contribution is just as important as its contents, that in fact the two are intertwined to the point that the form is the message (modifying a byword from Marshall McLuhan). Enid personally provided immense collegial guidance to help us express ourselves in ways so that others with contrary views could at least understand the point that we were trying to make even if they continued to disagree. This was a ‘priceless’ third lesson for the future of own work. In the end, I would just like to say, ‘Thank you very much, Enid’ in public. Your example will continue to shine through the doctoral students that we have exposed to your ideas and who in due time will inform the next generation.

RUDY HIRSCHHEIM

After spending my formative years studying Computer Science, I was somewhat dismayed that the field paid too little attention to the application of computers in organizations. The focus was on numerical analysis, complexity theory, systems, languages, graph theory, and so on. Systems analysis – or data processing as it was often referred to at that time – was not the subject

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for ‘true’ Computer Scientists. That is why I left the field in the early 1970s and started studying the newly emerging information systems discipline. Here, academicians were truly interested in how best to design, develop and use the new technology in real organizational settings. What a refreshing change I thought. At the time, I was a faculty member at McMaster University in Canada working with Richard Welke. His advice was to ‘go, get your PhD, but if you are really interested in the social and organizational side of information systems, you might consider studying in England where the true experts are’. The names of Enid Mumford and Frank Land were mentioned as possible mentors. So I packed my bags and headed for England. There I met Frank who was at the LSE, and Enid who was at the Manchester Business School. Although I wound up going to the LSE to study, I was really impressed by Enid and admired the work that she was doing. So much so that in 1979, I took a job at the National Computing Centre in Manchester; this afforded me the opportunity to meet with Enid regularly and learn more about her research. At the time I went to England in the late 1970s, Enid was engaged in the development of her ETHICS method for designing and implementing IS. She was busy applying her ideas to real organizations such as Turners Asbestos Cement, Rolls Royce Aerospace, ICI, and Digital Equipment Corporation. I was enthralled, and kept in touch with Enid while she proceeded to enhance her ideas on melding socio-technical principles with IS development further. Her ideas had a profound effect on me, and helped to shape my own thinking about how to develop IS effectively. By the early 1980s, IBM had taken a keen interest in Enid’s work and asked me to evaluate the participative/socio-technical approach to systems development. In analysing the cases that Enid had been involved in, it became clear that the approach did work and that the field had to take notice of this particular way of understanding organizations and how to implement IS within them. Clearly, Enid’s work had made a major contribution to the field and the systems development community subsequently recognized this when she was awarded the prestigious Warnier Prize for her contribution to IS. I used Enid’s ETHICS ideas in three of my own projects. The first was to study organizations who had used participative design (such as ETHICS) to ascertain the impact of using such an approach. As an alternative to traditional systems analysis and design approaches, this held much promise for the field (Hirschheim, 1983; 1985). I was so impressed with the result that in the second project, I attempted to incorporate the spirit of ETHICS thinking into the development of our FAOR (Functional Analysis of Office Requirements) project – an ESPRIT-funded project involving eight teams from around Europe. While many of my collaborators were more comfortable with Petri-nets and formal modeling than socio-technical thinking, socio-technical notions did find their way into the project’s output (Schafer et al., 1988). A third major project that I was engaged in (with Heinz Klein) involved conceptualizing how Mumford’s ETHICS could be extended to include emancipatory principles, such as those espoused by Jurgen Habermas. We believed that the emancipatory notions of Habermas were more than pure idealism and used ETHICS to show conceptually how this could be implemented in practice (Hirschheim & Klein, 1994). But Enid’s work extended beyond her ETHICS method and advancements in systems development theory and practice. Enid had always taken a keen interest in how to help the IS

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research community, how to broaden the focus of research, how to broaden the recognition of alternative research methods, and how to think about the values underlying the research that the community does. To this end, Enid organized the first IS conference whose focus was on alternative IS conceptions and the various research methods that could be used to study them. Many of the leading scholars of the field at that time took part in the conference. I was delighted to be part of the exercise that resulted in the book (Mumford et al., 1985). In fact, Enid was one of the initial founders of IFIP Working Group 8.2, and was instrumental in its growth from its inception in 1978 through to today. Enid continued to be an active participant in the group’s activities even though she officially ‘retired’ from academia a number of years ago. After many years working in the IS domain, Enid’s interests shifted towards broader societal issues. She worried that much work in academia was devoid of real substance. She thus developed a keen interest in the societal problems of drugs and cyber crime. This interest culminated in a fascinating book (Mumford, 1999). In the book, Enid argued for problem solving that was neither naïve nor simplistic. She eschewed such simplistic notions such as that suggesting that merely throwing more resources at problems can solve complex problems. Indeed, complex problems such as drugs and cyber crime defy simple solutions. Consider some of the statistics that Enid offered about drugs. It is a well known fact that drugs today are controlled by large-scale criminal organizations that cross national and international boundaries. Today’s drug trafficking industry is worth approximately $500 billion a year. She notes that: ‘The illegal drug industry is now believed to be the second largest industry in the world, second only to the arms industry and larger than the oil industry’. The US government has spent in excess of $20 billion during the past 10 years on international drug control programmes with little or no effect. ‘U.S. and Mexican interdiction efforts have had little if any effect on the overall flow of drugs through Mexico to the United States.’ In the United States alone, 85 million people have tried illegal drugs and around $75 billion a year is spent on these illegal drugs. And across the globe, there are an estimated 45 million people addicted to illegal drugs. These are indeed sobering statistics. It should be apparent to all that Enid Mumford was a very special person. One who focused her attention on the social side of technology; to making the use of technology pleasing and beneficial to the user; to warning us of the dangers of drugs and cyber crime. How did she come to have this focus? Consider how her ‘social’ interest always guided her career. Enid Mumford’s first degree was a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science which she received from Liverpool University. She then spent some time in industry, first as a personnel manager at an aircraft factory and later, as a production manager at a factory manufacturing alarm clocks. The first was the most valuable job experience she ever had as it involved looking after personnel policy and industrial relations strategy for a very large number of women staff. Her second job proved invaluable as it gave her the experience of running a production department, an experience that is unusual for academics. She next joined the Faculty of Social Science at Liverpool and carried out research in industrial relations in both the Liverpool docks and the North West coal industry. In order to get in-depth information for the dock research, she became a canteen assistant in three canteens used by the stevedores for meals. The coal mine research required her to spend many months underground talking to miners at the coal face.

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These are hardly the usual places to find academics, but are indicative of Enid’s strong desire to understand the ‘social’ side of work. After a year at the University of Michigan where she worked for the University Bureau of Public Health Economics, she joined the newly formed Manchester Business School. Here she had many research contracts to study the human and organizational impact of computer-based systems. At Manchester, she was Professor of Organizational Behavior and Director of the Computer and Work Design Research Unit. She was also Director of the MBA programme for 4 years. While at Manchester Business School, she developed a close relationship with members of the Tavistock Institute and became a follower of their democratic socio-technical approach. She was at the forefront in applying these ideas to the design and implementation of computerbased systems and information technology. In the 1970s, she became a member of the International Quality of Working Life Group. Her goal was to spread the socio-technical message around the world. She later became a council member of the Tavistock. Before her death, Enid was Professor Emeritus of Manchester University and a Visiting Fellow at the Manchester Business School. She was a Companion of the Institute of Personnel Management and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) as well as a founding member and ex-chairperson of the BCS Socio-Technical Group. In 1996, Enid was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. It is clear that Enid’s career was a long and distinguished one. While I am deeply saddened by her death, I am delighted to have had the opportunity to know her and work with her. I will especially cherish the many afternoons we spent chatting about socio-technical/participative design in cold, rainy Manchester. But most of all, I will miss her scholarship, humour, kindness, friendship and thoughtfulness. She was a great mentor. In closing, let me relate a humorous story on how Enid was viewed in my family. During my 10 years in England, there were many occasions when Enid would ring to discuss one thing or another or just to say ‘hello’. Phone calls backwards and forwards as well as visits were commonplace, especially in the early 1980s. One summer day in 1983 Enid rang our home in Hambleden. That was just about the time our son Geoffrey, who was about 3 years old then, decided he was now old enough to answer the telephone. He beat us to the phone. Enid must have said who she was and chatted a few minutes with him. Geoffrey had a look of pure joy and almost shock on his face as he held the phone and stood speechless. My wife looked at him and asked who it was – he said, ‘Mummy, it is the Amazing Mumford!’ Now it turns out that on ‘Sesame Street’ at that time there was a character, a magician, called ‘The Amazing Mumford’. Geoffrey, a big ‘Sesame Street’ fan in those days, was certain that he was speaking to this magical character. We told Enid the story later and all had a good laugh. Henceforth, she was always known in the Hirschheim household as ‘The Amazing Mumford’. And she was. She was an inspiration to us all and she will be dearly missed.

GUY FITZGERALD

As a new academic, I was introduced to Enid’s work by Trevor Wood-Harper when we worked together at Thames Polytechnic, as it then was. I recall that the first thing I read was her book

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on her experiences of redesigning work systems at Rolls Royce (Mumford & Henshall, 1978). This work excited me as it was practical and reflected some of my own experiences in industry as a systems developer. Enid managed to combine theory and practice with clear philosophical and ethical underpinnings – a revelation for me. I was hooked and read almost everything else she had produced. Enid’s work made me realize that academic ideas could actually be relatively straightforwardly expressed and that clarity was a benefit and had a power to reveal rather than obfuscate and confuse. Such straightforwardness was emancipatory, but I quickly learned that it also had dangers because it clarified the crux of one’s arguments to others, including any weaknesses, and thus one had to be absolutely sound in those arguments. Enid achieved this and was always consistent, whereas I was not! Enid’s work also introduced me to the notion of action research which again fitted with my view of the importance of practice and I saw how effective research in IS could be and her work legitimized and justified this by example. On a personal level I first met her in 1980. I organized a series of public lectures on behalf of the BCS entitled ‘Computers: Servant or Master’, together with Tom Crowe, also from Thames Polytechnic, and among the speakers we invited was Enid Mumford. I did this with some trepidation because I was a very junior lecturer inviting academic luminaries and directing them as to what kind of thing we wanted. Enid of course agreed, as she always seemed to do. This was partly her good nature, but also she was very keen to disseminate her work, particularly to those outside the academic world. On the evening of the lecture, I decided to stand outside the venue to welcome her. I waited and waited, but eventually concluded that she was not going to turn up. I went back inside to tell the assembled audience that the lecture was cancelled, only to find that she had somehow slipped past me and that the talk was already underway! She had decided that despite my having failed to appear, and even though there was no chairperson, she would just get on with it. She gave a spellbinding talk and managed to convince many of the practitioners in the audience not only of the effectiveness of her participative approach to systems development (which would become ETHICS) but also of its fairness and practicality. I had mistakenly assumed that she would arrive in grand style, by taxi at least, and would expect to be met at the door. But no, she was a normal person; she arrived by tube, walked from the station, and entered by a side door. I was mortified to have put her in a difficult position, but she would have none of it. Typical Enid, as I was to discover over the years. This series of talks were recorded and compiled into a book, but at the last minute the publisher (whom had better remain nameless) decided to renege on the deal and pulled out. I informed Enid, expecting some annoyance on her part as she had worked hard on converting her talk into a publishable chapter, but she was only upset for me and my wasted efforts. Enid had strong view on publishers which were not complimentary and this simply confirmed her views. Indeed she later decided to publish many of her own books herself. My next meetings with Enid were at various conferences. One, I recall was an IFIP 8.2 conference at the University of Minnesota in 1983, where I gave a presentation on IS development methodologies. The talk outlined various methodologies and summarized their

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strengths and weaknesses. As I started on the weaknesses of ETHICS, I suddenly noticed Enid in the audience. This threw me somewhat as I had not expected any of the methodology authors to be there. Anyway I persevered with my interpretation, including the weaknesses, and at the end she congratulated me on my presentation, which pleased me greatly, and she made some further comments about ETHICS in action. It was only sometime later, on reflection, that I realized she was in fact putting me right on a number of points, but she did it in such a way that I could not possibly be offended, indeed it was so gentle that I almost missed it. Later, I worked with Enid on the IFIP 8.2 conference at Manchester in 1984, where her strong views on the relevance of research and the role of qualitative research approaches were to the fore. However, she also recognized the right for others to have different views and helped coin what became a theme of the conference, which was to ‘let many flowers bloom’. The proceedings (Mumford et al., 1985) were jointly edited by Enid, Trevor Wood-Harper, Rudy Hirschheim and myself. In this task, I found her to be very open and constructive, and prepared to work very hard to produce an excellent book out of the conference. She even did much of the drudge work of tidying up the proceedings, improving the English and making it into a coherent whole, and most of the credit for the conference and the proceedings, which have subsequently become something of a classic, was down to her. Since that time I got to know Enid reasonably well and she came regularly to give talks on a post-experience MSc programme that I ran at Warwick University. She was a delight and invariably charmed the hard-nosed practitioners, and opened their minds. They found the notion of Ethics (both as a development approach and as a principle) strange but interesting. They would often ask how it could work where the objective of the IS being developed was staff reduction (as was often the case with IT systems in those days). Enid would put them right, and tell them that, of course, it would not work in such circumstances and if that was the case it was the objective that needed changing! Right to the heart of the matter, every time! I realized during these sessions that I would not so long ago have thought as these practitioners did and how much I had changed myself – and in a large part Enid was the catalyst for that change. Others talk more about her influence on the discipline, but for me her influence was personal. She will be greatly missed and will, I believe, prove irreplaceable.

MARCO DE MARCO

When a scholar of the standing of Enid Mumford dies, one is likely to ask two questions: what was their contribution to the disciplinary knowledge of the field in which they worked; and what will remain of their thinking in the years ahead. In my youth, I realized, in a purely indiscriminate way, that the advent of information technology would trigger a sea change in the way we work and that designing an IS thus took on a value that went far beyond the services of a specialist, influencing, as it did, the working conditions of a vast number of people. The 1960s saw the designing of computerized systems which involved the grouping of the various work activities and then their regrouping in line with

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a computer-compatible logic. The focus was on the machines and on efficiency, but disregarded the user-work aspect. The designers realized that this was a crucial issue, but had no idea of how to raise it. Enid Mumford gave this sentiment a solid scientific imprint. She stated clearly that technical systems created at the expense of social systems obtain suboptimal results. Mumford was a major figure in the universe of European IS. Her work was well-grounded in both the European tradition of industrial design and the socio-technical approach. Her most significant contribution to the field of IS research is the ETHICS methodology. In it she developed a set of guidelines for steering the design of IS. These guidelines indicate that designers need to approach both systems architecture and systems functioning as a collaborative endeavour. The recognition of both the technical and the social dimension of IS as key design elements pursues the socio-technical ideas developed at the Tavistock Institute in London, with which Mumford enjoyed a long-established working relationship. The ETHICS methodology suggests a new way of approaching the process of IS design. Mumford proposed addressing IS design as a joint effort, enabling the whole group to negotiate all the relative issues and solutions: from needs analysis, functionality requirements, system design and prototype/pilot project to full implementation, training, tracking and retro-fitting. The idea of IS development as a collaborative contractual procedure has opened a new pathway for IS research. The idea that an IS is not a technical artefact, but the result of the interaction among technological artefacts and their users – as proposed by Mumford with the ETHICS methodology – has enriched the bedrock upon which the humanistic paradigm in IS research has developed. The ETHICS methodology can be considered a major contribution to the development of the research path that continues to be central to the IS debate. For example, the Scandinavian approach based on the idea of participatory design is closely connected with the ideas proposed by Mumford and can be viewed as a further development of her original approach. The idea of social dimensions in IS, as proposed by Mumford, is pivotal to the research in IS even today. Her initial contribution has not been forgotten. Recently, actor-network theory (ANT) suggested a new way of looking at the problem of IS development, along similar, albeit not identical, lines as the ones proposed by Mumford. Indeed, ANT proposes approaching the overlapping of technological artefact and social setting as the natural domain within which IS need to be shaped. In this case, the focus is not on the research into the equilibrium between the technological and the social subsystems, as put forward by the socio-technical ideas underpinning Mumford’s work, but on the coevolution of the two. However, we must recognize that the design ideas emerging from ANT, such as cultivation, probably could have not been developed without Mumford’s fundamental work, which has paved the way for this new concept of researching the problems and issues linked to IS design. Mumford was one of the most important initiators of this research path into IS design, overcoming the constraints of the engineering concept of design, which only takes into account the design technicalities of technical artefacts. Mumford has helped to bring the human side of IS fully into the picture and has laid the foundations for developing the social studies of IS. For this, we must always be grateful to her.

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JAANA PORRA

The enduring quality of Enid Mumford’s work can be shown from Mumford (2003, p. 1): ‘The world changes and technology comes and goes, human problems remain the same’. I learned about Enid Munford’s work during my first doctoral seminar at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. During a seminar series led by Kalle Lyytinen and Markku Nurminen, I wrote a paper about the socio-technical design and ETHICS. I was ‘sold’. Enid wrote about simple, practical and doable things that helped made IS more ethical and more humane (Mumford, 1983b; 1995; 2000b; 2003). I had a Masters degree in computer science, but as a graduate of a Scandinavian university, I was trained to think in people terms when designing IS. During my years at work, however, I had learned that the rest of the world does not necessarily see systems analysis and design in the same way. Ideas included in ETHICS were not commonly included in IS design practices. ETHICS gave me a formalized way to include the humane side into IS development projects. Today I continue to teach ETHICS in my systems analysis and design classes. Management IS students are surprised to learn that designing IS should not mainly be a process where technical and economic aspects prevail. I first met Enid in my doctoral defence at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland in 1996 (developed in Porra, 1999). She was my opponent. The task of the opponent is to challenge the dissertation being defended. I never forget how her friendly demeanour was in stark contrast with her questions. Enid asked me to go beyond my dissertation. She asked how my Colonial Systems – essentially a model of sustained group level behaviour – could describe the behaviour of terrorist groups. Similar questions followed. I was prepared to defend my theoretical model. Instead, I had to apply it to real problems on the spot. The defence turned into an intense learning process. Enid’s constant smile and soft voice stopped me from panicking. Needless to say, I had not prepared to discuss how my model would apply to solving wicked problems of the world. That year Enid received an honorary doctorate from the University of Jyvaskyla. In Finland, symbols of doctorate are a top hat and a ceremonial sword. Whenever we met from then on Enid brought up the fact that we both had a sword ‘for fighting intellectual battles’. In her candid way, Enid also kept reminding me how good it was that in Finland we had finally made the female doctor’s top hat as tall as the male doctor’s and the female doctor’s sword as long as the male doctor’s. The old way struck her as ‘most unacceptable’ – I could not have agreed more. At that time, I had no idea that I would have the opportunity to spend many times with Enid talking about her career, work, life and being a female scholar. I was a keen listener. Even among general systems theorists, Enid’s ability to cross commonly held boundaries was impressive. She was one of the few people I have ever met who could move between theory and practice with considerable ease and teach others how to see the connections. The ability to cross boundaries also shows in her life. Enid turned working opportunities into research, life situations into work opportunities and research into money-making projects for organizations. These in turn would fund more research. She worked in canteens on Liverpool docks to do research on dockers. When she moved in order to accommodate her husband’s career, Manchester Business School hired her. She turned one time projects with organizations like ICI

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and Shell into long-term research relationships. Enid’s talent in creating interesting and consequential research opportunities struck me as uncommon among all scholars. Another talent I always admired in Enid was her direct, no nonsense approach to research. For her, the purpose of research was about ‘getting to the bottom of things’. In this respect, she reminded me of Ms Marple or Sherlock Holmes. In order to find out about things, Enid did her best to become part of the scene she was investigating even under difficult and novel circumstances (e.g. in the Maypole mine, Enid was the first woman to set foot underground). Enid’s main influence in research methodology was anthropology. Enid sought to learn to know the people and the circumstances she was investigating at first hand. Once I asked her about her views of research methods in general. Without hesitation, Enid replied: ‘Much more important than talking about what method you are going to use is to ask what is it that you want to find out. You will use any way that will help you find answers. You must choose a method that fits your research problem’. She used her own research as an example. Her comment on going into the mine to interview miners was: ‘I am reporting on a comparative study of working miners’ lives. Would I be sitting around with a questionnaire on the surface? What could be dumber! Enid felt so strongly about her research principles that she went into the mine knowing that Maypole was known for poor working conditions and had once blown up. Enid contributed her entire career to good luck starting with her first job as a personnel manager at Rolls Royce Aerospace. She used to say: ‘I was always enormously fortunate’ whenever I asked how she got a specific project or job. Enid’s positive attitude shows in her sense of humour. She lightened up serious conversations. I recently re-listened to my last interview with her, from which l use a number of extracts here. Throughout the tape, we laughed almost as much as we talked. I believe that Enid’s positive demeanour allowed her to speak candidly about serious problems without offending anyone: . . . this new and mysterious group of programmers offered a great new career to male clerks. For them it was splendid. But it brought some DREADFUL jobs for women, because this terrible punch-operating role appeared, where women had to punch the data into the computer. All the interesting bits were done by the computer. The women had to punch the data in and collect the output so they were just kind of bits of machinery – machine minders. It was a very bad period for women. Computers didn’t enhance the jobs of women AT ALL. A few years before her death, Enid still felt that the IS research field continues to give lip service to the human side of computing. The field can say all it wants that ‘we’re all about humans’, but then when you have a guest speech about the human side of things you don’t get anybody. Somebody might raise a little flag occasionally just to show that it [the human side of computing] hasn’t been totally forgotten. She also continued to maintain a humble viewpoint of her impact in the IS field: ‘How far have I ever penetrated? I have gotten high marks from a “utopian correct” ’. Enid felt, however, that the future for more ethical approaches to IS design looks bright: ‘People are going to want this more participative involved, LEARNING process’.

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Enid left a legacy beyond IS design. She challenged the IS field to tackle global, complex and wicked problems such as drugs, crime, cyber crime and the effect of globalization on corporate management. But today, there is another set of challenging problems that managers are confronted with. These are new, complex, and often very threatening. They are outside the manager’s normal day-to-day experience, and there may be few experts available to give advice; but the consequence of not tackling them may send a company on a route to commercial disaster. Some problems are so serious that despite our lack of knowledge we must make major efforts to remove or reduce them, even though the likelihood of success in doing so is poor. (Mumford, 1999, p. 1) A few years ago, I met Enid at her home in England. She had a present for my son, Julian then 2 years old. It was a book called Gruffalo (Donaldson & Scheffler, 1999). In the book, the main character is a mouse, who invents a mean, scary character called Gruffalo. The mouse walks along a path through a big, dark forest convincing every animal along the way that Gruffalo actually exists until one day the mouse actually meets its own creation. Starting that moment, the mouse goes everywhere with Gruffalo along its side. Even the sceptics must now believe that Gruffalo actually exists. Enid Mumford invented her own Gruffalo, ETHICS. She convinced a considerable number of people worldwide of the value of her approach. The big difference between Enid and the story about a mouse and Gruffalo is that Enid was no mouse and ETHICS is for kind and humane: Enid’s influence will remain with us for generations to come.

ELAYNE COAKES

I first met Enid not long after I became an academic having spent many years as a practitioner. I remember the occasion vividly as it was at a small conference/workshop held at the IEE’s centre on London’s Embankment, Savoy Place on 11 March 1996 on ‘Human, Organisational and Technical Challenges in the Firm of the Future’. The audience was very much reduced as there had been a major bomb scare that had closed much of the London Underground. This gave me the opportunity to talk to Enid. Her talk at this workshop explained for me my uneasiness in some of the ways I had been expected to work as a practitioner and gave me an insight into a ‘softer’ way of developing systems and processes in organizations. (I had been a practitioner with little academic knowledge as my first degree had been in Public Administration and it was not until I became an academic that I actually studied IS.) The workshop looked at Vision and Transition management, emphasizing that the future of technology was for integration in a socio-technical structure with a multi-skilled and self-directed human resource. Malcolm Peltu, with whom Enid later wrote an excellent paper on the issues concerned with Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), also presented at this workshop discussing the reasons why the systems for the London Ambulance Service and the London Stock Exchange (Taurus) went wrong. In particular, Enid and Malcolm

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pointed out why stakeholders needed to be involved. This later greatly influenced my PhD study which was grounded in a humanistic and socio-technical perspective. During our discussion after the workshop, Enid asked me to join what was then the SocioTechnical Working Party, which had an interesting role within the BCS. The Party was considered a part of the BCS Technical Committee on Human–Systems Interaction originally chaired by Professor Ken Eason, now of the Bayswater Institute, but was not a recognized entity of its own. One of the aims of the working party was to find a wider audience for socio-technical ideas. The Tavistock Institute, which had been a driving force in the period post Second World War, was concentrating on the psychological and human relations aspects, but the working party saw a wider application of the principles in general organizational theory and process and technical application development. In the Working Party, we saw that the purpose of sociotechnical theory was to combine the closed, technical view of IS, with an open view where organizations were adaptable systems. We looked initially at how to combine IS development and use processes with these theories so that both technical and social goals could be achieved, but in due course our discussion widened this view out into where socio-technical theory could be utilized more generally and not just for the development of IS. Enid was therefore extremely supportive of the book the group developed called The New Sociotech (Coakes et al., 2000) where we hoped to show the wider origins and applications of socio-technical thinking for modern organizations – thus writing Graffiti on the Long Wall (our subtitle). She contributed an excellent chapter on Technology and Freedom emphasizing that participation gives freedom of choice when systems (and processes) are being developed – a key tenet of socio-technical thinking. Involvement according to Enid came in three flavours – consultative, representative and consensus, and it was true participation that helped achieve success in the action. As Macgregor (1960) argued, participation ‘creates opportunities under suitable conditions, for people to influence those decisions that affect them’. Mumford (2000a) also argued that ‘participation is a process that allows employees to influence both the work they do and the conditions under which they do it . . .’, she also said ‘it is right . . . it is fair . . . and it increases profit’. The group also started the Socio-Technical Lecture Series (archive available on http:// www.sociotechnical.org/London_prev_lect.htm) where Enid Mumford was, of course, the inaugural speaker in 1999. I have had the privilege of organizing this series since commencement and have found it an excellent place to hear about the wider applications of socio-technology. At group meetings and a number of conferences, I had the opportunity to talk further with Enid and one discussion we had in Manchester, related to BPR and the harm that these ideas, as they had been interpreted, had caused within organizations. It became obvious to me as I reflected not only on Enid’s words but also my own practical experience, that as processes were re-engineered, much of the understanding of how they operated, especially under times of uncertainty, was being lost to organizations. This reflection was developed into the concept of ‘sticky knowledge’ (Coakes et al., 2004) whereby the tacit understanding of exceptional circumstances was linked closely to the process worker’s experiences both with that particular process and also other processes both related and unrelated.

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Reading Enid’s books and articles also introduced me to the fundamental socio-technical principles of Cherns (1976; 1987) which seemed to me to apply equally to the field of knowledge management as to that of more generic organizational design. A second book (Coakes et al., 2002) specifically applied these socio-technical ideas and principles to knowledge management, and in here I expounded how these principles could now be interpreted. Over the course of her career, Enid wrote many books and her final book (2003) contained a collection of her work from the 1950s. I reviewed this book (Coakes, 2005) and said: ‘Mumford argues that one of the major challenges of the future lies in the necessity for companies to build and retain teams with vision, competence and loyalty to navigate through “uncharted waters with no guaranteed safe haven on the far side”. Organisations, in order to succeed in the current commercial environment, need to establish mutually beneficial relationships with their employees. They also need to establish a work ethic so that the groups’ needs will be in harmony with individual needs through self-development and generally agreed values. She discusses (in Chapter Two) not only the history of Socio-Technical Design (STD) but also its possible future. Mumford argues that the most important thing that Socio-Technical Design can contribute is its value system that says that, even though technology and organisational structures change, the rights and needs of the employee must be given as high a priority as any nonhuman element of the organisation. . . . The question that Mumford set out to answer is in her words “Can greater employee participation and humanisation of work, help make industry more efficient, more people-friendly, and better able to deal with the challenges of the future?” ’. Her work on the origins of the socio-technical movement and the antecedents (1996a) looked at the work of Eric Trist and how he was influenced by his study of the Scottish Jute workers in the 1930s where the introduction of new technology caused unemployment and alienation. In Coakes et al. (2004), I reviewed the early history of the socio-technical movement and commented: ‘As Mumford (1997) says, Cole (1985) in his seminal 1985 paper, argued that there was a belief that the small and restricted jobs that had emerged from the Taloyristic view of organisations, had led to employees not only being demotivated, but also prevented them from realising their full potential. . . . The values and objectives of the Tavistock, and of sociotechnical design by change agents, have always been directed at helping companies to manage change successfully. This is done by creating work (and process) systems that enable individuals, groups and organisations to work together productively and harmoniously (Mumford, 1996a). . . . Mumford (1996b) grounds her arguments in the work of Mary Parker Follett who wrote and lectured in the early 1900s. Follett was a management consultant who espoused group networks with self-government instead of bureaucratic organisations . . . Mumford explains that Follett believed in a broad attitude towards organisations. They should be coordinated and closely knit, linking and so making a working unit not many pieces . . . individuals should have the freedom to join with others to form group power. Follett emphasised that group freedom meant no domination or compromise but integration and functional capacity’. These ideas that Enid Mumford espoused as derived from Mary Parker Follett have also influenced my current thinking about how Communities of Practice might operate in organizations and how they might best be supported.

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It is now some years since I spoke to Enid in person as she stopped attending the group meetings because of her failing health. Nevertheless, her influence remains on my bookshelves, and in my mind, with her contribution to the application of socio-technical thinking in the broader context. She has influenced not only my thinking in my academic articles but also my teaching practice – my module aims and learning outcomes invariably mention that a sociotechnical perspective will be taken. And, as I tell my students, that means an emphasis on the socio and not the technical, as I believe Enid Mumford would also have declared.

BERND CARSTEN STAHL

I never had the good fortune to meet Enid Mumford in person. This is particularly unfortunate because we share an interest in some developments in IS that are worth further exploration and development as I will outline below. These hold the promise to improve IS theory and practice and will form part of her lasting intellectual heritage. In this section, I will briefly outline how I came to appreciate her work and then I will present a critical reading of her achievements that I hope will open avenues for further development of Enid Mumford’s work. Like many others in the field of IS, I arrived at it more by accident than by design. The one question that I found most interesting when I started to understand the field was how moral activities and ethical reasoning can or should be incorporated into the design and use of systems. I now know that this is a question that Enid grappled with over many decades, but when I started my own investigations and considerations, I was not aware of her work. My approach was to analyse the concept of responsibility and see what it can mean in the context of the use of technology in organizations. When I wrote up these ideas (Stahl, 2004), I was fairly confident that they had a sufficient degree of theoretical stringency, but their practical application and realization seemed problematic. This is the point where I started to read Mumford’s work in more detail and I recognized that it included many of the answers I had been seeking. The concept of reflective responsibility that I have developed is based on the idea that the different dimensions of responsibility need to be constituted collectively through discourse. It is strongly inspired by Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1981). Responsibility cannot be understood as an objectively and externally given reality, but as something that needs to be negotiated by all stakeholders in order to gain the legitimacy it requires. But how do we do this in practice? Part of the answer to this is that dealing with IS in a way that can claim to be reflectively responsible will require participation. And this is where Mumford’s prior work, particularly that on the ETHICS methodology and QuickETHICS, provides a direct link to responsibility. Many years before I had become aware of the problem, she had already given part of the answer. In her attempt to find ways to facilitate change and its management, she had built up a strong body of knowledge with regards to participative research and design. She was also very much aware of the ethical implications of such participation. Most importantly, she had shown theoretically as well as practically that the assumption of reflective responsibility is not only possible, it is even economically viable in a market environment.

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In my current reading about Mumford’s work, there is a different but related aspect that I think is very interesting, which, if explored properly, will contribute to her lasting legacy. The aspect I have in mind is her affinity to critical research, which is currently seeing a surge in interest in the field of IS. Interestingly, Mumford never called herself a critical researcher. She was interested in change, problem solving and innovation and tried to address theses issues in an acceptable manner. What she does not seem to have realized is the close affinity between her interests and those of critical theory. Critical theory here will be understood to be interested in changing an alienating social reality with the aim of facilitating emancipation. It is theoretically linked to the Frankfurt School and non-orthodox Marxism, but it can also be related to other theoretical approaches, for example, to Foucault’s writing (Brooke, 2002). This very brief definition does not do the critical approach justice, but it allows pinpointing areas where Mumford’s work displayed clear characteristics of critical research. Most importantly, Mumford was not content to leave things as they are, but she shared the critical intention to change the status quo. This was the recurring theme of her research as well as her consultancy practice. The main aim of the social changes she envisaged was emancipation. Again, she did not use the term, but her attempts to facilitate participation, create legitimacy and promote liberation and democracy in the workplace can easily be translated into the language of critical theory. Her topics of interest were inspired by her perceived sense of alienation among workers that needs to be overcome. In some instances, she even used classical critical diction such as the ‘ideology of capitalism’ (Mumford, 2003, p. 8). Her critical intention is also reflected in her research approach, including her penchant for interventionist action research (Mumford, 2001). But most of all, her ethical intention to improve the lot of the workforce by catering to their needs and allowing them to achieve their potential were clear signs of a critical drive. This interpretation of Mumford as a critical researcher is not only a self-serving description of a fellow critical researcher. It also allows us to understand some aspects of her work better and to address, and hopefully overcome, some of the inconsistencies of her work. This is necessary because her theoretical and practical achievements may be undermined by some of the weaknesses of her approach. Among them, there is a lack of theoretical consistency. She never explored the connection her approach has with critical theory, despite the paper of Hirschheim & Klein (1994) that emphasized it. This precluded her from participating in current theoretical developments. There are other signs of lack of theoretical reflections of her work. She proposed the neutrality of the researcher (Mumford, 2001, p. 64), an unlikely aim for a critical researcher and promoted a simple increase in the amount of knowledge as the aim of research (Mumford, 2003, p. 197). More importantly, there is a practical self-contradiction in her work. If her assurance that participative work is equally conducive to worker as to management interests were true, then market mechanisms should by now have led to a general acceptance of participative methods. This is not the case. It is therefore arguably the case that some of her basic assumptions are false or that she has overlooked a serious drawback of participative work. In fact, she does not seem to have addressed the critique of participation that can be found in the literature. Moreover, she accepted parts of the managerial literature that are in ostensive contradiction to participation, such as the emphasis on top management support. Current management thinking cloaks

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many hidden agendas and ideology and Mumford, while surely aware of this fact, did not spend a large amount of effort on exposing these. Another serious shortcoming from the critical perspective is that she did not question the capitalist system in which IS are designed and used. The critical view of society as a collection of conflicting interests would have clashed with her belief in the concurrence of interests of management and employees, but it might have had more explanatory power. In a similar manner, she accepted the technology that is currently available without asking whether it could be conceptualized differently, as the critical theory of technology suggests (Feenberg, 1999). And finally, despite her emphasis on ETHICS, her notion of ethics remained superficial. While she referenced philosophical ethics in some parts of her oeuvre, this never fed back in her understanding of the moral properties of participation. She implied concepts of relativism, contractualism, natural rights and consequentialism without defining her own position clearly. As a result of this theoretical lacuna, her ethical intention remains rather fuzzy and does not provide a measure that would allow the practitioner of participation to develop criteria of success or failure. Given the importance and contribution of Mumford’s work, I believe it is important that it will be taken up and developed by a new generation of scholars. The insights she provides are invaluable and provide an interesting link between research and practice. The interpretation of Mumford as a critical scholar allows a differentiated understanding of her achievement. Most importantly, it allows the analysis of some of the weaknesses of her work and provides a theoretical platform to address these. I hope that this short tribute will contribute to the debate of Mumford’s work and that it will help us to think with Mumford beyond Mumford in the expectation that this will allow us to further develop the participative systems in the democratic society that Enid Mumford hoped for.

CARSTEN SØRENSEN

With the sad departure of Professor Enid Mumford, we have witnessed the loss of yet another academic so essential to the field of IS. Sadly Kristen Nygaard, Rob Kling and Claudio Ciborra have all left us within the last couple of years. I knew Enid Mumford from a very early academic age, being a computer science student in Denmark 1982–89. However, I only knew her through her work and indeed only met her at conferences a couple of times. This celebration of Enid Mumford is therefore one based on how I interpret her influence through her work, and not a personal one. The essence of our field is the unspoken assumptions we share. As I have spent my entire career moving between technical communities in computer science departments, multidisciplinary groups in research laboratories, business schools, and lastly, a social science institution, questioning the basic assumptions about the world and how to inquire it has been an integral part of my career. In a computer science department, the average IS person will often think of themselves as not being particular knowledgeable on databases, log-likelihood-ratio parsing and B-Trees compared with the computer boffins surrounding them, but rather some-

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what of an expert on matters concerning Heidegger and Goffman. However, placed among philosophers and social scientists, this assumption could easily turn out to be wrong. However, within IS, there is an acute understanding of the relevance of studying the complex relationships between human actors engaged in their daily activities within a social or indeed organizational context, and the various technological artefacts they rely on to do so. This is what we consider at the core of our field. In this Enid Mumford very much represents the fundamental concern for the human actor in this relationship. Faced with strong business arguments for certain arrangements dictated by the need for human actors to accommodate the arrangements of major capital investments in production machinery, it is essential to consider how the social arrangements will fare. Today we need this discussion more than ever (Hochschild, 1997; Bunting, 2004). One of the significant changes is the tighter and tighter coupling of human action and information and communication technology. Since the 1970s, computers have moved beyond secure basements and onto desks, laps and into pockets. Armed with laptops and mobile phones, more and more people do work outside offices, at home, or in cars, as we in the past years had studied at LSE (http://mobility.lse.ac.uk). This both relates to and fuels the changes to the way work is organized in terms of rapid changing reconfigured distributed project teams, global sourcing and increased fluidity between home life and working life. One of the consequences is an increased interest in understanding the fundamentals not exclusively as systems, but also in terms of infrastructures (Ciborra et al., 2000) and services (Mathiassen & Sørensen, forthcoming). This shift does by no means imply that the fundamental issues Enid Mumford has raised throughout her extensive career now will become irrelevant and obsolete, on the contrary. However, it does mean that we must reassess our understanding of the relationships between human and technological agency. Indeed, it can be argued that the application of modern information and communications technology to a large extent serves as means of effectivizing information work much as the technologies Enid Mumford studied aimed at effectivizing factory work (Zuboff, 1987). If the application of advanced organizational information services based on complex global infrastructures is to succeed, then significant attention to the issues raised by Enid Mumford is of essence. In highly distributed and mobile work contexts, the core concerns relate not to the proper availability of 3G roaming agreements, but to the proper care for interpersonal trust, the management of invisible work and the agreements of what data can be mined and applied across the organization. As a small example, the use of location- and context-based services to coordinate and manage remotely distributed mobile workers can of course greatly improve their performance. However, without significant consensus of how this can be arranged, it will be highly problematic to establish the trust needed to engage in this kind of working arrangement (Sørensen, 2004; Sørensen & Pica, 2005). Enid Mumford placed participation at the centre of the discourse when the current wisdom preached far from that. I have been so fortunate not having to question this rationale as I spent my academic youth being influenced by the Scandinavian School of Systems Development, Participatory Design, or The Collective Resources Approach, which in turn clearly was greatly influenced by established researchers such as Enid Mumford and Kristen Nygaard. In fact, one of the questions this tradition raised in the mid-1980s when I was an MSc student at Aalborg

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and Århus University in Denmark, was to what extent the socio-technical approach was radical enough. This is all water under the bridge now, and for me the fundamental questions are still the same, even if they must be asked in greatly different contexts with potentially significantly different outcomes. Whereas much of the work associated with the socio-technical school was concerned with understanding the relationships between manual work and the use of ICT, we have come to the point in time where the next challenge is the mobilization of information work spanning the highly routinized to the highly discretionary. The future of socio-technical arrangements is one that can be understood in terms of active and concrete participation where organizational actors assembling and instantiating heterogeneous information services suiting specific needs in specific contexts (Mathiassen & Sørensen, forthcoming). This requires not less, but more attention to the understanding of the socio-technical relationship. The challenge will not be its demise, but the fact is that the relationships will be increasingly complex and essential. Investigations into socio-technical relationships at work, at home or in society at large, will always be indebted to Enid Mumford for her immensely important work on emphasizing a symmetrical relationship between the concerns for the human and for the technical. The ubiquity of her contribution is essentially impossible to assess. She will be greatly missed.

JUHANI IIVARI

I met Enid Mumford the first time in 1983. It was at the IFIP Working Group 8.2 Conference on ‘Beyond Productivity: Information Systems Development for Organizational Effectiveness’ in Minneapolis. I do not think that I had a personal contact with her then, but I remember that she was charming as always. During the years I met her a number of times, even though I knew her more from some distance rather than as a close colleague. At the time of the Minneapolis conference I already knew Enid through her work. To me, Enid’s legacy can be summarized as three pillars: the idea of an IS as a socio-technical system, job satisfaction as an important objective in IS evaluation, and user participation. Of course, one could analyse Enid’s contributions from a number of other perspectives: for example, how she foresaw some sort of business process redesign much before BPR became a hot topic, even though her approach was governed by quite different values than the later BPR (Mumford, 1994). Enid also applied action research from the 1960s onwards when developing ETHICS (Mumford, 2001), years earlier than when it became widely known as a research method in general and especially in the IS research community. In my contribution, I will pinpoint some connections of her work with my own thinking. My earliest reference to Enid seems to be in Iivari (1982) in which I refer to Enid’s model of job satisfaction (Mumford, 1973), but in my first international paper (Iivari & Koskela, 1979) I refer to the British research community (Hawgood, 1975; Land, 1975; 1976) in which, according to my understanding, Enid was closely involved. In my dissertation (Iivari, 1983), I also make several references to Mumford & Henshall (1979). At that time, I was working on the PIOCO model for IS development that comprised three major components: PIOCO metamodel for an IS, PIOCO

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process model, and PIOCO model for choice and quality criteria for IS selection. Enid’s ideas of an IS as a socio-technical system clearly influenced my conception of an IS as a component of the redesigned organizational context, i.e. the pragmatic (P) model in the PIOCO model for an IS. Her idea of job satisfaction inspired us to include the IS impact on the quality of work as an aspect of effectiveness in the PIOCO model for choice and quality criteria for IS selection. In 1984, I developed and implemented for the first time a course ‘Theory of Information Systems Development’ that was the last mandatory course in our MSc curriculum in Oulu. When developing the course, I started to work on the idea of ‘schools of information systems development’ that gradually led to a scientific article (Iivari, 1991). Socio-Technical Design as applied to IS clearly was one of the strongest of such schools at that time. In that work, I got more broadly acquainted with Enid’s work and recognized her strong connections with Scandinavia already in the mid-1970s, especially with researchers such as Bo Hedberg and Niels Bjørn-Andersen (Hedberg & Mumford, 1975; Bjørn-Andersen et al., 1979). The socio-technical movement in Scandinavia was very influential in inspiring a more radical trade-unionist approach in Scandinavia, as explained in Iivari & Lyytinen (1998). The topic of Enid’s talk in Minneapolis was ‘Participation – from Aristotle to today’. It may be that she is most well known as a great proponent of user participation, of users’ ethical right to participate in the IS development that affects their daily work. Even though I have followed this stream of Enid’s work, I have never really worked in the area of user participation. Therefore, I am more than pleased that just when writing this commentary, I got access to my daughter’s PhD dissertation (Iivari, 2006). Her thesis critically examines discursive construction of organizational culture and user involvement in academia and in the development of commercial software products in industry. She refers a number of times to Enid’s work (Mumford, 1983b). This shows how Enid’s legacy continues over generations. In our field of fast change, it is quite exceptional that a researcher is able to make such an influence that continues over generations. Enid has a privilege of being such an exceptional person. Her life continues in her work and ideas. After her death, it is really sad that the new generation of researchers do not have an opportunity to meet her in person, to see the real human being behind those ideas. In Enid’s case I always found an exceptional harmony or fit, if you wish, between her personality and the humanistic ideals she represented in her work.

AMANY ELBANNA

I met Professor Mumford in 1997 when I was studying for an MSc at the LSE. She visited the IS department and gave us MSc students a lecture on BPR at that time. We wondered how an author of so many publications would look like. When she entered the lecture theatre, my colleagues and I were impressed. She looked so elegant with very well-coordinated clothes and lovely golden hair. Her smile, easy-going approach and remarkable enthusiasm quickly bridged the gap between her and us. After the lecture, a friend of mine and I approached her and we were even more surprised by her generosity and ability to listen and engage in a very kind, charming and respectable way. We talked about BPR and our term assignment, and she lis-

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tened carefully and discussed some of our points enthusiastically. We could not believe that the ‘great professor’ seemed so modest and approachable. I always admired her spirit, energy and remarkable persistence that allowed her to maintain her mission even during the 1990s when BPR was booming. She bravely continued advocating human choice in the face of computers incorporating the business needs to rethink the organizational structure to respond to its increasingly competitive environment and be more attractive to customers (Mumford, 1994; 1997). She published a whole stream of literature to remind academia and industry that human, organizational and technical factors were inseparable and that the design environment that provides challenge, work freedom and opportunities for initiative is the one most likely to produce high-quality design for the benefit of employees and their organizations (Mumford, 1996a). She has never stopped campaigning for the introduction and use of technology ‘in a humanistic way, with beneficiaries rather than victims’ until the end of her life journey. I was reading extensively her work and was planning to interview her this spring as part of the data collection part of a research project on her work that I collaborate with Chrisanthi Avgerou and Frank Land. Alas, this was not feasible and my 1997 discussion with her is my only personal encounter with the lady professor. But I will never forget her smile, charm and sympathetic mission for people. Her inspiration will continue.

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Contributors David Avison is Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at ESSEC Business School, Paris. Niels Bjørn-Andersen is Professor at the Institute for Informatik of Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Elayne Coakes is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Management, University of Westminster, London. Gordon B. Davis is Honeywell Professor of Management Information Systems, Emeritus, University of Minnesota, USA. Michael Earl is Professor of Information Management at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Dean of Templeton College, Oxford. Amany Elbanna is Researcher at the Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics. Guy Fitzgerald is Professor of Information Systems at Brunel University, Uxbridge. UK. Robert D. Galliers is Provost at Bentley College, USA. Rudy Hirschheim is Professor of Information Systems at E.J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, USA.

Juhani Iivari is Professor in Information Systems at Oulu University, Finland. Heinz K. Klein is Associate Professor in Information Systems at State University of New York, Binghamton, USA. Frank Land is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Information Systems at London School of Economics, UK. Marco De Marco is Professor in the Department of Economic and Management Sciences, Catholic University of Milan, Italy. Andrew M. Pettigrew is Dean, School of Management, University of Bath, UK. Jaana Porra is at the C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, USA. Bernd Carsten Stahl is Reader in Critical Research in Technology at the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Carsten Sørensen is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems in the Department of Information Systems at London School of Economics, UK. Bob Wood is Professor of Information Systems, Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, UK. Trevor Wood-Harper is Professor of Information Systems, Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, UK.

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