Redesigning Human Systems

Citation

Land, F. (2004), "Redesigning Human Systems", Information Technology & People, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 104-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2004.17.1.104.2

Enid Mumford is a phenomenon. She has been an active researcher for over five decades and has published the results in a string of books. She is one of the pioneers of action research, and when involved with such research hers is not the typical ivory tower approach of the academic, but she engages in the situation she is studying. Thus when researching labour problems in the Liverpool Docks she felt the need to understand the daily life of the dock workers and achieved this by working as a canteen assistant in the docks. When doing research in the coal mines she had to do her studies underground at the coal face.

Her main claim to fame is her association with the sociotechnical movement and the development of a systems methodology she called ETHICS. And that name betrays her value system. The purpose behind her notion of change management and change design is QWL – the quality of working life. The notion is derived from her study of psychology – she was trained as a psychologist – that achieving improvements in QWL is desirable not only in its own right, but if properly handled will yield management goals of improved efficiency.

The book Redesigning Human Systems is at one level, the story of her life as a researcher, and at another level a guidebook for practitioners and students on what she has learned about the redesign of systems and the management of the required change process. As we might expect from her, a central message is that redesign and management both need the active involvement of those whose jobs may be changed by the redesign.

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 sets the scene. It identifies some of the problems of managing change, sets out the values behind the sociotechnical approach and its early history in various parts of the world, and discusses both the need for participation and its practice.

The next three parts are devoted to case studies, primarily case studies in which Enid Mumford played a major role as an action researcher and in the later cases more and more as a facilitator and developer of her own ETHICS methodology. She describes the context of each case, uses the voice of one of the employees to set out the issues, and then analyses the case for the lessons which emerge. She describes cases which succeed in delivering the twin objectives of improved QWL and improved business efficiency and other cases where initial success was followed by declining use and ultimate failure.

Each of these parts concentrates on a particular phase of her development as a researcher. Thus, part two describes her work through the 1950s to the 1970s with problems concerning manual workers in a variety of industries. Part three introduces change due to the introduction of information technology into particular offices of the firms she worked with in the 1970s to the 1990s. Part four jumps from systems in which management seeks to improve the efficiency of white collar work, to company‐wide systems and systems which aim to have a strategic impact on the organization. She explains her design of QUICKETHICS developed by her for management systems.

In the final part Enid Mumford reflects on the future and the need to design for problem prevention in the context of the increasing need to guard the integrity of systems against attack from fraud and the problems arising from complexity. Finally she notes the increasing uncertainty of the modern world and the need to design for an uncertain future.

The book is rounded off with an appendix setting out the main steps in the ETHICS methodology.

In its own terms of setting out her values, using the cases to draw out lessons and providing us with an insight into her research methods, the book succeeds brilliantly. As such, the book is an essential read for practitioners and students.

But to the scholar there are some important missing pieces. The first of these is the failure to address some of the critiques which have been voices over the years at the “Mumford approach”. Perhaps the most important is the view derived from critical theory that she fails to deal with the problem of the inequality of power in an organization. As a result, as one critic suggested, all she has achieved is to redesign the direction of the stripes of the prisoner's uniform. These criticisms need to be answered and can be answered.

The second missing piece is the lack of discussion or reflection on the relationship of her approach to other important approaches which, like hers reject, both in value terms and in terms of effectiveness, the approaches labelled as scientific management. There is no mention, for example, of the work of the soft systems methodology approach linked to the name of Peter Checkland – an approach which has a wide measure of support from scholars and some success with practitioners.

Most of the cases she cites arose from specific industrial problems and her action research sets out to rectify the problem. But a discussion of how she would approach a situation in which there is no presenting problem, but a possibility of gaining competitive advantage by the deployment of new technology or new working practices would be useful. In the last part of the book she begins to address that situation, but we are left with the feeling that we call in Mumford when we have to deal with a defined problem situation.

Despite the criticism in the final paragraphs of this review, this book is an important restatement of the invaluable work Enid Mumford has carried out, and is still carrying out in the course of her long career as an academic researcher and teacher.