Enid Mumford was born on Merseyside in North West England, where her father Arthur McFarland was magistrate and her mother Dorothy Evans was teacher.
The first job was important for her career as an academic, since it involved looking after personnel policy and industrial relations strategy for a large number of women staff.
The second job also proved invaluable, as she was running a production department, providing a level of practical experience that is unusual among academics.
On returning to England, she joined the newly formed Manchester Business School (MBS), where she undertook many research contracts investigating the human and organisational impacts of computer based systems.
During this time she became Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Director of the Computer and Work Design Research Unit (CAWDRU).
When gathering data from face-to-face interviewing programs, fewer formal methods are shown to be more respectable and often show superior quality of information.
[3] Early in her career Enid Mumford realised that the implementation of large computer systems generally resulted in failure to produce a satisfactory outcome.
Four decades later, despite the identification of these sociotechnical factors and the development of methodologies to overcome such problems, large scale computer implementations are often unsuccessful in practice.
[5] Mumford also used Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils’ patterns variables to propose five different contracts that can be used to evaluate employer-employee relationships.
To implement this contract, Mumford states the need for the continual questioning of production processes and principles alongside the identification of tools, techniques, and technologies which can be considered efficient and humanistic.
[6] While at MBS, Mumford developed a close relationship with the Tavistock Institute and became interested in their democratic socio-technical approach to work organisation.
The discoveries uncover that Mumford held and adjusted numerous heterogeneous entertainers and assets that together added to the forming of ETHICS.
[12] Enid Mumford’s draws success from the implementation of Socio-Technical Design; an organisational development method that focuses on the relationship between people and technology in the work environment.
With the Global economy being in a recession during the early 1980s, Enid Mumford’s theory of socio-technical design gave way to several cost cutting methods that helped better organisations during this period.
By making technology more viable in the workplace environment, enabling them to introduce lean production and suitable downsizing techniques.
[15] Furthermore, Mumford’s work around Ethics Methodology, change management, and the humanly acceptable development of systems to provide an ethically acceptable way for the use technology was supported by Critical Research in Information Systems (CRIS) as many of ideas that still dominate Critical Research, which aim to improve the Social Reality.
[16] Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer Systems (ETHICS) method is made to help integrate the company and its aims with that of its stakeholders.
The ETHICS method can greatly contribute to encourage people to embrace change and adopt new technological solution, thus resulting in higher job satisfaction and efficiency.
This ETHICS method follows 15 steps for designing new systems, they start with asking why to change and then end with the evaluation and testing to see if it is achieving what is required.
[18] A theoretical foundation in Mumford’s career was Action research – an approach adopted from the Tavistock Institute in which analysis and theory are associated with remedial change.