The Relevance of Elliott Jaques
Elliott Jaques
(1917-2003) was a brilliant social scientist. I draw on his basic discoveries, not his paradigm or theories. Taxonomically, his later development of Requisite Organization appears to be a , and it has value as such. You can read his later books and draw your own conclusions about its suitability in different situations. Here, I am concerned with the relevance of his discoveries to THEE, specifically to the .
Elliott Jaques at the Glacier Metal Company
Elliott Jaques' initial detailed inquiries into were made with Wilfred Brown at the Glacier Metal Company over half a century ago. The focus was on the psychology of working, the nature of task performance and the use of authority for accountability.
Jaques noted that a task had both prescribed and discretionary elements, and recognized how mental processes in the discretionary element changed as the levels in the organization's hierarchy were ascended.
He identified time-spans of discretion as a measure of task complexity and showed that this correlated to felt-fair pay i.e. the innate feeling that greater complexity deserves greater pay. The biography from the website run by his widow and dedicated to his work identifies his two great discoveries as: •time-span as a measure of the complexity of work, and •his account of human potential capability and its maturation throughout life.
Jaques naturally preferred to specify work levels in terms of increasing time-spans: but the boundaries identified are just empirical findings. It is likely that cultural factors or work pressures can influence the time allocated for task completion. THEE Levels invariably reflect fundamental and universal unambiguous discontinuities, and the continuum of time, relevant as it surely is, cannot provide for that.
Development & Validation
The Glacier-inspired framework of work-levels was further tested and developed for various organizations in the 1970s and 1980s by Jaques and his colleagues at Brunel University: principally Gillian Stamp, David Billis, Ralph Rowbottom, Ian MacDonald and Warren Kinston—see references. The Institute's work was continued in the 1990s and later by the BIOSS organization that is now international.
Jaques did his work in the UK but returned to North America in the early 1980s and developed followers there. His levels framework has now been broadly validated over several decades by many different consultants and investigators in hundreds of organizations in over a dozen countries. This has included very large entities like the US Army and the NHS, often in projects lasting over many years.
The Global Organization Design Society is dedicated to explaining and applying from a strongly Jaquesian perspective. It has an extensive downloadable bibliography including many academic publications.
Beyond Jaques
Without diminishing Jaques' contribution here, it is worth listing aspects of work and organization that failed to receive his full attention.
- Work outside conventional bureaucracies or requiring polyarchic authority e.g. high-tech firms, the news industry, scientific disciplines, political institutions, community development, film studios, artist colonies, religions.
- Activation and handling of human experiences at work e.g. elements of creativity, cooperativeness, sensitivity, motivation, self-interest, political manoeuvring &c.
- Values and objectives outside setting tasks, plans and policies e.g. the role of paradigms, ideals and ultimate values (except ), ethical standards, movements within organizations, contribution of informal networks.
- Styles of decision-making (outside the structuralist method), strengthening management culture beyond the structuralist stage, structures of achievement, dynamics of management and employment tensions.
Given the location of within , specifically the , it is important to note that Jaques was unaware of the . He stuck with information processing as basic, and viewed the different modes conceptually (e.g. serial processing, parallel processing) rather than experientially.
Jaques added more organizational levels in his later years and saw work above these levels as being at the genius level. His time-span ideas exploded and lost their tight relation to tasks. I do not engage with such speculations. A taxonomic perspective on language-use and a down-to-earth comprehensive view of work outside ordinary organizations can only complement his extraordinary insights based on consultancy findings. That is the goal of this part of TOP.
Originally posted: 11-Oct-2013