Background to this Inquiry

Initial Stimulus

This framework, even if posted rather late, emerged at an early stage of my inquiries. It was associated with my introduction to «levels of work responsibility» a developed by Elliott Jaques. Each of his levels of work corresponded to a level of management in a properly designed managerial hierarchy. At that time, there was some uncertainty about how many levels there were. However, Elliott had determined that those working at Levels 1 to 4 used language in a different way to those working at Level 5 and upwards. He saw the use of information as characterizing the lower section (L1-L4) and the use of concepts characterizing higher management (L5 - ?).

From my consulting, I became rapidly convinced that this was a valid and brilliantly perceptive observation. His differentiation of the levels became the first THEE 4-Level Style Hierarchy (then called a modal hierarchy).

About that time, Ian MacDonald at BIOSS was extending this discovery by working with those caring for learning-disabled individuals (called 'mentally handicapped' in those days) within special institutions. He described differences in what could be expected e.g. could a resident do what was asked?  could a resident be given a goal and determine for themselves what should be done? This was evidently related to using words concretely in immediate association with actions. This sort of work sat below the lowest level of work in an organization e.g. sweeping the street, packing boxes, delivering parcels where task specification was rather concrete but not immediately tied to a specific action.

Further Observations

Working in a University, I noticed that academic disciplines were evidently based in concepts. I also noticed that top CEO's often entered academia, but never reached posts of any seniority. So there was an overlap here. When I looked at academic careers, I saw that top scientists often played a role in society as advisors to government or as experts in court or on regulatory authorities or occasionally writing for newspapers. It was evident that in such work they used a different sort of language that could be universally understood within a particular society.

So far so good: L'1-concrete, L'2-informational, L'3-conceptual, and L'4-universal.

I then reflected and identified my own work as being different. It was about fundamentals and seemed to be distinguished from the others by needing formulae to avoid confusion in English and for clarity and universality across cultures. This suggested similarities to the foundations of mathematics and science. But where did it fit in to the typology?

I initially named the approach 'formulaic'. However, as this word has come to mean mediocre, I changed the name to "Formal". However, because Formal was the name assigned to a research method-PH'2L2, I changed it again to Logical.

By this stage, I had developed the Principal Typologies for decision-making (PH'1) and inquiry systems (PH'2), so I felt reasonably confident that these language methods were similar in principle. The highly structured nature of my logical approach suggested it was at L'6. I had long realized that the language of the bible was unusual: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. What a magical image! This had to be L'7. I was now only missing L'5, but I had become acutely aware that so far I had no place for Middlemarch, Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. So I placed such writing in this gap and called it the gestalt method.

Originally posted: 5-Jan-2013. Amended: 25-Aug-2016. Last updated: 10-Feb-2023.