After Glenn Mehltretter’s comments about Kinston and Rowbottom’s article from 1990, I went and got copies, OCRed them, and got Warren’s permission to post them here. This is the first, from 1989. They are useful articles and should be in someone’s database but this journal has never been electronically archived anywhere that I could find.

Warren has developed these articles further in later documents. These are substantially correct from today’s point of view, I think, but still missing some of the changes that they made later.

You may also wish to pick up Rowbottom and Billis’s Organisational Design: The Work Levels Approach from the GO Society website (check in the online books section).

Note that Warren’s 7 Languages of Achievement (or decision making) are something different than the seven work levels.

Also interesting is that Kinston and Rowbottom are writing about seven levels of work, as did Rowbottom and Billis. Jaques at some point allowed for an 8th level of work within organizations, and said that other levels of thinking exist. He was kind of wrong here and kind of right, but it is useful to think of seven levels of work as outlined in this article being within a single domain of work.

Even in situations where there is no hierarchical relationships (no Managerial Authority Hierarchy, in Jaques’s term) you still have work being done at a certain level. just because attorneys in a firm work in a Partnership and not a work hierarchy doesn’t mean that all of them do work at the same work level. So this is useful for a variety of contexts, even those not in MAHs.

Warren Kinston and Ralph Rowbottom. 1989. “Levels of Work: New Applications To Management In Large Organisations”. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16: 19-34. [PDF: 6.3MB]

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