Hierarchy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A hierarchy is any ranking of objects into grades, orders, or classes of increasing dominance or inclusiveness. As a social phenomenon, hierarchy is a specific type of social organization in which members are divided by status or especially authority. Early use restricted the concept to sacred rankings of heavenly bodies (e.g., orders of angels) or ecclesiastical and religious rule. Indeed, in his master-work Economy and Society, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) first distinguished between political and hierocratic organizations, limiting the latter to those entities with a monopoly of psychic coercion in distributing or denying religious benefits. Contemporary usage refers to any status or authority ranking based on traditional or religious beliefs and customs, formal-legal rules, or persistent inequalities.

Although contested, many scholars believe that humans, like other primates, are hierarchical animals who innately create social rankings within groups. Less contested is that humans throughout history have formed many social hierarchies, ranging from family, tribe, and clan groupings to genders, classes, and castes, to city-states, empires, and nation-states, to bureaucratic organizations including corporations, guilds, unions, political parties, and other civic associations.

Although particular forms differ, all hierarchies are comprised of relationships of superiority-inferiority or domination-subordination. On a daily basis, each individual in a modern society is likely to be a member of several distinct hierarchies with multiple and overlapping jurisdictions. One can simultaneously be a dominant member of a family from a “lower” class and a union leader, subject to the laws of the state in all these roles.

As these examples suggest, hierarchy is ubiquitous in social life. No definitive enumeration of types or forms is possible. At the same time, hierarchy is not universal. Many relationships are carried out between more or less equals, including interactions within peer or friendship networks, transactions in the marketplace, and diplomatic exchanges between great powers in international politics.

Hierarchy is not only varied but dynamic, evolving in form and extent. Although the historical trajectory has not been smooth and unidirectional, hierarchy appears to have deepened in scope and expanded in range over time, and especially in the modern era. With the rise of the nation-state as the encompassing form of hierarchy in the twentieth century, and the deepening of the division of labor within and between societies, greater areas of social life are now more clearly organized by rank and authority than in the past. This trend is challenged in the twenty-first century by globalization, the Internet, and various transnational social networks, all of which carry the potential for alternative, nonhierarchical forms of social organization. Whether these developments signal a long-term change in trajectory or merely a short-term oscillation in the degree of hierarchy remains a subject of debate.

Early understandings of the origins and rules of hierarchy were often functionalist, positing that hierarchies form to solve collective problems within societies. Perhaps best known among these early approaches is Robert Michaels’s “iron law of oligarchy,” which posited that the division of labor within organizations combines with the self-interest of organization elites to produce hierarchy even within bodies that pursue egalitarian goals ([1915] 1958). Subsequent scholars have rendered this “law” a contingent tendency, but the forces first identified by Michaels remain important in our understanding of hierarchy.

Contemporary theories of hierarchy can be grouped into three principal schools. Psychological theories ground the ubiquity of social hierarchy in human nature. Associated with the work of James Sidanius and his colleagues, social dominance theory is, perhaps, the most prominent psychological approach today, largely because its multilevel approach avoids many of the problems of strictly individual-level theories. Like authoritarian personality theory and other individual approaches, social dominance theory posits a social dominance orientation that, although universal, varies across the human population and expresses the value people place on hierarchically structured relationships among social groups. Social dominance orientation, in turn, interacts with context-specific institutions and ideologies to produce age, gender, and “arbitrary-set” hierarchies that take the form of clan, ethnic, caste, class or other socially constructed types of discrimination. Although providing a persuasive synthesis of a tendency towards hierarchy in all nonsubsistence societies, social dominance theory lacks a well-developed mechanism for explaining intra- and intersocietal differences in the degree of group-based hierarchy.

The other two main approaches to hierarchy seek to explain precisely the differences in the forms and extent of hierarchy. The contractual perspective dates most clearly from Oliver Williamson’s path-breaking Markets and Hierarchies (1975). In a world of costly contracts that fail to specify obligations in all possible future states of the world, Williamson posited, self-seeking actors will tend to form hierarchies when one, but not both, of the parties to a recurring transaction possesses relationally specific assets—or assets that are worth considerably more within that relationship than in their next best use. An example would be a producer of specialized components for a particular brand of automobile. By placing the transactions under unified ownership, and subjecting them to administrative controls (dominance), the incentives of the parties to act opportunistically toward one another are greatly reduced. By internalizing transactions within a hierarchy, actors give up the information and discipline that is otherwise provided by market competition, but reduce the likelihood that they will be exploited by partners. Thus, Williamson and his many followers predict that the producer of specialized components will be subsumed within the automotive firm into a corporate hierarchy. In the absence of relationally specific assets or frequent exchanges, in contrast, actors will prefer to transact “at arm’s length” in a market. When both parties have relationally specific assets, they hold “mutual hostages” and can coexist effectively in long-term, bilateral, and non-hierarchical relationships. This key insight on hierarchies as solutions to the problem of incomplete contracting in the presence of relationally specific assets has been extended from firms and economic exchange to bureaucracies and other managerial hierarchies, as well as to the analysis of empires, alliances, federal states, international organizations, and a variety of other institutions.

The distributional school lacks a single defining work, but generally understands hierarchies as emerging from initial inequalities between individuals or groups and, then, reinforcing those inequalities to produce an even more highly stratified society. Like the contractual approach, this school conceives of hierarchy as largely negotiated, albeit often under duress and possibly under threat of coercion, between actors who accept a subordinate status in exchange for access to the economic surplus possessed by the would-be superior. In the “big man” societies of Melanesia, for example, individuals acquire status and authority by using their comparative advantage in hunting, gardening, ritual knowledge, or violence to accumulate a material surplus, which they then redistribute to needy villagers. Often pressed to appeal to the big man by unexpected downturns in fortune, the supplicants become followers or subordinates in an informal village hierarchy. Over time, or once embedded into some religious or ideological frame, these relations of inequality become accepted or “normalized” into legitimate rule, with big men or perhaps their sons turning into “chiefs” at some later date. Similar hierarchies unfolded in early monarchies and empires, on the one hand, and in modern capitalist societies, on the other.

A contractual approach understands hierarchy as constructed to prevent possible opportunism, whereas the distributional approach posits that hierarchy emerges from actual inequality and exploitation. Despite this apparent tension, the two schools are actually complementary. Within the distributional approach, subordinates are understood to be locked into hierarchies by the material benefits provided by the superior; although perhaps driven by necessity to appeal to the dominant party for assistance, the subordinates are better off than they would be otherwise, absent that aid. In turn, the benefits of reduced opportunism provide the superior with the economic surplus necessary to assist subordinates while making himself better off as well. This exchange of goods for status and authority, what Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) first called “compulsory cooperation,” provides the glue that holds social hierarchies together. Yet, to understand hierarchy as a bargain of sorts that leaves the parties to an agreement better off than they would otherwise be in an anarchic state of nature—where life would be, as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) famously described it, “short, nasty, and brutish”—is not to accept that inequalities of status or resources are fixed and immutable or cannot be made more equal. The history of social struggle is largely one of subordinates claiming a greater and possibly equal share of the social benefits produced by hierarchy. To the extent that hierarchy is an enduring feature of human life, social struggle will persist as well.

SEE ALSO Caste; Community Power Studies; Elites; Michels, Robert; Oligarchy, Iron Law of; Power Elite; Psychology; Social Dominance Orientation; Spencer, Herbert; Stratification

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diehl, Michael W., ed. 2000. Hierarchies in Action: Cui Bono?. Occasional Paper 27. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University.

Lake, David A. 1996. Anarchy, Hierarchy, and the Variety of International Relations. International Organization 50 (1): 1–33.

Michaels, Robert. [1915] 1958. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Miller, Gary J. 1992. Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sidanius, Jim, and Felicia Pratto. 1999. Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Hierarchy and Oppression. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Williamson, Oliver E. 1975. Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications. New York: Free Press.

David A. Lake