Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Your minor musing on hierarchy and organization touched my own research hot button. As I respond in this blog post, your "characterization is more or less correct in practice. However, I would suggest that it's not the most useful way to think about organizations, the dynamics of their multiplicity of interactions, and the effects they create in their environment of relationships."

Summary of the tacit message of my longish response: we need a new organizational vocabulary.

He said it, not me:

http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/GHD09-07.html#note_3308

"You see, if you define hierarchy narrowly enough then all the problems of inequality and uninclusiveness go away, and we're just "small pieces, loosely joined," one great egalitarian blogosphere where ideologues masquerading as idealists get to try to shape perceptions to make reality resemble their dreams. But reality keeps biting us in the ass!

Personally, I hate it when that happens.

Take a look at Facebook and "friends." Now we can all "count" our friends, and he who dies with the most friends wins, or is most trustworthy, or something. Anytime some aspect of our lives becomes explicitly measurable, we compare others with it, and we rank people accordingly. We are intrinsically fascinated with rank. Lots of links means more "authority" than those with fewer links. Woo-hoo! But that's not a "hierarchy."

Thanks for clearing that up, Dave. I'm feeling more equal already."

A couple of quick thoughts.

- I read your headline and description of "Norms" as if you were using it as a name for normal people; The Norms, like The Sims!

- There's a real tension developing between the geeks and the paranoids. The geeks are following Brad Fitzpatrick's call for ways of moving social graphs from social network to social network by imagining vast White Pages that provide search functions into everyone's network of friends. The basic view is "You have no privacy, get over it". The paranoids of course, find this horrifying.

However there is a reality that is going to have to happen. As a culture we're going to have to come to terms with judging sensible adult people in their 30s (and up) on how they are now despite the fact that they were idiots in their late teens and we have the documentation to prove it. On balance this is probably a good thing. For instance, maybe we can stop judging politicians on the basis of how spotless they were 20 years before.

- Hierarchies and pyramid structures. The worst part of hierarchical organisations is that each level tells lies to the level above and below it. People in the middle tell the people above them what they think they want to hear. And they tell the people below them half truths in order to manipulate them. As if that wasn't enough, the competition among peers to rise to the next level means that there are whole sections of the organisation who spend most of their time on politics and little on getting any kind of job done. This is a cynical generalisation but pyramid control structures do seem to encourage this sort of behaviour. So at this point it's interesting to ponder on how most of the West's organisations (both public and private) are structured on a military, hierarchical, pyramid model that goes back to the Romans. It's also worth pondering the effect on the leader at the top of the pyramid being fed the results of successive lies being told by the layers below them as the message from the people who actually know what's happening is filtered up to them.

re: your assertion that real hierarchies have the constraint:

"in which each node has exactly one superior node"

First, I think you mean "one *immediately* superior node." Both my boss and my boss' boss would be superior to me.

Second, you are introducing tree / graph concepts on general hierarchies, i.e., by thinking in terms of "nodes." The things that we call "hierarchies" that are representative of "rank" or "status" or "priority" aren't necessarily trees (or, pyramids)--and they can also be upside-down (e.g., many superiors of higher rank commanding an individual at lower rank).

In an army, all generals are of hierarchically higher rank than all corporals. This general rank hierarchy exists alongside chains of command, which are also hierarchies, but might be described as top-down tree-like structures (the one is the direct boss of the many).

But, when a lawyer appears before a panel of judges (e.g., a supreme court), the many judges are superior in rank to the lawyer. And, this could be described as being more like an upside-down tree / pyramid hierarchy (the many are the direct boss of the one).