In many countries, feudalism and manorialism provided a formal social structure that established hierarchical links pervading every level of society, with the monarch at the top.
A conventional view ascribes the growth of hierarchical social habits and structures to increased complexity;[12] the religious syncretism[13] and issues of tax-gathering[14] in expanding empires played a role here.
However, others have observed that simple forms of hierarchical leadership naturally emerge from interactions in both human and non-human primate communities.
[5] The iron law of oligarchy, introduced by Robert Michels, describes the inevitable tendency of hierarchical organizations to become oligarchic in their decision making.
Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and managers in an hierarchical organization "rise to the level of their incompetence."
Hierarchiology is another term coined by Laurence J. Peter, described in his humorous book of the same name, to refer to the study of hierarchical organizations and the behavior of their members.
Hierarchiology, although a relatively recent discipline, appears to have great applicability to the fields of public and private administration.David Andrews' book The IRG Solution: Hierarchical Incompetence and how to Overcome it argued that hierarchies were inherently incompetent, and were only able to function due to large amounts of informal lateral communication fostered by private informal networks.
[19] The formal hierarchy can thus be defined as "an official system of unequal person-independent roles and positions which are linked via lines of top-down command-and-control.
[32][33][25][27] In the literature on organization design and agility, hierarchy is conceived as a requisite structure that emerges in a self-organized manner from operational activities.
Another example involves organizations adopting holacracy or sociocracy, with people at all levels self-organizing their responsibilities;[34][35][36] that is, they exercise "real" rather than formal authority.
[38][39] Examples of self-organized ladders of responsibility have also been observed in (the early stages of) worker cooperatives, like Mondragon, in which hierarchy is created in a bottom-up manner.
[40] In a hierarchy driven by ideology, people establish themselves as legitimate leaders by invoking some (e.g., religious, spiritual or political) idea to justify the hierarchical relationship between higher and lower levels.
[21] The work of diverse theorists such as William James (1842–1910), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Hayden White (1928–2018) makes important critiques of hierarchical epistemology.
James famously asserts in his work on radical empiricism that clear distinctions of type and category are a constant but unwritten goal of scientific reasoning, so that when they are discovered, success is declared.
[citation needed] But if aspects of the world are organized differently, involving inherent and intractable ambiguities, then scientific questions are often considered unresolved.
A hesitation to declare success upon the discovery of ambiguities leaves heterarchy at an artificial and subjective disadvantage in the scope of human knowledge.
Heterarchy, the most commonly proposed alternative to hierarchy, has been combined with responsible autonomy by Gerard Fairtlough in his work on triarchy theory.
[48] Amidst constant innovation in information and communication technologies, hierarchical authority structures are giving way to greater decision-making latitude for individuals and more flexible definitions of job activities; and this new style of work presents a challenge to existing organizational forms, with some[quantify] research studies contrasting traditional organizational forms with groups that operate as online communities that are characterized by personal motivation and the satisfaction of making one's own decisions.