"[1] This notion is coupled with the one of heterarchy, defined by Crumley as "the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways".
Homoarchy must not be identified with hierarchy (as well as heterarchy must not be confused with egalitarianism in the proper meaning of the word).
More so: sometimes it seems too difficult to designate a society as “homoarchic” or “heterarchic” even at the most general level of analysis, like in the cases of the late-ancient Germans and early-medieval “Barbarian kingdoms” in which one can observe the monarchy and quite rigid social hierarchy combined with (at least at the beginning) democratic institutions and procedures (like selection of the king), not less significant for the whole socio-political system's operation.
The pathway to evaluation of a society as heterarchic or homoarchic (in either absolute or relative categories) goes through an analysis of it as a whole – as a dynamic system of social hierarchies, and the aim of this analysis in the vein of systems theory should be not to count the hierarchies but to understand the way they are related to each other.
Hence, the question which rises at studying a particular society is as follows: are the hierarchies that form the given social system ranked (more or less) rigidly or not?