Abstract
Is large-scale collective action possible without hierarchical structures to guide it and without inequality as an unpleasant corollary? This question is of interest to social scientists in general and organization scientists in particular. The late David Graeber (an anthropologist) and David Wengrow (an archaeologist) have produced a book written for a general audience that answers this question with a resounding “yes.”
Offering a revisionist view of humanity’s deep history based on their synthesis of the evidence, the authors argue that contrary to current opinion, human societies did not transition from egalitarian to hierarchical social structures because of the agricultural revolution (usually dated to about 13,000 B.C.E.). Instead, they argue that the archaeological evidence reveals complex collective action projects (such as the Göbekli Tepe and the “mammoth huts” of central Europe) well before agriculture. This suggests that hunter–gatherer societies may sometimes have had forms of hierarchical coordination to produce such major public works. The authors also note evidence that urban centers (such as in the Indus Valley settlements) that came after large-scale agriculture appeared to lack hierarchical arrangements. Egalitarian social structures, they conclude, were neither universal prior to agriculture and urbanization nor impossible afterwards. This conclusion leads them to the question of why we seem stuck in hierarchical social structures today.
The authors provide the answer that social structures result from play, imagination, and deliberate cultural differentiation rather than technological determinism (i.e., “agriculture did it!”). Through ritual, fun, and difference-seeking, they argue, humans have explored a wide variety of social arrangements both before and after agriculture and urbanization. Therefore there is nothing inevitable about the hierarchical state of today’s societies, and we should be able to imagine alternatives. This answer is consistent with our understanding of social behavior as the joint product of a multi-peaked task environment and the partly random exploration of actors in it; getting stuck on local peaks, we know, is possible but not inevitable or permanent, nor is it possible to say for sure whether we are stuck (Levinthal, 1997). I believe both the question and the answer that Graeber and Wengrow propose will resonate with students of non-hierarchical firms, social movements, open-source communities, and participative self-governance—who are well represented among the authors and readers of this journal.
In addition to questioning the inevitability of hierarchy, the authors include many other interesting ideas in this engagingly written book. These include thoughts on the definitions and origins of inequality, the origin of states, the close links between warfare, slavery, and hierarchical structures, the lost histories of female-led societies, and the proposal that many Enlightenment ideas—such as liberty, equality, and self-governance through deliberation—may owe their origins to Native American societies.
A weakness of the authors’ arguments is lack of clarity on what hierarchy really is. Interestingly, the authors recognize that calling all different models of non-hierarchical organizing “egalitarian” could be misleading since the term masks a plurality of meanings. It would have been useful if they had accorded the same care to the concept of hierarchy as well. When applied to relationships between people, hierarchy can refer to a ranking in terms of possession of valued resources (e.g., wealth or status), asymmetric and transitive patterns of influence (e.g., a reporting structure of authority), or centralization of decision rights. The extent to which these patterns are temporary or permanent, and based on consent or coercion, is also very important. But while these dimensions may often be correlated, they are not the same, a point sometimes obscured in the book.
For instance, when Graeber and Wengrow note that pre-agricultural public works of substantial complexity could not have existed without some degree of hierarchy, which aspect of hierarchy do they mean? When they note approvingly that the post-agricultural Indus Valley settlements seem to show no signs of hierarchical stratification, which aspect of hierarchy do they mean now? Clearly not the same one. The authors also point to instances of decentralized decision making through civic councils, but these could of course coexist with hierarchical administrative structures to implement policies agreed upon through deliberation, as occurs in many modern democracies.
I would also have liked to know more about exactly what makes large-scale collaboration without authoritative coordination possible. An important function of authority in collective action is to resolve (anticipated or realized) conflicts—breakdowns of cooperation and coordination—that cannot be resolved among peers. This suggests that authority can be avoided even as groups scale if one can control conflict either by reducing its prospects by lowering interdependence (the modularity/decoupling solution) or by relying on shared belief systems and norms that make it possible to resolve disagreements and disputes in a peer-to-peer fashion when they arise (the cultural solution) (Puranam, 2018). But how these solutions scaled as systems grew larger remains unspecified in the various cases of non-hierarchical social organization that the authors describe, possibly because of data limitations. Regardless, it is encouraging for students of organizations to realize that relative to fields like anthropology and archaeology, our access to data is truly luxurious.
The most interesting theoretical intuition I took away from the book is that even when hierarchies of authority are necessary to produce order, their transformation into hierarchies of inequality and oppression can be prevented through what Christopher Boehm (1999) has called “levelling mechanisms.” These include gossip, coalition building among subordinates, turn taking, and forms of temporal limits that reduce power differentials. If subordinates can simply exit and pursue outside options, the power of superiors is also kept in check. These mechanisms can effectively produce a reverse-dominance hierarchy in which the weak collectively subjugate, or at least keep in check, the strong. An implication is that the ability to organize at scale without unpalatable power differentials or inequality may not be as much about discarding authority structures as it is about scaling up leveling mechanisms that prevent the abuse of such structures.
The fact that most organizational scholars (including myself) are unable to judge the accuracy of the authors’ specific claims based on their (re)interpretation of the archaeological evidence should not stop us from reading this book. In many ways, I believe the book serves the same purpose as that of the writings of management gurus on the latest models of organizing such as “holocracy” or “humanocracy”: even if it turns out that they sampled outliers or survivors, their accounts are still useful stimuli to consider what is conceptually possible, what is not, and why. As Graeber and Wengrow remind us, Aristotle noted that the human species is perhaps uniquely Zoon politikon—we can look forward and imagine social orders that do not exist. One might paraphrase this to say that humanity’s gift is the capacity to design organizations in the broad sense of social arrangements that meet some goals. Ultimately Graeber and Wengrow want us to exercise that gift with more creativity and playfulness, and they suggest that our ancestors apparently did so. Who could resist such an invitation?