Social Institutions and Basic Principles of Societal Organization

Abstract

Aside from complexity measured in levels of political integration, societies as systems of social institutions have another fundamental characteristic that can be called a “basic principle of societal organization.” The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions are arranged with respect to one another. Two basic principles can be distinguished: heterarchy—the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or can be ranked in different ways (as coined by Crumley), and its opposite, homoarchy,—a condition in society in which relationships in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent the most universal “ideal” (generalized) principles and basic trajectories of socio-cultural organization. There are no universal evolutionary stages: cultures can be (generally) heterarchical or homoarchical having an equal level of complexity. A culture can change its basic organizational principle without transition to another complexity level. Alternativeness also exists within each of the types. So, the heterarchy—homoarchy dichotomy runs throughout the whole of human history: it is observable on all levels of social complexity in all historical periods and culture areas, including the globalized world of our time. Transformations in the ways social institutions and their sets, societal subsystems, are ranked (homoarchically or hetrarchically) on the one hand and changes in the overall cultural complexity on the other are two different, largely unrelated processes.