ABSTRACT
The hierarchic form of organization, considered in Chapter 4, has the advantage of facilitating the concentration and selective redistribution of collective resources within the structure as a whole. As a result a hierarchically organized structure has the capacity to be both more powerful and more flexible than a network constituted of an equivalent set of elements. One of the principle disadvantages of the hierarchic form, as we noted in Chapter 4, is that the more powerful elements in the structure are just as vulnerable to disruption or destruction by external forces as are those with the least power. However, because these more powerful elements also bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for maintaining the stability and integrity of the structure as a whole, they constitute in effect localized points of high vulnerability for the whole.
