ABSTRACT
Explanation. A hierarchy is defined as arrangement into a series of graded compartments. Picture, for instance, Chinese boxes, with a box inside a box inside a box, and so on. We can illustrate by comparing geographical, military, and ecological levels of organization hierarchy, as shown in Table 3.1. The ecological and geographical hierarchies are said to be “nested” in that each level is made up of a group of next-level-below units. Thus, states are made up of groups of counties and landscapes groups of ecosystems. In contrast, military organization, in common with many other human organized hierarchies, is “non-nested”; sergeants, for example, are not composed of groups of privates. These nonnested arrangements tend to be more rigid than the nested ones. Society might do better if our human organizations were less rigid and more flexible and interactive as in nature's.
