Hierarchy Beyond Top-Down Control: The Architecture of Self-Organised Social Systems

Diverse social system architectures are needed to address the inter-related social and environmental challenges that societies face across scales. The iron law of oligarchy states that all societies eventually become hierarchical, with top-down control, as they grow in size and complexity. We contribute to existing research arguing that this is not an inevitability. To do this, we analyse social systems that organise non-hierarchically (Self-Organised Social Systems (SOSS)). SOSS have a multi-scale architecture with respect to information abstraction, which is not tied to a hierarchical control structure, and allows for scalability. Through primary and secondary data collection, we analyse the structure and function of SOSS in the past and present, including neighbourhood collectives, activist and co-living groups (primary data, via interviews); and anarchist collectives in the Spanish Revolution, the Zapatistas, and the Occupy and 15M movements, among others (secondary data, from literature). We identify federations and networks as two initial types of SOSS that can scale in size and complexity. Key features include: (i) maintaining power at the lowest level; (ii) the quasi-autonomy of lower-level groups; (iii) sharing of skills, information and knowledge; (iv) adaptability across scales; (v) stability and uncertainty reduction; (vi) resilience. Future work will focus on questions of timing, scalar stress, and adaptability, to better understand how and why SOSS architectures succeed, fail, and can be implemented.