hierarchy

hierarchy

1. Religion a body of persons in holy orders organized into graded ranks

2. Taxonomy a series of ordered groupings within a system, such as the arrangement of plants and animals into classes, orders, families, etc.

3. Linguistics Maths a formal structure, usually represented by a diagram of connected nodes, with a single uppermost element

4. government by an organized priesthood

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Hierarchy

An arrangement or system of ranking one above the other or arranged in a graded series or sequence such as size (large to small), shape (similar or dissimilar), and placement (emphasis or location).

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hierarchy

An organisation with few things, or one thing, at the top and with several things below each other thing. An inverted tree structure. Examples in computing include a directory hierarchy where each directory may contain files or other directories; a hierarchical network (see hierarchical routing), a class hierarchy in object-oriented programming.

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hierarchy

A structure that has a predetermined ordering from high to low. For example, all files and folders on the hard disk are organized in a hierarchy (see Win Folder organization).

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Hierarchy

 

the ordering of parts or elements of a whole from the highest to the lowest.

The term “hierarchy” was introduced not earlier than the second half of the fifth century by Pseudo-Dionysius in his treatises The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Until the 19th century, it was used to describe the organization of the Christian church. The development of the conception of hierarchy in science began in the second half of the 19th century. In the social sciences, the conception of hierarchy was originally used to describe class-estate divisions in an antagonistic society (for example, feudal hierarchy) and to characterize the structure of authority, especially of bureaucracy. In contemporary bourgeois sociology, numerous research studies have been devoted to the hierarchy of prestige, the hierarchy of wealth, and the hierarchy of power and control as an expression of social stratification and of social inequality.

With the appearance of the general systems theory in the 20th century, the conception of hierarchy was applied to describe any system objects. Hierarchically organized forms exist in all spheres of objective reality: inorganic, biological, and social. In Marxist philosophy, the idea of the hierarchy of qualitatively irreducible structural levels of matter has been developed. In general organizational theory, hierarchy is seen as the principle of control that secures the effective functioning of the organization. The hierarchy of levels (tiers) of a language is distinguished in linguistics. In graph theory the hierarchically constructed graph (the so-called tree) is used.

L. A. SEDOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.