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Decentralization as an organizing principle has drawn growing interest from scholars and practitioners because of its perceived suitability for contemporary market conditions and alignment with employees' evolving work expectations. However, efforts to decentralize authority face significant obstacles and often end in failure. I propose that existing research on decentralization has struggled to generate insight into how such barriers can be overcome because it has treated decentralization as a static outcome imposed by organizational designers. In contrast, this article treats decentralization as a dynamic and situated achievement that must be continually enacted, and it leverages ethnographic data from a decentralization effort in order to build theory on the organizational practices that support enactments of decentralized authority. I find that successful enactments of decentralized authority were supported by practices that established clear boundaries of authority and focused collective attention on these boundaries, as well as by practices that depersonalized collective attributions of the source of authority. At the same time, the practices were difficult to sustain because they were cognitively, emotionally, and temporally demanding. Through this study, I show that decentralization is not merely a one-time structural change but an ongoing collective process that requires navigating and neutralizing the structural and psychological forces pulling organizations back toward hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does pay dispersion elicit positive or negative employee attitudes? A review of the pay dispersion literature indicates a controversy around this vital question and suggests that numerous contingency factors moderate the effects of pay dispersion. In an empirical study of four Finnish companies consisting of 141 work units, we examine contingencies in attitudinal reactions to job‐based pay dispersion among blue‐collar workers. Based on archival pay data matched with employee survey responses (n = 536), we find that perceptions of pay basis legitimacy, task interdependence, and an individual's pay standing within the work unit explain the strength and direction of the relation between job‐based pay dispersion and employee attitudes (i.e., work engagement and organizational commitment). Our findings have implications for the design of pay systems and contribute to a better appreciation of the complexities underlying employee attitudinal responses to pay dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To foster bottom-up innovations, health care organizations are leveraging interdisciplinary frontline innovation teams. These teams include workers across hierarchical levels and professional backgrounds, pooling diverse knowledge sources to develop innovations that improve patient and worker experiences and care quality, equity, and costs. Yet, these frontline innovation teams experience barriers, such as time constraints, being new to innovation, and team-based role hierarchies. We investigated the practices that such teams in federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) used to overcome these barriers. Our 20-month study of two FQHC innovation teams provides one of the first accounts of how practices that sustained worker engagement in innovation and supported their ideas to implementation evolve over time. We also show the varied quantity of engagement practices used at different stages of the innovation process. At a time when FQHCs face pressure to innovate amid staff shortages, our study provides recommendations to support their work.

Paranoia is a common delusion type found in clinical and non-clinical populations. A hierarchical, dimensional model of paranoia in the general population has been proposed, with four categories representing increasing levels of paranoia: interpersonal sensitivity (IP), mistrust (M), ideas of reference (IR), persecutory ideas (PI). What is currently lacking and could provide insights into etiology is a comprehensive clinical characterization of the lower end of the paranoia spectrum, psychological domains that are associated with symptom severity, and how paranoia and its structure fluctuate over time. This study conducted both cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys with 802 participants from the German population assessing paranoia and general psychopathology. Data was collected through Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). Several statistical approaches were used including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), latent class analysis (LCA) and mixed modelling analyses (ME). Paranoid experiences appear to be a common phenomenon that occur in people with and without mental illness. Subjects clustered into four paranoia severity subgroups (IP, M, IR, PI) and showed significant associations in various psychological domains like increased psychiatric symptoms and maladaptive coping. Paranoia fluctuates over time in all four severity subgroups, but the hierarchical subgrouping was stable. Both persecutory ideations and interpersonal sensitivity were significant predictors of paranoia. Findings provide important insights into the architecture of paranoia in the German population by characterizing their hierarchical, dimensional, and dynamic structure and its link to psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a general conception of levels in philosophy which says that the world is arrayed into a hierarchy of levels and that there are different modes of analysis that correspond to each level of this hierarchy, what can be labelled the ‘Hierarchical Correspondence View of Levels” (or HCL). The trouble is that despite its considerable lineage and general status in philosophy of science and metaphysics the HCL has largely escaped analysis in specific domains of inquiry. The goal of this paper is to take up a recent call to domain-specificity by examining the role of the HCL in cognitive science. I argue that the HCL is, in fact, a conception of levels that has been employed in cognitive science and that cognitive scientists should avoid its use where possible. The argument is that the HCL is problematic when applied to cognitive science specifically because it fails to distinguish two important kinds of shifts used when analysing information processing systems: shifts in grain and shifts in analysis. I conclude by proposing a revised version of the HCL which accommodates the distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correlational pilot study (N = 143) and an integrative data analysis of two experiments (total N = 377) provide evidence linking anger to the psychology of social hierarchy. The experiments demonstrate that the experience of anger increases the psychological accessibility of implicit cognitions related to social hierarchy: compared to participants in a control condition, participants in an anger-priming condition completed word stems with significantly more hierarchy-related words. We found little support for sex differences in the effect of anger on implicit hierarchy-related cognition; effects were equivalent across male and female participants. Findings fit with functionalist evolutionary views of anger suggesting that anger may motivate the use of dominance to strive for high social rank in group hierarchies. Implications for downstream behaviour, including aggression and negotiation, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a paradigm for access control to typed objects logically connected to form a hierarchy, whereby each object has a single parent, and may have children. Protection domains are divided into three classes. A vertical domain includes authorizations for the objects in a subhierarchy. A horizontal domain includes authorizations for the children of a given object. A simple domain includes an authorization for a single object. We introduce the hierarchical capability concept as a generalization of the classical password capability concept. A hierarchical capability references an entire domain instead of a single object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the adoption of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the order founded on the treaty has evolved into an increasingly fragmented regime complex. Fragmentation has resulted from forum-shifting initiated both at the top and at the bottom of the nuclear hierarchy: both the United States, with varying partners, and coalitions of small-and medium-sized non-nuclear states have repeatedly moved rule-making on nuclear issues to fora outside the NPT, adding partly conflicting institutions to the complex. To understand this dynamic, I propose a sociological perspective that highlights states' positional struggles in a multidimensionally stratified international society. Drawing on Bourdieusian global fields theory, I argue that both dominant and weak states use forum-shifting to manipulate exchange rates between different (material, institutional and social) forms of capital they possess. Thus, they seek to protect their positions in global hierarchies within and beyond the nuclear field when they perceive these hierarchies as being challenged by material or institutional power shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of a global pandemic, rising inflation, and stock market uncertainty, many across the globe are experiencing financial insecurity. We build on an emerging line of research to explore the mechanisms through which leaders' personal financial insecurity impacts the teams they lead. We draw on compensatory control theory to theorize that leaders' personal financial insecurity has a negative indirect effect on adaptive team performance because more insecurity is associated with less perceived personal control, to which leaders respond by implementing a more hierarchical decision‐making authority structure in their teams. Integrating the social identity theory of leadership, we theorize that this effect is stronger when the leaders are more prototypical of their team. Evidence from three multi‐wave, multi‐source field studies including leaders and their teams and an online experiment supports our model. By uncovering how a leader's perceived financial state impacts those they lead, our work adds to the growing bottom‐line case for why organizations should care about supporting their employees' financial health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, the call for fewer hierarchies and flat structures has increased tremendously as shown by the numbers of recent papers. Academics and practitioners continually discuss the perfect organizational type. Nevertheless, this discussion is nothing new; already in mid last century, researchers were analyzing softened hierarchies in organizations. Due to the long-standing and recently reignited debates and influences from various perspectives, the body of research is vast, highly fragmented, and distributed among different disciplines. By reviewing the field systematically, we have analyzed in depth the current state of research and thereby interrelate the power relationships between manager and employee with the organization type they work in. With the aid of this newly developed framework, we can show that most companies act in a hierarchical organization not a flat one. Additionally, we show that even in organizations typified by flat structures, hierarchies do nevertheless appear. This revelation supports earlier findings that where formal hierarchies decrease, informal hierarchies increase, but this is contrary to much of current business understanding. Our research contributes to academia by providing a long-needed, integrated framework for power relationships in different types of organizations on the basis of which future scholars can undertake further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractDrawing inspiration from hierarchical structures, axisymmetric design layouts were introduced, and hybrid hierarchical chiral structures (HHCS) based on four- and six-chiral structures were proposed. The performance of HHCSs under in-plane compression is investigated using finite element methods and experiments. The effect of different loading conditions on the behavior of HHCSs is discussed. Under low-speed impact, HHCSs exhibit a negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR) effect, which diminishes as the velocity increases and the inertial effects gradually become dominant. The parameter study shows that increasing the connectivity between subunits and the thickness can enhance the energy absorption capacity of the structure while maintaining a good NPR effect. The conventional inclined deformation mode of the chiral structure is improved by the axisymmetric layout, which effectively improves the energy absorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated politeness types constructed between doctors and patients during medical consultations in private hospitals in Akure, Nigeria. While the earlier studies on doctor-patient interactions in the Nigerian context employed Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory and Leech’s politeness maxims, this study adopted Akio Yabuuchi’s hierarchy politeness. Yabuchi’s model of hierarchy politeness was employed as a framework to identify the types of politeness. It investigates how politeness type influences linguistic choices and hierarchical behavior in doctor-patient interactions. The politeness types constructed are institutional politeness, symmetrical politeness, and quasi-institutional politeness. Common strategies used by doctors and patients to negotiate hierarchy within the politeness’ constructions include veneration and comprehension strategies. Asymmetry is customary between doctors and patients in Nigerian private hospitals; although patients pay for the consultations, doctors seem to act as the superior participant by constructing desired politeness type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expenditure involves allocating money to various items or services to satisfy our needs from different aspects of life. To understand the consumption and expenditure patterns, this study aims to analyze the spending habits of the B40 youth group living in urban areas, specifically in Kuala Lumpur, by examining their specific needs. To achieve the objectives of this study, a research framework on the prioritized needs during shopping or expenditure has been established. These needs include basic needs, protection and health, family, religion, and leisure. Subsequently, the findings of the study indicate that there are differences in priorities during shopping were found, as indicated by respondents to ensure survival in the city. Although basic needs such as home ownership are often discussed, the unaffordability of prices, especially in urban areas, has resulted in home buying not being a major contributor to expenditure breakdowns. This suggests that the type of settlement contributes to the lifestyle and spending habits practiced by youth in urban areas. This study demonstrates that urbanization can affect how youth allocate their money to sustain their livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing confidential information is a critical concern in today's world. Secret sharing schemes facilitate the sharing of secrets in a way that ensures only authorized participants (shareholders) can access the secret using their allocated shares. Hierarchical secret sharing schemes (HSSSs) build upon Shamir's scheme by organizing participants into different levels based on priority. Within HSSS, participants at each level can reconstruct the secret if a specified number, denoted as the threshold value (t), or more of them are present. Each level has a predetermined threshold value. If the number of participants falls below the threshold at any level, higher-level participants must be involved in reconstructing the secret at lower levels. Our paper proposes schemes that implement hierarchical access structures and enable the sharing of multiple secrets. Additionally, our proposed scheme includes share verification. We have analyzed potential attacks and demonstrated the scheme's resistance against them. Through security analysis and comparison with existing schemes, we highlight the novelty and superiority of our proposed approach, contributing to advancements in secure information-sharing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the strict rejection of casteism by the Sikh faith, caste-based hierarchies are still a prevalent factor amongst Sikh diasporas within the UK. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork amongst women whose caste is considered to occupy a lower status, this paper examines their experiences and explores how, over time, this has contributed to the construction of their identity. This article situates the women within a nexus of complex social and cultural factors, illuminating the representations of caste, gender and intergenerational change within Nottingham. An intersectional standpoint provided an analytical value in accentuating the sites where gender, caste and the mediation of honour intersected. The research shows a heterogeneity in the self-positioning of women vis-à-vis caste identity and shows a marked difference in attitudes between generations, denoting a depreciation in the significance of caste. Ultimately, while the respondents were conscious of their caste and of the historical prejudice against their caste, it is significant that they did not live their lives through it, as they internalised Sikhi as their core identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Research Summary: This article investigates how job seekers' perceptions of an employer's formal hierarchy affect the size and gender composition of its applicant pool. Building on the literature on gendered organizations and organizational design, we develop opposing perspectives on these relationships. To arbitrate between these perspectives, we first conduct a field experiment in partnership with a hiring firm. We find that featuring a flatter hierarchy in recruiting materials does not significantly affect the size of the applicant pool, but significantly decreases women's representation within it. Our follow‐up survey experiment identifies several potential mechanisms (e.g., perceptions of career progression, informality, workload, and fit). Our findings imply that firms' growing tendency to adopt flatter hierarchies could inadvertently undermine efforts to attract a greater proportion of women applicants. Managerial Summary: Using a pair of labor market experiments, this study finds that characterizing a hiring firm's hierarchy as "flatter" with fewer management levels reduces women's representation in the applicant pool. We show that this decrease in the share of women applicants is likely driven by the fact that women, compared to men, perceive flatter hierarchies as more likely to present difficulties in fitting in, burden them with more work, and provide fewer opportunities for career progression. These findings suggest that, to mitigate workplace gender segregation, organizations with flatter structures may benefit from de‐emphasizing their organizational hierarchies in recruitment efforts. Moreover, companies should consider how their organizational attributes contribute to fostering a more inclusive work environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013–2016 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa galvanized a quest for more knowledge with regards to the ecology of the disease. In its immediate aftermath, research initiatives, at the junction of biosecurity and One Health, were mounted to elucidate the circulation of the Ebola virus and other emergent pathogens through sampling local wildlife, in particular bats. The article investigates the knowledge, affects, and practices mitigating care and risk in encounters between human animals and potentially contaminated nonhuman animals. Grounded in an ethnography of the labor of wildlife sampling by Guinean veterinarians, it adopts an interspecies perspective on the One Health laboratory, a place where relations between animals and humans are inflected by a postcolonial, gendered, and anthropocentric imbalance of power. It argues that, rather than blurring interspecies boundaries, scientific care for sampled bats may cement hierarchies, with consequences for samplers and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds a novel perspective to employee voice literature by thematically analysing 36 in-depth interviews of surgeons and anaesthesiologists, who work together but in the context of a blurred hierarchy. We found that these two professions effectively leveraged expertise in speaking up on safety concerns relating to their own speciality, when speaking to each other, irrespective of hierarchy. Further, as interdependent roles make cross speciality voice vital for patient safety, they also spoke up on occasions to negotiate risk and safety concerns across speciality. However, power struggles and protection of speciality authority predisposed each professional group to undervaluing the contribution of the other and often attributing self-interest and opportunistic motives to those speaking up. This led to each group resisting influence making silence a commonplace on cross speciality safety concerns. These contexts present an intriguing environment for voice behaviour which requires research and management attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn many domains, data measurements can naturally be associated with the leaves of a tree, expressing the relationships among these measurements. For example, companies belong to industries, which in turn belong to ever coarser divisions such as sectors; microbes are commonly arranged in a taxonomic hierarchy from species to kingdoms; street blocks belong to neighborhoods, which in turn belong to larger-scale regions. The problem of tree-based aggregation that we consider in this paper asks which of these tree-defined subgroups of leaves should really be treated as a single entity and which of these entities should be distinguished from each other.We introduce the false split rate, an error measure that describes the degree to which subgroups have been split when they should not have been. While expressible as the false discovery rate in a special case, we show that these measures can be quite different for the general tree structures common in our setting. We then propose a multiple hypothesis testing algorithm for tree-based aggregation, which we prove controls this error measure. We focus on two main examples of tree-based aggregation, one which involves aggregating means and the other which involves aggregating regression coefficients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchical networks typically get rated to be not assortative on the basis of the degrees of the end vertices of the edges. However, degree centrality is not cognizant of the location of the nodes in the hierarchy. Rather, we propose the use of hierarchy-aware metrics (such as the k-core index of a node: the largest value of k for which the node would be part of a k-core and not part of any k′-core, where k′ > k and the number of k-core levels for which there exists a non-empty k-core for the network) for assortativity calculations. We first determine the assortativity index ( A s s I kcore ) of a network on the basis of the k-core indexes of the vertices. We then conduct principal component analysis (PCA) on a dataset of the A s s I kcore and the number of k-core levels for a suite of 77 real-world networks. We quantify the hierarchical k-core assortativity of a network as the weighted sum of the entries in the two principal components of this dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children and even infants have clear intuitions about power early in development; they can infer who is dominant and subordinate from observing a single interaction. However, it is unclear what children infer about each individual's status from these interactions—do they think dominants and subordinates will maintain their status when interacting with novel partners? In three experiments, we investigate this question. Children (4- to 10-year-olds, N = 365) heard stories about a dominant and subordinate agent and predicted the dominant or subordinate agent's behavior with a novel agent. In all studies, we found that 7- to 10-year-olds generalized dominance, thinking the dominant would again be dominant or "in charge," both for social power (e.g., granting permission) in Study 1 and physical dominance (e.g., a fistfight) in Studies 2 and 3. Furthermore, although they believed dominant agents would win dominance contests (fistfights), they did not believe they would win contests unrelated to dominance (math contests). Younger children did not generalize social power (Study 1) but did generalize physical dominance (Studies 2 and 3). However, even for physical dominance, their generalizations were less selective (i.e., they believed the dominant would win fistfights and math contests). Notably, neither age group generalized an agent's submissiveness in any of the studies—they did not believe a subordinate agent would again be subordinate when paired with a novel partner. We discuss how these results extend past work on children's developing intuitions about dominance and prompt deeper questions about the inferences children draw from dominance interactions. Public Significance Statement: Inferring whether people are dominant or subordinate in a social hierarchy informs how we interact with them. From whom do we take and to whom do we give orders and who might we want to avoid (e.g., to evade bullying)? Because perceived status influences people's behavior toward others, it is particularly important to understand the building blocks that underlie the ability to infer status, and whether relative rank generalizes across contexts. Understanding how children track status will be informative for educators interested in mitigating the negative social effects that can be entailed by such social hierarchies (e.g., forms of aggression, both physical and relational). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindu law tradition grounds its social ethics on an ideological hierarchy of class or caste known as varṇa. The positive inculcation of this hierarchy is bolstered by a fear of social inversion, known as pratiloma, in every area of law and society. Through an examination of the concept of pratiloma, this article contends first that the central Hindu law principle of dharma, religious and legal duty, depends upon knowing and abiding by one's place in society. From this Hindu articulation of social rank as the foundation of ethics, the article then draws a comparison between classical Anglo-American conservatism and Hindu law to suggest that conservative traditions in general base moral action on social station and the fear of breaking social rank. Ethics in Hindu law, therefore, are derived from an acceptance of social station within the varṇa hierarchy and the constant cultivation of local expectations of proper behavior according to social position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchy conflict, a dispute among members over the rank order of influence in the team, often impairs team processes and outcomes. The current literature often operates from the assumption that self-interest must be high when team members engage in hierarchy conflict. Building on interdependence theory, we propose that hierarchy conflict may also occur when members have a more prosocial motivation, leading to a more constructive expression of the hierarchy conflict and more positive effects on team performance than hierarchy conflict instigated by members with a more proself motivation. Specifically, we argue that the extent to which a team member is more driven by prosocial (versus proself) motivation heightens the threshold and lowers the frequency for engaging in a hierarchy conflict and that more prosocially motivated team members express their challenge of the hierarchy more directly and with less intensity than more proself-motivated members. This sets in motion a hierarchy conflict exchange that is more constructive and helps teams perform better compared with hierarchy conflict instigated by proself motivation. Our theory complements and extends the current study of the causes, expressions, and consequences of hierarchy conflict in teams across multiple levels of analysis and helps redirect the focus of how hierarchy conflict is viewed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our review of 154 articles published over the last decade portrays an evolution of status research. This body of literature has transitioned from viewing status as a monolithic construct to appreciating its inherently multidimensional nature, characterized by diverse types, functions, levels, and audience structures. Although this shift has expanded our knowledge, it has also introduced increased complexity and fragmentation. To systematize this scattered work on a multifaceted view of status, we develop a comprehensive framework that integrates the diverse research findings. For each constituent part of this framework, we review key themes and insights in the literature and outline future research directions. Our goal is to provide a clear roadmap to navigate the increasing complexity of status research, encouraging more precise theorizing and transversal exploration across the different dimensions of status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how everyday practices of ‘bordering’, as conceived by Yuval- Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019) as the ongoing proliferation of border sites where migrants are assessed to be fit for inclusion or exclusion, may violate moral respect by subjecting migrants to a wide array of discriminatory treatment, leading to what I call ‘status-harms’. Section II begins by providing an overview of bordering and the various forms it has taken, such as internal immigration checkpoints or even online visa application processes. Section III develops an account of comparative and non-comparative status-harms and why they constitute violations of moral respect. There, I pay special attention to comparative status-harms by proposing three conditions under which a comparative status-harm can be said to have occurred: (a) if an individual or group is singled out for disadvantageous treatment that others are not subjected to on the basis of a socially salient attribute, (b) if the attribute marks them out as inferior relative to those who are not affected thus, and (c) ascriptions of inferior status occur within a morally objectionable social hierarchy where they are targeted by hostile norms and practices centred around that attribute. I then consider how discriminatory practices of bordering routinely imposes status-harms on migrants. Section IV draws a distinction between two types of discrimination that migrants may be subjected to at border sites, which I term policy-based discrimination and procedure-based discrimination, and explores their relationship to the comparative and non-comparative status-harms suffered by migrants. I conclude in Section V.