The horrors and harmonies of workplace hierarchy

I am a child of the seventies, and one of my favourite shows when I was just a tyke was The Jeffersons. For those not familiar with The Jeffersons, it was about a black family in New York City who had, through ambition and entrepreneurship, ‘made it to the top’. George Jefferson, the patriarch, was a bolshie character. Hijinks usually ensued. But what stuck with me about that show was the catchy theme song, Movin’ On Up. The lyrics were ‘I’m movin’ on up, to the upper east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky… I finally got a piece of the pie.’ Growing up in suburbia, this was probably the first time that I learned the idea of a penthouse, and the notion that the higher up the building, the more important you were. It wasn’t until I was about age eight that I realised the word wasn’t ‘high-archy’, but ‘hierarchy.’

Hierarchy is a resilient beast. Hierarchies have survived through economic crashes, world wars, tech revolutions, because they are efficient. Our brains are lazy, and hierarchies provide clarity and structure, but the word hierarchy today is emblematic of not only a structure but the resulting culture as well. Embedded in our lexicon from the ‘corporate ladder’ to the ‘glass ceiling’, hierarchies define our aspirations and our struggles alike.

‘Hierarchy’ first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1880 as a reference to the three orders of angels as depicted by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The term was thereafter adopted, not surprisingly, by the military, and later commercially propagated during the industrial revolution. Formal organisational hierarchies were key to the rapid growth of large conglomerates during that period, and so when the great depression of the 1930’s hit the United States, the organisations with embedded hierarchies were the ones best able to survive. The halo effect from those survivors was that hierarchical systems became synonymous with strength and stability.