Social institutions and basic principles of the organization of societies

Societies are systems composed of a great number of various social institutions that interact and change, which results in that the whole structure of societies changes. This is what social evolution is - the process of structural change. Evolution does not have any particular direction: any significant, that is, transforming change is evolutionary. Along with complexity measured in levels of political integration, societies as systems of social institutions have yet another fundamental characteristic that can be called a ‘basic principle of societal organization'. The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions relate to one another. Specifically, two basic principles can be distinguished here: heterarchy, whereby elements are unranked or can be ranked in different ways, and its opposite - homoarchy, whereby elements in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent most universal, ‘pure' (generalized) principles and basic trajectories of socio-cultural organization. There are no universal evolutionary stages: cultures can be (generally) heterarchical or homoarchical and have an equal level of complexity. A culture can change its basic organizational principle without changing its current complexity level. There also exist alternatives within each of the two types. The heterarchy - homoarchy dichotomy runs throughout the whole of human history: it is observable on all levels of social complexity in all historical periods and culture areas, including the globalized world of our time. Transformations in the ways social institutions and complexes thereof, that is, societal subsystems, are ranked (either homoarchically or hetrarchically), on the one hand, and changes in culture complexity overall, on the other, are two different, largely unrelated processes. The heterarchy - homoarchy dichotomy has, to a considerable degree, predetermined the non-linear and non-fixed nature of the global sociocultural process. An adequate understanding of human socio-cultural history does not appear possible unless one takes into consideration the possibility of alternative basic principles of societal organization, their complementary and competitive co-existence, and their interrelated dynamics throughout human history. Also, considering this possibility enables discussion of the future of the present-day globalized world as not fixed but variable, where homoarchical and heterarchical principles may intersect in various ways and at different levels - national, international, and transnational.

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