Power and Empowerment in Strict Hierarchies

Hierarchically structured organisations endow its members with distinct institutional roles. In the context of decision-making, these roles depend on the decision rights individuals are endowed with, the hierarchical positions individuals occupy, and the rules such organisations use to arrive at final decisions. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, to formulate and analyse measures of how powerful the members of hierarchically structured organisations are in virtue of the institutional roles they are endowed with. Second, to discuss the effect of endowing the members of such organisations with distinct institutional roles. Chapter 1 clarifies the meaning of these concepts, describes two sets of decision rights that subsequent chapters deal with (a so called binary and ternary case), and explains two types of constraints that individuals may be facing when exercising their decision rights (so called hierarchical games and hierarchical decision models). Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the binary and ternary case in the context of hierarchical games. While binary hierarchical games have been well studied, a corresponding model of the ternary case in hierarchical games does not exist in the literature—Chapter 2 formulates such a model. Chapter 3, first, defines and axiomatises measures of power for the binary and ternary hierarchical games introduced in Chapter 2. Then, Chapter 3 compares the binary and ternary measures with respect to what they imply for how powerful the members of hierarchical organisations are in virtue of the institutional roles these members are endowed with. Chapters 4–6 explore these implications in the context of hierarchical decision models. Chapter 4 prepares the ground by first defining a binary and a corresponding ternary hierarchical decision model. Chapter 5, then, defines and axiomatises measures of power for the binary and ternary hierarchical decision models introduced in Chapter 4, and compares what these measures imply with respect to how powerful the members of hierarchical organisations are in virtue of the institutional roles they are endowed with. One of the main messages of these comparisons in Chapters 3 and 5 is that, as organisations expand horizontally and vertically, the ternary role is more relatively empowering than the binary role for members who do not occupy the highest position in the organisation—particularly when these members’ combined power is compared with the power of those at the top. Chapter 6 discusses these and related empowerment effects within organisations with more general hierarchical structures than those considered in prior chapters. There are two core conclusions of this discussion. First, that any member of an organisation with an arbitrary hierarchical structure is more powerful when endowed with the ternary rather than the binary role. Second, that certain types of hierarchical structures are most empowering and others are most disempowering for those members who do not occupy an organisation’s top position. In particular, keeping the number of an organisation’s members fixed, what we call stars—horizontal structures that we define in Chapter 2—are most empowering, while what we call lines—vertical structures that are again defined in Chapter 2—are most disempowering. Chapter 7 summarises the main contributions of this thesis and concludes with an outline of possible lines of future research suggested by the present work.