Many social Web sites allow users to annotate the content with descriptive metadata, such as tags, and more recently also to organize content hierarchically. These types of structured metadata provide valuable evidence for learning how a community organizes knowledge. For instance, we can aggregate many personal hierarchies into a common taxonomy, also known as a folksonomy, that will aid users...

Social dominance hierarchies are widespread, but little is known about the mechanisms that produce nonlinear structures. In addition to despotic hierarchies, where a single individual dominates, shared hierarchies exist, where multiple individuals occupy a single rank. In vertebrates, these complex dominance relationships are thought to develop from interactions that require higher cognition, b...

In terms of the relationship to injustice and inequality, both gender and sexuality function as ‘parallel and interlocking’ social hierarchies that shape basic relationships and access to resources and power (Collins 1993:37). Race or ethnicity and class, caste, and socio-economic status also function in this way (and in some cultures, other hierarchies form; for example religion, or age) (Acke...

This paper is motivated by the idea that development and developmental hierarchies have been constructed and embraced for centuries by scholars and policy makers, and have been disseminated among ordinary people. Recent research shows that most people have constructions of development hierarchies that are similar across countries. In this paper, we extend this research by examining how basic so...