Organizational Structure and Scalar Stress

It is a common observation in anthropology that larger societies tend to be more complex than smaller ones, and both size and complexity are normally considered to be major axes of variability in social evolution. Indeed, various measures of social-system size and organizational complexity are highly correlated Naroll (1956), for example, reports strong positive relationships between the population size of the largest settlement in a society (N = 25) and both degree of craft specialization and a measure of organizational ramification. Carneiro (1967) notes a similar relationship between population size and organizational complexity in a sample of 46 single-community cases, while Ember (1963) reports strong relationships between the number of types of political officials (both formal and informal) in a society (N = 24) and both population of the largest community and population of the largest territorial unit on behalf of which government activities are initiated. The relationships reported in these studies arc linear in logarithmic transformation. Figure 21.1 uses Ember's data to illustrate the relationship between types of political officials and population sizes of the largest organizational (territorial) unit Twenty-three of Ember's 24.cases are used here, giving a correlation between the variables examined of .828. One case (Thai: types of political officials = 100+, largest organizational unit = 20 million) was deleted as an