Stepping back to look at dominance theory as a whole, I found that they are not without problems. Pecking order may apply to chickens, but primates vary widely in social organization, lending little support to the thesis that dominance displays, dominance-submission behaviours and so on are as universal as Johnstone suggests and can therefore be thought to shed much light on the complex social organization of humans.
I’m just googling around but it looks like the default for multi-male, multi-female primate societies is a linear dominance hierarchy. The existence of Bonobos suggests whatever status programming we have might be more flexible than some claim. And that’s a really interesting notion and ought to be explored. But I don’t think it is sufficient for throwing out dominance theory. It seems reasonable to infer, even without knowing anything about human group structure, just from facts about other primates, that humans likely have some kind of dominance hierarchy. And if actual humans (like us!, we’re authorities!) feel like these theories capture some of what we mean by status in human groups then some of the insights we find in primatology are probably applicable to humans. Bonobos are likely the exception, not the norm. Moreover, it looks like primatologists don’t have any problem using the word “alpha” to describe those on the top of these dominance hierarchies (If people are really too busy to just google through these things I can go back and pull out examples).
I think the dominance hierarchy is probably about the same thing as prestige status. Prestige status does confer power over small groups. But it would be a very messy way to organize very large groups. I think power and wealth status are likely constructions that are much newer than prestige status. They’re part of how we organize large (100+ ?, 1000+ ?) societies, societies much bigger than any in the ancestral environment. These kinds of status are more flexible in form (in just a decade we can go from comfortable monarchy to comfortable democracy) but more stable in internal structure, in which individuals have the highest status. I suspect it gets a lot harder to compute hierarchies as group size expands. In a group of 1000 the 100 with the highest status is hard to determine. The 100 with the most wealth is relatively easy to determine. And it also isn’t likely to change any time soon (whereas prestige could). We also probably lack programming that helps us make sense of these kinds of status whereas we are more likely to in the case of prestige. Occasionally of course, prestige status issues will come up in the context of broad social organization. For example, prestige status may influence the outcome of close elections.
I’m just googling around but it looks like the default for multi-male, multi-female primate societies is a linear dominance hierarchy. The existence of Bonobos suggests whatever status programming we have might be more flexible than some claim. And that’s a really interesting notion and ought to be explored. But I don’t think it is sufficient for throwing out dominance theory. It seems reasonable to infer, even without knowing anything about human group structure, just from facts about other primates, that humans likely have some kind of dominance hierarchy. And if actual humans (like us!, we’re authorities!) feel like these theories capture some of what we mean by status in human groups then some of the insights we find in primatology are probably applicable to humans. Bonobos are likely the exception, not the norm. Moreover, it looks like primatologists don’t have any problem using the word “alpha” to describe those on the top of these dominance hierarchies (If people are really too busy to just google through these things I can go back and pull out examples).
I think the dominance hierarchy is probably about the same thing as prestige status. Prestige status does confer power over small groups. But it would be a very messy way to organize very large groups. I think power and wealth status are likely constructions that are much newer than prestige status. They’re part of how we organize large (100+ ?, 1000+ ?) societies, societies much bigger than any in the ancestral environment. These kinds of status are more flexible in form (in just a decade we can go from comfortable monarchy to comfortable democracy) but more stable in internal structure, in which individuals have the highest status. I suspect it gets a lot harder to compute hierarchies as group size expands. In a group of 1000 the 100 with the highest status is hard to determine. The 100 with the most wealth is relatively easy to determine. And it also isn’t likely to change any time soon (whereas prestige could). We also probably lack programming that helps us make sense of these kinds of status whereas we are more likely to in the case of prestige. Occasionally of course, prestige status issues will come up in the context of broad social organization. For example, prestige status may influence the outcome of close elections.
Interestingly, it seems that bonobos do have what primatologists call “alpha males”.