Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however:
Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies.
The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced of cybernetic orchestration. The second is that which percolates through the combinatorial serendipity of complexity and entropy into what might be called “natural” hierarchies.
A key problem seems to be that of just how much brute-forced or ego-driven and institutionally-normative order must be asserted when complex adaptive dynamical systems quite naturally explore the phase space of all possibility before approximating to their own optimal, if transient, solutions.
How, in short, to reconcile biology/physics/logic with human choice when the bias towards self-organisational efficiency encapsulates both already.
Even when we mess up our systems and organisational structures, there is a larger holistic and ontological container within which this is all located – itself much more of physics than of ourselves.
Daedelus Kite 