0 an informal social system in which some people or groups know they are more or less important than others:
1 the order of importance of people in a group:
2 the level of importance of people in a social group, at work, etc:
He claimed that it was the central factor that determined the international pecking order.
It also confirmed the new pecking order within the revolutionary alliance.
An example of this is when all of the comparisons are consistent with a fixed pecking order.
To the cognoscenti of cyberspace, there is a strict pecking order, all plainly visible in the alphabet soup of letters and punctuation.
For them there is a pecking order in terms of materials from those that are decent and novel to those that are secondary and poor.
The pecking order of free radicals and antioxidants: lipid peroxidation, a-tocopherol and ascorbate.
It is a type of music, not a quality of music (or 'quality' music) in terms of which all others musics are judged inferior on the inevitable aesthetic pecking order.
That is, a pecking order exists that sets the agenda and ultimately determines the direction the guideline is going.