It depends on the job for me. Currently I work at a job where there is a definite hierarchical organizational structure but within the part of the place I work, there are only four of us, and the manager is, most of the time, only a manager when it comes to signing off on reimbursement checks, annual reviews, report writing, and running interference between me and upper management. Most of the time I ignore that there is a hierarchy, but do so with some degree of caution and wariness.
As far as with upper management, I just avoid them as much as possible, and occasionally find small ways to poke at them or otherwise feel better by lashing out, but as BA@ suggested, the degree of open hostility possible has shifted in my adult life.
In previous jobs there was either an almost total lack of hierarchy (one job there were two staff who ran our particular parts of the agency, and a somewhat uninvolved board of directors who were so enamored with us as people that we basically had almost free reign to do what we needed how we wanted), or there was open hostility. The last job I had that was not in the not-for-profit world I openly criticized the upper management, helped in trying to openly organize a union, stole from work (it was a book store with an art supply section), disappeared for an hour at a time (either to go have a nap, talk to friends/my partner who also worked there, or to have a "liquid lunch break"), flyers and zines were mass produced in the evenings on their copy machines, experiments turning ball point pens and rubber bands into semi-deadly projectile weapons happened. The only thing I didn't do was surf the web (they were really uptight about employees being online for some reason, which is funny considering how many books I absconded with).
