Mystery.

Local governments today are under extreme pressure to undertake boundary reform. The global trend toward urbanization has brought with it economic, environmental, social, and regional demands that have severe implications for local governments and their territories. As a result, changing the areal jurisdiction of this most basic level of government has become a persistent and pressing challenge around the globe. This collection examines the legal and regulatory procedures involved in such municipal restructuring. Case studies from eight nations - the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, Israel, Korea, China, and South Africa - investigate how and why local governments have been enlarged in scope and reduced in number within each country. Four key aspects are examined: the geography of the local government boundary problem, the procedures associated with boundary reform, the roles of institutions and actors in boundary reform, and the implications for urban and regional governance. Redrawing Local Government Boundaries offers a broad theoretical understanding of local government boundary reform and informs the wider scholarly discussion about institutional change, state structures, and the areal jurisdiction of local governments. The first international comparative study of local boundary reform, it will be a valuable reference for scholars and students of political science, public administration, geography, urban studies, and urban planning.

The essays in this volume explore various aspects of work in China, including the nature of work, gender inequalities in work, gender and work in the context of migration, and the reciprocal influences of households and work organization.

Was the New Testament written in the early first century CE or at a much later date? Sturdy's work was conceived as a reply to John Robinson's Reading the New Testament, which dated the New Testament material very early. Sturdy argued that the Pauline letters are in places interpolated, Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastorals are pseudonymous, and that Luke and Acts are not by the same author. He believed that Matthew was the last Synoptic Gospel to be written, with John assigned to the period 140 CE. Redrawing the Boundaries offers a radical approach to New Testament Studies that stands in a long tradition of scholarship represented by the Tuebingen School in Germany.

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

This book tests the effectiveness of political control and neutral rules on limiting partisan gerrymandering in state legislative redistricting. Specifically, the book examines the 2000 redistricting process in eight states_Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Washington.

The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 fundamentally changed the way in which reviews of parliamentary constituencies boundaries are conducted. The new rule requiring the electorate of all but four constituencies to be within 5% of the UK average number of electors for a constituency meant that the Boundary Commissions were unable to give adequate consideration to other factors. Although there is a case for the electorates of parliamentary constituencies to be more equal than is the case at present, the Boundary Commissions must be able to take a balanced approach to various considerations-including reflecting local ties and limiting disruption to existing constituencies. If no action is taken, the next boundary review will commence in early 2016. It is recommended that the rules be changed-including relaxing the 5% rule and reversing the reduction of the number of parliamentary constituencies to 600-ahead of the next boundary review. To achieve this, the next Government should make a statement no later than June 2015 on its policy on the rules for the distribution of parliamentary constituencies. This statement should respond to the recommendations set out in this report. The Government should in July 2015 publish a draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny and introduce a Bill in the autumn of 2015 to receive Royal Assent by early 2016.