This textbook is a comprehensive, student-friendly guide to understanding the fundamentals of public administration. It examines the recent developments and relevant theoretical underpinnings in an accessible manner. Public Administration: Helps students grasp key dialectical interconnections between theoretical conceptualizations and prevalent socio-economic and political circumstances Provides understanding of issues in governance Analyses significant transformations in civil society and administrative set-ups across the world Highlights the contributions of non-Western thinkers in the development of conceptual ideas of the discipline Accessibly written, it caters to a wide range of university syllabi in public administration and will be essential for students and researchers of political science, public policy and public administration. It will also be particularly useful for those preparing for the civil service examinations.

Midway through the reign of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, Hungli, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men's queues (the braids worn by royal decree) and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn opens a window on the world of eighteenth-century China.

This volume translates one of the major works of modern Chinese philosophy and in so doing makes a major contribution to the study of comparative philosophy.

No detailed description available for "History and Institutions, 3".

Participatory governance has a long history in India and this book traces historical-intellectual trajectories of participatory governance and how older Western discourses have influenced Indian policymakers. While colonial rulers devolved power to accommodate dissenting voices, for independent India, participatory governance was a design for democratizing governance in its true sense. Participation also acted as a vehicle for localizing governance. The author draws on both Western and non-Western theoretical treatises and the book seeks to conceptualize localizing governance also as a contextual response. It also makes the argument that despite being located in different socio-economic and political milieu, thinkers converge to appreciate localizing governance as perhaps the only reliable means to democratize governance. The book aims to confirm this argument by reference to sets of evidence from the Indian experience of localizing governance. By attempting a genealogy of participatory governance in the West and in India, and an empirical study of participatory governance in India, the book sheds light on the exchange of ideas and concepts through space and time, thus adding to the growing body of literature in the social sciences on ‘conceptual flow’. It will be of interest to political scientists and historians, in particularly those studying South Asia.

This second volume of the ongoing annotated translation of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shi chi(The Grand Scribe's Records), widely acknowledged as the most important early Chinese history, contains the "basic annals" of five early Han-dynasty emperors. The annals trace the first century of Han rule (206 BC to ca. 100 BC) in a year-by-year account that focuses on imperial activities. In The Grand Scribe's Records, Ssu-ma Ch'ien revitalised the style of the annals he had written for previous rulers. Here are accounts of the peasant who founded the dynasty, Liu Pang, a man noted as much for his licentiousness as he was his ruthless political instinct, and of his cruel wife, Empress Lÿ, who murdered her chief rival for Liu Pang's affections in the most gruesome manner. The annals of two relatively undistinguished emperors follow. The volume concludes with Ssu-ma's depiction of perhaps the greatest ruler of the Han, Emperor Wu, told within the context of his delusive attempts to find a means to achieve immortality. When completed this translation will bring all 130 chapters of the Shih chi into English. Volumes 1 and 7 were published by Indiana University Press in 1994.