Sir Thomas More’s Utopia provides an occasion to delve into how fiscal policy and administrative activity constitute forms of worldmaking. This chapter argues that More’s Utopia places the challenges of defining and funding security at the center of its project, both in Book One’s critique of contemporary rule and in Book Two’s thought experiment about how to govern security. Utopia, as an alternative to contemporary Europe, can be seen as an attempt to resolve the fiscal security dilemmas besetting European governments by eliminating private property and money. The presence of other polities, though, complicates the effort to imagine a world in which security is distributed equitably, a world without fiscal conflict or the violence that monarchical wealth enables. Utopia thus provides both a powerful diagnosis of the shortcomings of contemporary governmental practice and a meditation on the limits of the ability to govern security.

The importance of cohorting observation unit patients in one location or unit, having adequate nursing staffing with specific nurse to patient ratios, design, equipment/supplies, dealing with variations in hourly and daily census, the negatives of floating nursing/support staff to other units, and nursing/physician administration are discussed.

The director of an observation unit needs to provide service to more than just the patients that pass through the unit. Hospital executive leadership is a key constituency with a vested interested in the successful operation of an observation unit. This chapter discusses key expectations frequently held by health care executives, and offers potential solutions and suggestions for keeping the observation unit in the good graces of the administration.

This chapter gives the administrative policies that are necessary for starting and maintaining an observation unit.

This chapter examines the relationship between the administrative state and constitutional values and structures with reference to German and American legal and political theory. It recovers from these intertwined traditions three analytical approaches to the administrative state. The first analytical approach understands the administrative state to implement the constitution. The second understands the administrative state to generate new constitutional structures and values. The third understands the administrative state to displace the constitution with patterns and practices of rule that lie outside of the existing governance framework. These frameworks foreground normative analysis of how the administrative state ought to relate to general democratic principles and the specific constitutional rules that institutionalize them. I argue for a differentiated and developmental understanding of the relationship between democracy, constitution, and administration. The concrete administration of democratic values should allow constitutional rules to shift in light of social and historical context. The administrative state should not be strictly limited by, but rather should facilitate critical interrogation of, the constitution’s current instantiation of democratic values. The administrative state can and should hold the constitution open for the introduction and proliferation of new institutional configurations and forms of public life.

This chapter surveys the workings of the British Board of Longitude in the period from the mid-1770s, which saw expenditure and bureaucracy increase. The Longitude Act of 1774 cut rewards and tightened the criteria for success. Managed through a permanent secretary, the Board more resembled an office of state, while personal and patronage relations still played vital roles in its conduct. Both Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne and Joseph Banks exploited the Board to further their own interests in policy and organisation in projects including management of the Nautical Almanac and its computers, supply of instruments to survey voyages, and trials of new kinds of optical glass. The chapter explains how Maskelyne used the Board to extend networks centred on the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, while Banks used his position as a Commissioner of Longitude to mend relations with the Admiralty and extend patronage. Although there were major tensions and conflicts with Maskelyne, Banks was able effectively to make the Board of Longitude an integral component of his system of public administration over the sciences.

This chapter reinterprets the demise of the Board of Longitude in 1828, which has been seen as resulting from reformist pressure or financial retrenchment. Such accounts underestimate continuation of the Board’s activities, notably managing chronometers, producing the Nautical Almanac and providing scientific advice. Changes were initially driven by Joseph Banks’s interests, notably the appointment of Royal Society fellows and Resident Commissioners including Thomas Young, who became secretary and a key organiser after Banks’s death. Schemes such as rewards for finding the Northwest Passage, improvement of optical glass, determining the figure of the Earth and the foundation of the Cape Observatory, were managed under Young’s aegis. The role of the Admiralty and its Secretaries John Wilson Croker and John Barrow were decisive. The Longitude Act of 1818 brought the Board under Admiralty control, and that of 1828 moved its work into the Admiralty. An Admiralty committee comprising Young and natural philosophers Michael Faraday and Edward Sabine was formed; the Nautical Almanac and chronometer testing remained within the Admiralty’s financial remit.

This chapter examines the foundations and evolution of papal legation in the Middle Ages. It frames the development of this ecclesiastical office in the context of burgeoning papal authority and its reception in Christian lands. And it posits the growth of legation as a natural and effective response to the Roman Curia’s administrative, bureaucratic, and legal needs.

The academics studied are more than ivory-ensconced scholars, they are multiskilled and multi-committed to serving their communities, universities, and professions. One means is by integrating research, teaching, and service activities. Research might spark a new book, class, and workshop offering. Scholars especially take their work to the people, writing articles for practitioners and providing presentations and instructional materials for schools. Some serve the field by being journal reviewers or editors. Editorial positions not only serve the field, they help you grow as a scholar, introducing you to new theories, findings, and statistical approaches and exposing you to instructively good and poor writing samples. Surprisingly, several productive scholars served administrative roles at some career point. Most did because they wanted to make their organizations and people better and more productive. All found ways to remain personally productive through collaborations and assuming more back-seat research-directing roles. Still, productive scholars prioritize research over all else and accept that they might be less good at other things. They say one should not aim to be prolific scholars but the best one can be, whether that produces five hundred or fifty publications. Each publication should represent one’s best thinking and be impactful.

In Roman Egypt, Greek remained the language of rule but the introduction of the Roman legal system and practices resulted in changes within the bureaucracy and an increase in documentation. Declarations were now required for birth, death, taxes, and much else. There were minor changes in the vocabulary of slavery, but in terms of acquisition and use much remained unchanged. There was an active market in slaves who were primarily employed in the home. There is further evidence for slaves in labouring jobs, artisanal roles, in entertainment and sex work. Imperial slaves held some important administrative roles, and slaves might act as business agents in urban settings. Slave labour was little used in agriculture, though the balance between free and unfree changed over time. As earlier, the boundaries between these categories were sometimes blurred. There is evidence, too, for the manumission of slaves. Documents translated in this chapter illustrate the situation.

The history of Egypt during the first centuries of Islam comes with a striking paradox. While Upper Egypt, from Fusṭāṭ to Aswan, has received much attention due to the numerous papyri from the region, the Delta is rarely attested in these documents. This is most probably linked to the region’s humid soil, which contributed to the progressive degradation of papyri. Indeed, other than a few private letters written in Alexandria, no papyri from this period have been found in the Delta. Despite this, the Delta occupied a central place in the imperial construction of Islam, especially during the Umayyad period (40/661–132/750): it linked the new capital, Fusṭāṭ, to the Mediterranean and its main cities, was the prime locus of Arab settlement from the second/eighth centuries and was a choice transit space to Syria-Palestine and Cyrenaica. Based on narratives by Egyptian Muslim writers and papyrological documents mentioning the Delta, we can sketch the history of the administrative and fiscal management of this space, to follow the process of tribal settlement in relationship with imperial policies and to analyse the latter’s consequences on the social situation in the Delta at the end of the Umayyad period and in the early Abbasid period.

Chapter 5 builds the case that, in order to better facilitate the collection of agricultural taxes, the Hieronian state brought about the standardization of volumetric measurement throughout southeastern Sicily during the course of the third century BCE.

The chapter deals with the administration of Alexander’s empire. The main focus is on the satrapal administration. Although Alexander borrowed the system of regional governance from the Achaemenids, he introduced changes to it, adapting it to the new circumstances. Alexander’s actions in the administrative sphere were not aimed at a realization of any abstract ideal. They were taken to satisfy specific needs arising at given points. Nonetheless, it is obvious that all the actions of the king were in pursuit of one main goal: the creation of an effective administrative system for the Imperial lands that would allow him to control and exploit the subjugated peoples better.

Alexander spent at most eight months in Egypt (mid/late October of 332 to late June of 331), but his brief time there has sparked more academic debate than any other similar period in his eleven-year campaign. In order to contextualize such a diversity of scholarly opinion, this chapter will investigate the Greco-Roman literary sources, the contemporary Egyptian language documents, and the archaeological evidence through four key events–Alexander’s arrival in Memphis, his founding of Alexandria, his visit to Siwah, and his return to Memphis and departure.