Perhaps the most widely and persistently reported characteristic of Japanese organizational development in the period 1868–1945 is the pattern of behavior known as ringisei. The literature defines ringisei as a system, emerging first in the 1870's and becoming endemic after 1900, characteristic of both public and private bureaucracies in Japan. In this system of decision-making, policy was and, apparently, still is drafted at lower departmental levels by “specialists” and circulated by document or formal approval, indicated by the affixing of a seal, to successively higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. The policy thus circulated was said to become official when the document reached the minister or senior executive official and he affixed the final seal to the document. It is this pattern that is usually viewed as being synonymous with decision-making from below. This assumption appears to stem from the often repeated belief that once drafted in response to a request from superiors the document (ringisho) met only approval or stalling but never rejection on its journey through ever-higher levels of the administrative hierarchy. Analysts have consistently seen the ringisei system as a major, if not the key, factor in the civil bureaucracy's inability to innovate and as the means by which officials were able to avoid individual responsibility for decisions. The system is also often viewed as the means by which, in the pre-World War II period subordinates were able to impose policies on their superiors without being held accountable.

Rapid growth in the size and militancy of trade union movements has been a common development in the newly independent states of Asia since the end of colonial rule less than two decades ago. In these states, and in the more recently independent African states as well, government employees frequently constitute one of the principal groups of organized workers. Public servants' right of association and right to strike or demonstrate have been among the insistent questions confronting the governments of the new states.

In the areas of Asia formerly under British rule, public servants enjoy the right to form trade unions with some restrictions and, except in Pakistan, trade unionism in the public service has expanded considerably. In India, government employees other than industrial workers are allowed to organize subject to restrictions limiting membership or leadership in their trade unions to public servants and prohibiting political activity by the unions.

The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.

Party governments in Japan during the period from 1924 to 1932 joined a majority of the European democracies in imposing rigid state controls over the new medium of radio. Over the years many elected governments have restricted political expression over radio despite the strong logical connection between free elections and free speech, and this article examines the Japanese case in a comparative perspective. It analyzes the decision-making process that produced Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), the public-interest radio monopoly, in Japan in 1926, as well as the exercise of state controls over broadcasting until the last prewar party cabinet fell in 1932. Various definitions of the public interest that are consistent with democratic values may nonetheless call for close state supervision of broadcasting. In Japan, the rationale for the control of radio resembled the rationales of many contemporary democracies. The Japanese experience suggests that, although broadcasting controls may not have contradicted democratic principles, the development of a strong democratic regime would have been better served by a liberal policy toward the new electronic medium.