As colonial subjects acquired Britishness, how did such newly acquired identities interact with their existing identities and identifications? This chapter explores the ramifications of colonial subjects acquiring Britishness by drawing from the experience of the Hong Kong-Portuguese (more commonly termed ‘Macanese’ now). Through education and participating in public services, Portuguese Eurasians in Hong Kong took both an active and passive role in acquiring Britishness. While on one hand institutional discrimination made it too obvious to them that state authorities never fully accepted their Britishness, on the other they became too British in the eyes of other Portuguese communities in the region. Using newspapers, family papers, and oral history, this chapter examines this acculturation process, and the tensions and backlash this process engendered for the community.

Generally and ideally, recruitment and appointment to the Civil Service or public sector in the Philippines should be based on merit and fitness. However, political appointments by the Executive, particularly by the President of the Republic, for positions that are policy determining, primarily confidential, or highly technical in nature are ‘allowed’. This political appointment is construed as patronage appointment and perceived to be abused. Recent reports point to the growing politicization of this appointment process, with no meaningful means for vetting presidential appointees to ensure they meet the criteria and have the required qualifications for the positions to which they are appointed. We investigate patronage appointment at the third tier of the Philippine civil service and describe the policy-patronage dynamics over historical period. It also attempts to conceptualize a typology of roles and relationships between the patron and the appointees based on Peters typology. This challenging research could provide the bases for future studies on patronage politics in the public sector, their implications and effects on the bureaucracy, public policy, and development.

There is nothing more important to the future of the WTO than negotiation. One senior WTO Director lamented after MC11 that it was a lost skill. This proved not to be the case on many issues decided at MC12. Nevertheless, attention must be paid to making sure that those serving the WTO and the WTO members understand the centrality of negotiation. It is a skill set that makes international cooperation possible.

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section I discuss Plutarch’s life and work in the general context of the first century CE. Following this, I provide a short analysis of six of Plutarch’s Lives, Lycurgus, Numa, Alexander, Caesar, Antony and Phocion, to demonstrate the key themes highlighted by scholars of his thought, and to introduce readers to accounts which figure among the most prominent as references in Western intellectual traditions. In the concluding section I offer a comparison and contrast between Cicero’s On Duties and the themes of Plutarch’s Lives and his moral essays devoted to questions of public life. This comparison highlights what distinguishes Plutarch’s contribution and signals his unique contribution to traditions of political reflection on public life and public service.

The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

Against the common view that the creation of obligations through generosity in gift-giving and hospitality is a pervasive feature of the Homeric world and an antecedent of the classical and later culture of euergetism and benefactions, a survey of the epic evidence shows that this type of generosity is in effect confined to ‘international’ relations. Within Homeric communities, ‘gifts’ are almost always forms of payment for services rendered or tributes to those of higher status, and the flow of wealth is from the community to the elite more than vice-versa. The origins of public benefactions therefore do not lie in a culture of gift-giving but in an ideology of ‘public service’ owed by the elite to the community. In Homer, such service is ideally performed in war, counsel and the administration of justice, but as political and military changes reduced the scope for elite performance in these arenas while public spending needs increased during the archaic period, the community increasingly came to expect financial services instead from the elite.

The changing position of the public service is examined in relation to the growth of ministers’ policy roles. As the political executive assumed greater policy leadership, a stronger emphasis has been placed on the contestability of advice and increasing use of other advisory sources. There is a tendency for public service policy capacity to decline, but there are differences across the policy advisory systems due to country-specific patterns of reforms. The public service has become more disposed to being internally collaborative and externally engaged through policy processes, but regular injunctions for greater connectivity indicate continuing shortfalls. There is a question of whether a restoration of capacity is possible and what the advisory role is for a public service that has been emphasising generalist and process-based functions as a broker and convenor of advisory inputs.

Quality policy advice is essential for good governance, but the advice needed, who provides it and how, have evolved in Westminster policy advisory systems (PAS). The public service role has been transformed as new sources of advice have emerged and ministers have been critiqued for ignoring officials’ advice while focusing on the short term. In a contestable environment, public service advice is replaced by that of consultants, think tanks and political aides. Four themes guided the analysis of advisory systems: the place of advisory work in the Westminster administrative tradition; structural and organisational trends; comparative analysis of advisory systems’ stability and change; and managing PAS and implications for policy making. The main arguments are: PAS is more dynamic and complex than is currently depicted; politicisation and externalisation continue as important dynamics but need to be explained; parallel processes have operated to increase flexibility in using advice instruments and independent agencies; and PAS change has been gradual and endogenous. At the macro level, dimensions of an evolving advisory system are identified based on the directions of change, which indicates a more expansive understanding of PAS that takes into account the complexities of public policy and the centrality of government.