We possess in ancient Tamil a large body of poetry which antedates for all intents and purposes the incursion of Sanskrit culture into Tamilnad. This poetry, found in the eight anthologies and the Pattuppāṭṭu, dates from the first and second centuries A.D. The culture which produced it was a continuation of the megalithic culture which dominated the Deccan for the millenium before Christ. The special importance of early Tamil poetry for cultural history is that it describes this civilization, which according to the Allchins was characterized by a very conservative and unchanging culture, before it was appreciably influenced by Sanskritic culture from the North. Thus a study of early Tamil reveals elements which were contributed to India by this culture and which were later assimilated by the rest of India. Other sources for this culture—the Sattasaī in Māhārāṣṭrī, for example—show the influence of Sanskrit culture, so that it is not possible to determine from them which elements belonged originally to the Deccan culture and which to the culture of the North.

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.

During the 1660's four Manchus dominated the Chinese empire from the court at Peking. These four, Soni, Suksaha, Ebilun, and Oboi, had been appointed in the “Imperial Will” of the late Shun-chih Emperor to serve as Regents during the minority of the K'ang-hsi Emperor. For the first five years of the Regency these Manchus governed collectively. After 1666, however, one of the Regents, Oboi, managed to concentrate power in his own hands and to eliminate the influence of the other Regents. In the years of 1667–69, the young K'ang-hsi Emperor, assisted by his grandmother (the Grand Empress Dowager) and several Manchu advisers, sought to assert personal control over the Ch'ing state and to eliminate the ambitious Oboi. Eventually, in June, 1669, the Emperor arrested Oboi and put an end to his faction of relatives and supporters.

Western evaluations of the prospects for economic development in Indonesia seem to have come full circle in the past twenty years. The initially positive appraisals of the immediate post-independence period, based on the extensiveness of untapped resources, the apparent commitment of Indonesian leaders to development within a framework of parliamentary institutions and “rational” planning, and the euphoric Zeitgeist produced by newly-won independence, were undermined first by the parliamentary instability of the mid-1950s and then by the continuing political instability and presumed economic irrationality of the Sukarno years. Deepening pessimism, having reached its nadir in 1963–65 when cracks in the Guided Democracy structure were most visible and the Indonesian Communist Party seemed to be moving inexorably toward full control of the polity, was gradually reversed after 1966, as the new army-backed regime of President Suharto began to consolidate itself and to declare its commitment to a Western-assisted process of economic development.