ABSTRACT
Politics occurs not only in whole societies, but in parts of them and in the course of relations between them. These parts may be villages or towns or regions. Or they may be major institutions – whether ‘political’ in the conventional sense, or commercial, educational or religious. All are involved in the use, production and distribution of various resources, and hence are political institutions. With appropriate adjustments, therefore, the framework of analysis adopted in this book can be used to explore their politics. To show how this may be done, the present chapter looks at the politics of villages, a typical university department, and a large international organization, the World Bank.
