Introduction: Bureaucratic Institutions and Information Networks

Abstract

In the almost two decades since Prof. Deng Xiaonan published her seminal article, “Towards a Living Institutional History,” scholars have made remarkable progress toward understanding Song government institutions as dynamic, living organisms that interacted with each other and with other elements in society through interconnecting networks of “processes” and “relationships.”1 Both the article by Xiong Huei-Lan on the function of the academic agencies (guan’ge 館閣) as a career track for Song officials and Tung Yung-chang’s article on the role of informal information networks in the re-appointment process build upon and advance the practice of living institutional history. Xiong explores the “process” by which the academic agencies served as locales to foster prospective talent for top leadership positions—perhaps a Song predecessor to the American policy think tank. Tung delves into the murky “relationships” between brokers who sold information about the re-appointment process to clients eager to obtain a preferred post— perhaps a Song precursor to the modern American executive search firm. As a young scholar I once heard a titan of Western sinology complain that dynastic history biographies devoted too much space to strings of empty titles and too little to the subject’s real personality and achievements. His view reflected a common perception at the time that the arcana of the Chinese personnel system was best ignored in the interest of research into larger issues of intellectual or political history. Only later did I realize that the Song system of personnel management had, as Umehara Kaoru has written, the subtlety