This collection of cases is intended to be the first of several, and it may well be that future volumes will contain different emphases and perhaps different conceptions of case study. It is only right, therefore, that the writer should admite at the outset of his preference for the case study designed as a detailed narrative account of a complete episode in the work of some branch of administration. All five studies in this book follow this narrative pattern and in that respect are broadly similar to the products of the American Inter-University Case Program