Case studies are clearly useful in showing how dishonest tycoons can come undone, or revealing how tricky dilemmas - whether, say, to fire loyal but inefficient employees - can be finessed.
After the fall of Rome, the first European society to regulate behaviour in private life in accordance with a complicated code of etiquette was twelfth-century Provence, in France.
Although church ritual had sustained an interest in timekeeping throughout the centuries of urban collapse that followed the fall of Rome, church time was nature's time.