Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration: Concepts and Cases

Concepts and Cases

Raymond W Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317471134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Währungspolitik

"Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration" presents cutting-edge perspectives on the role of ethics in public sector management - what it is and where it is going. The contributors include a cross-section of authoritative authors from around the globe, and from both the academy and government. They cover a wide range of topics, diverse theoretical and conceptual paradigms, and global examples, and provide a broader view than what is typically offered in other books. The book includes both theoretical insights and commentaries grounded in practice. Chapters are divided into three parts: Ethical Foundations and Perspectives, Ethical Management and Ethical Leadership, and International and Comparative Perspectives.

III

International and Comparative Perspectives

The concept of comparative administration has evolved over the last five decades. In its earliest form it represented a statement of method; that is, public structures and processes of administration were compared. Much of the early work took on something of an ethnocentric cast in taking the American model of governance and administration as the basis for comparison. Others were judged by how close they hewed to that American model. The pioneering efforts of scholars such as Fred Riggs and Ferrel Heady changed how we viewed the field. Researchers in comparative administrative began to explore the processes and practices of countries to uncover shared assumptions and common frameworks so that lessons could be learned in other settings. This permitted scholars to examine the political and social structures that influence administration and management, not to “judge” those influences, but rather to create a taxonomy of influences that can be applied regardless of the setting. The two deceptively simple questions that are being asked are: what beliefs, processes, and practices do we have in common, and to what extent do the beliefs, processes, and practices that are not shared affect our understanding of ethics? Comparative administration scholars thus have an array of tools and approaches from which to draw. These include:

• cross-national comparisons;

• organizational taxonomies;

• political/social descriptions of administrative methods;

• analyses of internal processes in a single country (cases); and

• empirical and normative examinations of administrative practices.

It is in this context that we should understand the discussion of international and comparative perspectives on ethics. All of the above tools and techniques are on display in the chapters that follow. Chapters 8 and 14 are bookend pieces. Both ask important questions about governance and ethics. Chapter 8 asks the how the numbers and statistics are generated by which we assess and rank countries with regard to internal ethical performance. Chapter 14 focuses on “the divergence between global and local views on corruption.” Taken together these chapters provide insight into the two ways to understand ethics, one as a failure of processes and institutions and the second as a reaction to personal or individual behavior. These dichotomous views affect both the popular understanding of public sector ethics and the limited effect of structural change on public perception of the scope and extent of unethical behavior.

This theme is extended through the examination of ethical reforms and policy initiatives in Italy. Again through the lens of two divergent techniques of analysis we get a fuller understanding of the political activities in support of an anticorruption agenda. In the first study we see how the clash between the normative understandings and definitions of corruption that are constructed on the world stage may come into conflict with the attitudes and perspectives on corruption in a single nation. This theme mimics that of the Chapter 8, but extends it by providing us the depth and insight of the experience in a single country. The second “case” also comes from Italy. It works well as a companion to Chapter 10, because it asks the question left from that chapter; that is, what do we do in an operational and behavioral sense about corruption. That chapter introduces the important question of the role of organizational leadership in the face of corruption.

Beginning with Chapter 12, we shift gears to apply other techniques for exploring public sector ethics. That chapter follows the most traditional of methods—a straightforward cross-national comparison—in this case a comparison of the attitudes of senior municipal managers in the Netherlands and the United States. This particular study will ultimately be a part of a broader, multinational comparative analysis, but even as a two-nation study it is a reminder of how much attitudes and behaviors are influences by the socio-cultural setting. The understandings of ethics in the sample were not all that dissimilar yet there were distinctly “Dutch” and “American” organizational attributes that showed through.

Chapter 13 also follows in the comparative “tradition,” a cross-sectoral analysis. While at one level it has been accepted for several decades that, like other aspects of public organization theory and practice, public sector and private sector ethics are different, such comparisons remain instructive because of the push to make manage public organizations “like a business.” The lesson from this study is that the differences in the sectors remain and that ethical performance, as with other elements of public operations, must be judged using methods that reflect those differences.

Finally, Chapter 14 fittingly describes a program that seeks to explore training and education techniques for developing ethical competence. The training effort must juggle all the sociocultural and political variables discussed above to convey a consistent and useful message about ethical behavior.

8

Politics and Numbers

The Iron Cage of Governance Indices

Tero Erkkilä and Ossi Piironen

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind…. If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

—Lord William Thomson Kelvin (as quoted in a World Bank Working Paper by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Massimo 2005)

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge of international efforts to calculate the performance of states in terms of various activities. New internationalized statistical activities have been perhaps most apparent in the attempts at measuring economic performance and competitiveness of the state. Similarly, whereas before ethical standards of administration were largely set in national political contexts and analyzed by academics, we are now increasingly witnessing a new rise of international standards and assessments of administrative performance, put forward by supranational actors. Good governance has become a token of responsible rule in contemporary governing. Yet we seldom come to think what it entails and offers us as a virtue. In this chapter, we will open up the notion of good governance by focusing on the new numerical objectifications of governance virtues put forward by the World Bank Institute, World Economic Forum, Transparency International, and Freedom House. These objectifications seem to carry certain normative implications that are not always readily apparent. There are undercurrents of economism in the conversation, which link the solid and reliable institutions to success in the global economy.

We draw on two differing theoretical leads in our analysis of the numerical objectifications of governance. In the first place, we will make use of certain Foucauldian insights linked to the concept of governmentality. We attempt to show how, through the use of statistics and index data social issues, phenomena and entities are conceptualized, framed, and brought into discussion, and consequently, made governable. Since our intention is not to engage in a full-blown analysis of power at this point, we pick out tools from the governmentality pack, only so as to be able to make the points we are here interested in. In short, applying such concepts as “technologies of government” and “governing at a distance,” we begin by looking at the political character of numbers and statistics, arguing that they serve a function in problematizing new issues, making them also governable.

Second, and even more important considering our aims, we analyze the political function of what we call governance measures. We feel that being too general and lacking any clear understanding of actorness, governmentality thinking must be complemented with a more structured analysis of the “politics of numbers” (Desrosières 1998). Indeed, our arguments are based on a very specific, although rather common, understanding of “the political.” We follow—in the line with Max Weber—a tradition that, in one way or the other, identifies the meaning of the political with societal conflict or opposition. For Weber, politics was the means for opposing modern bureaucracy, consisting of fixed hierarchies, rules, and calculative measures, which Weber (1968) saw to favor efficiency and instrumental rationality over values and ethics.

In Palonen’s (2007) terminology, “policy refers to the regulating aspect of politics, politicking alludes to a performative aspect, polity implies a metaphorical space with specific possibilities and limits, while politicization marks an opening of something as political, as ‘playable’” (55) An issue, whether or not subject for governing, cannot become political before it is politicized, interpreted as being potential for struggle and thus opened for politicking—“there is no politics ‘before’ politicization” (Palonen 2007, 66). We argue that numerical objectifications of governance, although serving as “technologies of governance”—though they can be used for politicking within an existing polity, and though they can potentially function as instruments for politicization—are also powerful instruments of depoliticization. According to Palonen (2007, 41) this kind of reinterpretation either can be active, “an extremely intensive form of politicking” and “a movement towards closing a horizon,” or it can be passive, “based on exhaustion or on a diminishing interest in the horizon of politicking.” Instead of or along with the term depoliticization, one could use such constructivist terms such as “naturalization” or “institutionalization” of ideas. We believe that certain powerful objectifications of governance are both representations and instruments of constructing and maintaining an economist understanding of good governance.

Numerical index data partly functions as a mechanism through which room for debate is narrowed by framing the meaning of good governance. We intend to show this, first, by taking a short and general look at the shifts in the measuring of governance performance and, second, by assessing four prominent indices and what we perceive to be their interrelations. We take a critical stance toward the content of standardized normative categories such as good governance, regulatory quality, or sound institutions that, combined with the technical nature of measuring, help to shift the attention away from what is actually measured, and effectively depoliticize issues that are potentially political. This can, somewhat paradoxically, make the new international governance rankings appear like the Weberian Iron Cage, a bureaucratic construct based on calculative measures, which leave no room for ethics and politics (Weber 1968).

Numbers and Governance

Numbers often seem to bring clarity to large issues, allowing us a concrete grasp of abstract phenomena. We are governed through figures that allow us to pass judgment on political issues, as well as to adopt measures to deal with them, be it a health policy, environmental issues, or military budget that we are to decide upon. The figures themselves often appear innocent in terms of politics. The French language is telling when it comes to the political character of numerical objectifications of things. The Latin word computare (to count) is the root for two French words: compter (to count) and conter (to tell a story, to talk nonsense), both having a similar pronunciation. Another word for numerical objectification is indicator or indices, which come from Latin: indicare (in: toward; dicare: make known). Numbers tell a story.

In politics and administration, figures usually take shape in statistics. The statistical practices and institutions were developed in Europe around the seventeenth century, although the development took different cour...