Ethics in Public Management

H George Frederickson, Richard K Ghere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317471073
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The first edition of this work, published in 1993, refuted the notion that administrative ethics could not be studied empirically. In this second edition, Frederickson (public administration, University of Kansas) and Ghere (political science, University of Dayton) expand their scope to include both the managerial and individual/moral dimensions of ethical behavior, and add a new section on administrative ethics and globalization. Other sections cover organizational designs that support ethical behavior, market forces that compromise administrative ethics, and unintended outcomes of anticorruption reforms. The book is appropriate for a graduate course in public sector ethics.

1

Introduction

Richard K. Ghere

This volume follows two earlier projects undertaken by Frederickson (1993) and Frederickson and Ghere (2005) to present collections of theoretical essays and empirical analyses on administrative ethics. Three years before the publication of the first volume—Frederickson’s Ethics and Public Administration—the National Commission on the Public Service released Leadership for America (also known as the Volcker Commission Report) that attested to “the quiet crisis” in government whereby

too many of the best of the nation’s senior executives are ready to leave government, and not enough of its most talented young people are willing to join. This erosion in the attractiveness in public service at all levels—most specifically in the federal civil service—undermines the ability of government to respond effectively to the needs and aspirations of the American people, and ultimately damages the democratic process itself. (1989, xiii)

For the Volcker Commission, the issue of political legitimacy at that time appeared foundational to both the nature of the quiet crisis and proposals to address it. Specifically, the commission’s Task Force on Public Perceptions of the Public Service recognized the causality between perceptions of ethical abuse in government and challenges to legitimacy as follows: “Contributing to the public’s negative image of government is the succession of ethics scandals [and similar failings] & The resulting sense of alienation ricochets against public servants” (1990, 64).

Although only a few specific references to improving ethics and professionalism appear within the broad scope of the commission’s recommendations, the context of the report related administrative ethics to the problem of political legitimacy in a manner generally consistent with this logical syllogism:

1. Legitimacy depends upon trust in government.

2. Perceptions of ethical failures on the part of “faceless bureaucrats” threaten legitimacy.

3. Therefore, ethics reform promises to restore political legitimacy.

Further, the commission’s report implied that the rather straightforward nexus between ethics and public perception could be understood as low-hanging fruit calling for immediate attention in rebuilding the public service. In particular, the report quotes President George H.W. Bush in support of “goal one—rebuilding] the public’s trust: It’s not really very complicated. It’s a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there’s not even a perception of conflict of interest” (1990, 14).

Particular references to ethics and the public trust in the Volcker Commission Report delineated the scope of conversation about public ethics leading up to the conference that George Frederickson convened on the Study of Government Ethics at Park City, Utah, in June 1991 and to the publication of Ethics and Public Administration (based on the Park City papers) in 1993. In fact, President Bush’s remark—as clear and forthright as it appears—actually spoke to some rather complex, dialectical conundrums that festered beneath the surface of “government ethics talk” as it related to political legitimacy. The president spoke in earnest that “knowing right from wrong” would seem not at all complicated, but it followed that such awareness might extend beyond matters of law to more generalized public standards and expectations. In this regard, it could be argued that Leadership for America more directly addressed the extralegal offenses of “deceit and manipulation” associated with the Vietnam conflict and Watergate affair than with particular illegalities, although these did in fact occur (Jos 1993, 365). In referring to the obligation of “avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there’s not even a perception of conflict of interest,” President Bush implied that for the public official, conserving the public trust or legitimacy is as often a matter of satisfying public perceptions as abiding by the law.

In his “Conclusion” to Ethics and Public Administration, Frederickson situated each of that volume’s chapter contributions within various theoretical categories “concerned with what we know about government ethics” (1993, 243). To varying degrees in each of the five categories, he revealed the conceptual wrinkles that follow from a perceptual underpinning of legitimacy as public trust. For example, although the first category “The Nature of Persons: Good or Bad” might seem directly resolvable through tests of Kantian imperatives, Frederickson raised the intervening problem of context related to either societal or organizational cultures as eclipsing Kant’s imperatives. In terms of the second category, “Making Ethical Decisions: Doing Right or Wrong,” he borrowed from Herbert Simon to propose a “bounded ethics” wherein the public administrator’s moral authority to make ethical decisions is hemmed in by any number of legislative and budgetary constraints. Interpreting that decision-making quandary as a question of accountability, Frederickson introduced a third category, “Democracy and Ethics: The Issue of Accountability,” which pits the perceived need to exact accountability as a bureaucratic control against the ethical warrant to “take responsibility” proactively or claim extensive bureaucratic discretion to foster ethical governance in a democracy. Fourth, Frederickson opened Pandora’s box to deal with the big questions related to “Policy Ethics and Politics” as distinct from the (more?) “petty ethics” of government corruption (253–254). Here, he mused as to whether and to what extent appointed public administrators bear responsibility for “big” policy questions as distinct from legislators, elected executives, and jurists formally involved in policy processes. In each of these four discussions, Frederickson traced the contours of the government ethics dialogue that reflects creative tensions in the dialectic between the obvious and forthright (“knowing the difference between right and wrong”) and the more complicated relationship between legitimacy and perception.

Frederickson’s examination of the fifth theoretical category, “Methodology and Knowledge in Public Administration Ethics,” encountered a fundamental dilemma that accompanies the dialectic between forthright legalism and perceived legitimacy. Clearly, knowledge about laws, rules, controls, and other interventions is amenable to

the primary and dominant approach to the study of public administration [, which] is positivist, rational, and empirical & To the rationalist, reason alone can provide the knowledge of the existence and nature of theory. Rationality is also used to describe the view that reality is a unified, coherent, and explicable system. (255)

He then differentiated among particular positivist methodologies (survey research, interviews, use of secondary data, case studies, and experiments) that researchers followed in their chapter contributions for the 1993 volume.

Then Frederickson turned to alternative, post-positivist thought that challenges the “presumed objectivity of the positive-empirical-rational school,” which asserts that “social structures such as laws, rules, organizations, and governments ‘do not exist independent of human consciousness’ & To the post-positivist analysis is interpretation, not an objective interpretation of the facts” (256–257, quoting Harmon and Mayer 1986, 287; emphasis theirs). After citing two chapter contributions that approached post-positivist analysis, Frederickson argued that such interpretation provides a clearer lens for observing actual behavior. Often, assessments of legitimacy (as anchors for “public standards and expectations”) straddle the divide between the two research orientations; on the one hand, positivist methods for measuring public opinion are available on the presumption that expectations (placed upon governments and political systems) are relatively convergent and constant rather than dynamic “moving targets” (see Jos 1993, 362).

On the other hand, Philip Jos (whom Frederickson quoted in the 1993 “Introduction”) raised still another dilemma that arises in examining expectations (in particular, expectations about the nature and severity of corruption) that are by nature dynamic. In this regard, Jos illustrates this movement by explaining the essence of nonlegal corruption as follows:

Once the notion of a public sphere and public offices gains a foothold in society, these offices can be corrupted in ways that may or may not violate the law. This is so because these offices and the people who serve in these offices, because they are public offices and public officials, become part of a dynamic political process that generates new standards and expectations. These offices become linked to larger processes and goals in a way that generates new demands. (364)

In this 1993 essay, Jos appears to have been prophetic in suggesting that “legal corruption” could ultimately prove more destructive than outright bribery (363). As political theorist Michael Sandel points out in What Money Can’t Buy, influence peddling and similar legal activities constitute corruption as processes that lead to the degradation of government institutions:

We often associate corruption with ill-gotten gains. But corruption refers to more than bribes and illicit payments. To corrupt a good or social process is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it. (2012, 34)

By implication Jos recommended that researchers direct attention to specific contexts, just as Frederickson did in discussions of the first four theoretical categories concerning the nature of persons, making ethical decisions, exercising discretion, and attending to the big policy questions. Thus, the cumulative effects of interrelated dialectics (of legality versus expectations, observation of facts versus interpretation, and dynamic—or perhaps less than stable—expectations versus durable norms) implied that knowledge acquisition through public ethics research could indeed be messy. All the while, the ethics conversation had become fertile and robust.

Although the second of the three volume, Ethics and Public Management (2005), moved Frederickson’s concern for context forward, it reached out as well to capture conversation within the academy about what administrative ethics are or should be in relation to societal issues. The identity conversation about administrative ethics as reflected through scholarly research had been aptly characterized in Terry Cooper’s commentary “Big Questions in Administrative Ethics: A Need for Focused, Collaborative Effort” (2004), which presented the crux of the issue as follows:

More than a passing fad, administrative ethics has demonstrated its sustainability and its centrality to the field. What is lacking with respect to these developments is anything like a focused effort by groups of scholars to study specific sets of significant research questions in a sustained and systematic fashion & Not intended to preclude or exclude other work on other questions, the call here is for the establishment of a center of gravity for the development of administrative ethics around some focused collaborative efforts. Diversity of interests articulated by many from various areas in public administration are needed to keep the field fresh and lively; focused efforts of those mainly committed to studying administrative ethics may be required to provide sustainability, coherence, and sufficient weight to advance it solidly into the core of public administration. (395)

Cooper then extended the conversation by proposing four questions that might lend coherence to public ethics research:

1. What are the normative foundations for public administrative ethics?

2. How do American administrative ethical norms fit into a global context?

3. How can organizations be designed to be supportive of ethical conduct?

4. When should we treat people equally in order to treat them fairly, and when should we treat them unequally? (404)

Ethics and Public Management (Frederickson and Ghere 2005) drew upon two of these questions as organizing criteria; five chapter contributions appeared under the volume section “Organization Designs That Support Ethical Behavior” and three under “Administrative Ethics in Global Perspective.” It is worth noting that the chapters included in the global perspectives section corresponded to critical events that had occurred during the previous decade, including global economic activities and controversial trade agreements, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the abusive treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo detention facilities.

But more important, editorial efforts in the 2005 volume were deliberate in assessing whether and how chapter contributions related to Cooper’s focus and coherence criteria (in the “Introduction”) and to the overall comportment of “Administrative Ethics in the Twenty-First Century” (in the “Conclusion”).

Notwithstanding its attentiveness to research focus and coherence, the 2005 volume did, at least implicitly, address the public ethics-legitimacy conundrum in chapter contributions that focused on (1) the legitimacy of appropriately used executive power, (2) the variation of moral agency in thick and thin accountability environments, (3) the questionable legitimacy of the private-sector-oriented new managerialism, and (4) blind spots in adjudicating responsibility in public-private partnerships. If Ethics in Public Management (in reference to the 1993 volume) amounted to old wine in new bottles, it is hard to decipher whether the “old” or “new” is desirable to which particular stakeholders (and why) in conversations about public ethics....