Changing Public Sector Values

Montgomery Van Wart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136518393
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

First Published in 1998. The single most important purpose of this book is to create a field of public administration values, a field that currently does not exist in a recognizable form. Surely values are discussed significantly and usefully by the fields of ethics, management, decision making, and organization behavior and theory, to mention only a few. But these discussions are inevitably narrower in scope than is necessary for a true field of values. Such a field is needed to help bridge the seeming chasm about discussions of values among the established fields. A second purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive treatment of values. A third purpose of the text is to provide a balanced treatment, giving all the major schools of thought roughly the same coverage so that their values can be compared as dispassionately as possible. A fourth purpose of the book is to make the subject accessible to and interesting for practitioners and students.

PART I

Values Endorsed in Public Administration

Part I briefly examines the domains of values competing for an individual administrator’s attention. Depending upon the circumstances, the administrator may have to look carefully at the following questions:

• What is the legal thing to do?
• What is best for the organization?
• What is best for the public at large?
• What best meets professional standards?
• What is an appropriate role for me to play and to what extent should my interests influence the decisionmaking process?

Answers to these questions require value assessments, which always have practical concern. That is, even when there is no question of impropriety or moral judgments, decisions are based on values that should be understood and explainable. If the administrator is trying to meet minimum standards or to improve performance and standards, answers to the above questions may also encompass ethical concerns. Whether ethical issues are simple or complex, it is imperative that the values be ascertained clearly.

The following chapter presents a framework for understanding the values inherent in both practical and ethical decisions.

CHAPTER 1

The Five Value Sources Used in Decisionmaking in the Public Sector*

Individuals facing difficult decisions and trying both to do the right thing and to avoid doing the wrong thing must generally consider a number of factors, ranging from society’s mandates to personal convictions. If those individuals work in the public sector they may feel the pinch of competing values even more acutely than others do, for several reasons:

1. They have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) sworn to higher ethical standards of commitment to the nation and their organizations.
2. Decisions and actions may have more complex countervailing values to consider.
3. Their personal standards may be more keenly honed because of their strong civic commitments, while their personal needs may be among the least considered in the family of professional organizations because of an ethic of subordination of personal benefit to the public good.

In making decisions, individuals must consider their own standards and needs, the principles of their professional disciplines, the precepts of their specific organizations, and the dictates of the law, all the while trying to accomplish what is in the overall public good. Juggling these differing sets of interests is only made more difficult by the fact that none of them is constant over time. Even the most basic assumptions of public administrators are being subtly redefined and reinterpreted, just as new constitutional amendments subtly redefine society and Supreme Court decisions reinterprete old ways of behaving. In this current era of great value shifts, the decisions public administrators must make are not only more profound but also more open to debate and disagreement. Given this context, a clear understanding of the underlying values of those decisions and actions is both essential and reflected in some of the typical questions administrators ask today, including these: What are the underlying values implicit in a new organizational structure? To what degree should personal concerns for career and security play a role in agency downsizing? How best should a new, more austere social policy be implemented? This book aims to assist in the analysis and explanation of the many decisions that administrators make, and one of its major premises is that it is the responsibility of administrators not only to be able to understand the values implicit in their important decisions, but to be able to articulate those values clearly for others in the organization—especially subordinates, clients, and legitimate overseers outside of the organization.

This chapter examines decisionmaking from an individual’s perspective. It begins with an overview of the various—and sometimes competing—taxonomies of decisionmaking sources that have been described in the literature, and the derivation and rationale for the one underlying the discussion in this text. It also discusses some of the major considerations in using each source and provides some examples. (A full chapter is dedicated to each source in Part II.) The five sources (and their constituent basic assumptions) that guide administrative behavior are as old as the Republic, but, as is typical of each new era in any evolving society, these sources can and are undergoing significant reinterpretation, leading to new emphases within and among them.

The aim here is not only to examine the decisionmaking affecting ethical problems and conundrums, but to extend that examination to all decisionmaking—both traditional and more explicitly ethical—by public administrators.¹

Problems in Identifying Sources of Decisionmaking

Which Are the Key Sources or Value Sets?

There is widespread agreement that administrators have numerous value sets, or roles, which are sources for the decisions they make. An administrator may, for example, concentrate quite appropriately on legal issues at one point, organizational issues at another, and personal interests at still another. This agreement quickly dissipates when one tries to identify and name the specific sources or value sets that are crucial for public administrators.

Researchers have divided an administrator’s major value sets in many ways. Some specialize in a single area, even though their views are broad, as John Rohr did in concentrating on regime values (law and legal tradition) and George Frederickson did in giving attention to social equity (public interest).² Many researchers have consciously divided the sources to cover all the major decisionmaking bases. Both Darrell Pugh and April Hejka-Ekins divided legitimate sources into bureaucratic ethos and democratic ethos.³ Barry Posner and Warren Schmidt compared the rugged-individualism ethic to the community and cooperation ethic.⁴ Some have defined three critical value sets, as Patrick Dobel did in identifying regime accountability, personal responsibility, and prudence as the keys to the ethical decisionmaking mix; Kathryn Denhardt similarly distinguished honor, benevolence, and justice as the three “moral foundations.”⁵ Terry Cooper classified four sources—individual attributes, organization structure, organization culture, and societal expectations.⁶ Donald Warwick’s four sources were public interest, constituency interests, bureaucratic interest, and personal interest.⁷ Carol Lewis, Stephen Bonczek, and Harold Gortner each detailed five sources; Gortner’s is a particularly thorough analysis of role classification.⁸ Depending on the narrowness of the values and the degree to which they are allowed to overlap, other researchers have catalogued more numerous sources; for example, Jonathan West, Evan Berman, and Anita Cava identified 11 popular ethics roles, and Dwight Waldo found a dozen.⁹

The fluidity of administrative value sets can encompass all these classifications, so the acid test for an analysis may be the purpose to which it is applied. ASPA’s Professional Ethics Committee and its subcomittee that redrafted the Code of Ethics selected five role sources as the organizing basis for the 32 principles used in ASPA’s Code.¹⁰ Those five are likewise used here: They are personal values, professional values, organizational values, legal values, and public interest values. Five is a number that allows for adequate differentiation of sources without undue overlap. A discussion of each of these sources, however, would be premature without first considering some of the problems related to clear and consistent definition of roles or sources.

The Problem of Source Definition

Source definition (or role definition) varies significantly in light of the decisionmaking context, a phenomenon Rohr calls role morality: “The limited (or particularistic) character of role morality immediately challenges the universal quality of most moral propositions.”¹¹ In other words, all roles or value sets, even legalistic ones, lose much of their universal appeal when applied to the details of specific cases. This is clear in a classic example: Killing someone is considered immoral in the eyes of the law, but it is sanctioned in a variety of exceptional circumstances, such as war-time combat, self-defense, and the state’s execution of prisoners. Two even more controversial possible exceptions to the universal rule are abortion, which is partially legally sanctioned, and euthanasia, which is not currently legally sanctioned. Moreover, the specific details of cases rarely enable “clean” decisions, even when a general rule has been established. For example, when is withdrawing a patient from life-support systems mercy killing? When is doing so restoring the natural condition?

A second issue for source or role definition is that the values in roles (value sets) change during the lives or evolution of individuals, organizations, countries, and civilizations. The foremost value-researcher, Milton Rokeach, commented,

If values were completely stable, individual and social change would be impossible. If values were completely unstable, continuity of human personality and society would be impossible. Any conception of human values, if it is to be fruitful, must be able to account for the enduring character of values as well as for their changing character.¹²

Public administration has undergone value changes associated with Federalists, Jacksonians, civil-service reformers and Progressives, New Dealers, and the Civil Rights and Great Society movements of the 1960s.¹³ Such changes clearly represent a great challenge to public administration because “‘reinventing government’ involves a profound commitment to new ideas, values, and roles.”¹⁴ Thus, while each source has been an important value set since the beginning of the republic, the way these sources have been defined has varied significantly with successive eras. The current sea shift of values (at the beliefs level) will subtly but profoundly alter not only the definition of, say, legal values (changing the values in the value set), but also the emphasis placed on one source in comparison to other sources. How, then, can administrators choose among competing sources when making decisions?

Which Source Takes Precedence When Sources Compete?

The problems of source identification and source definition may be largely intellectual, but when legitimate sources compete, the challenge of decisionmaking for practitioners becomes acute. At a minimum, competing sources mean tough decisions; they may also provide fertile ground for ethical predicaments. Empirical studies indicate that “management’s toughest dilemmas occur in trying to strike a balance between competing objectives.”¹⁵

To use a prosaic example, it is clear to government employees that government vehicles are for official use only. If employees are traveling on government business for several weeks, do personal needs, such as traveling to a restaurant or dry cleaner, then become “official”? If not, is the emp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I Values Endorsed in Public Administration
• PART II An In-Depth Look at Values Endorsed in Public Administration
• PART III Analyzing Values Using a Cultural Framework Perspective
• PART IV Shaping and Managing Values to Ensure Coherence and Legitimacy
• Index