Ethics in Public Policy and Management

A global research companion

Alan Lawton, Zeger van der Wal, Leo Huberts, Alan Lawton, Zeger van der Wal, Leo Huberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415725286
• eBook ISBN: 9781317931997
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Ethics in Public Policy and Management: A global research companion showcases the latest research from established and newly emerging scholars in the fields of public management and ethics. This collection examines the profound changes of the last 25 years, including the rise of New Public Management, New Public Governance and Public Value; how these have altered practitioners' delivery of public services; and how academics think about those services.

Drawing on research from a broad range of disciplines, Ethics in Public Policy and Management looks to reflect on this changing landscape. With contributions from Asia, Australasia, Europe and the USA, the collection is grouped into five main themes:

• theorising the practice of ethics;
• understanding and combating corruption;
• managing integrity;
• ethics across boundaries;
• expanding ethical policy domains.

This volume will prove thought-provoking for educators, administrators, policy makers and researchers across the fields of public management, public administration and ethics.

1 The Scope and Scale of Ethics in Public Policy and Management

Alan Lawton, Zeger van der Wal and Leo Huberts

DOI: 10.4324/9781315856865-1

Introduction

The delivery, and deliverers, of public services have changed dramatically in the past 20 years, with the shift from government to governance, through a wide range of different types of organizations. Networked and collaborative forms of govern ance and direct provision of public services through private and voluntary organizations have changed the parameters of the public sector. This raises a number of issues, including the motivations of individual employees, the concept of acting in the public interest, and the wider issues of public-sector economy, efficiency and effectiveness in a time of austerity. It raises the question of whom or what constitutes the core public service. The casualization of the workforce in many areas of the public sector raises concerns over, for example, the quality of public services and the commitment of those who deliver them. At the same time, it raises ethical issues for the organization, the individual and the users of the services that they provide.

We might wonder at the extent to which there continues to exist a concept of public service as a vocation or whether, for both elected and appointed officials, public service has been replaced by the pursuit of private interests. Critics of postmodernism (e.g. Taylor 1991) describe the self-centred, self-improved and self-promoted individual as an example of the postmodern condition. One example of this might be, to paraphrase Von Clausewitz, ‘Politics is the continuation of business by other means’. In Australia, billionaire businessman Clive Palmer, Federal Representative for Fairfax in Queensland, has been accused of using his political position in his dispute with Chinese company Citic Group Corporation in Beijing. It is alleged that Palmer siphoned off over $12 million of Chinese funds to bankroll his Palmer United Party’s campaign for federal election in 2013. His commercial interests in China appear to have become entwined with his political ambitions. Palmer holds the balance of power in the senate.

Of course, we might consider the extent to which certain roles or professions in the public sector can make special claims to a certain understanding of ethical behaviour. A politician may argue that he or she is accountable to, and has responsibility for, those that elected him or her, or to the wider public rather than to individual constituents. Is it just a question of balancing out different priorities or do some commitments ‘trump’ others? A defence of arms sales to unsavoury dictators is that such sales are ‘in the national interest’. A defence can be made of the ‘dirty hands’ of politicians. As philosopher and former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, puts it:

I learned that you can’t take refuge in moral purity if you want to achieve anything, but equally, if you sacrifice all principle, you lose the reason you went into politics in the first place. These are the essential dilemmas of political life, but they are what makes politics exciting.

(2013, p. 150)

But what about civil servants who face different constituencies and accountability obligations, while at the same time having to loyally (but not necessarily obediently) serve their political masters (cf. van der Wal 2011)? They have always been operating in a minefield of competing values and loyalties (De Graaf and van der Wal 2010; van der Wal et al. 2011), and developing political astuteness and administrative virtues was key to their survival. However, we might wonder if the virtues of our public officials have been compromised in recent decades by the target-setting, performance-driven culture that is such a feature of the public services nowadays, from health care to university education.

The organizational dimension will provide a context for the ethical behaviour of public officials and will include those regulatory agencies that are used to police, educate and/or adjudicate ethical conduct on the part of public officials. These organizations increasingly take on different forms, have different resources and have different functions. The extent to which they form part of an integrity system, coherent and with clear jurisdictions, is a moot point.

However, different regulatory ‘styles’ will reflect social norms and values; a legalistic regulatory style may incline a country’s institutions to formalized codes of conduct and approach ethics through compliance mechanisms.

Aims of this chapter

This first chapter serves several functions. First, it provides an overview of some of the key issues in public service ethics, integrity and governance. It is not the intention to provide a state-of-the-art summary of developments and research in the field over the past 20–30 years. Rather, it asks us to pause and reflect upon some of the key questions that researchers have been asking and considers whether we could have problematized our interests in different ways. Second, in so doing, we consider how different disciplines might offer different perspectives on the same problems. Indeed, the individual authors in the book are drawn from different disciplines, including philosophy, public administration, history, political science, economics, management and so on. Third, the Introduction indicates the different themes that emerge and link the individual chapters. Our approach has not been to impose a pre-conceived set of themes for individual authors to follow. Rather, we recognize that researchers follow their own instincts and pursue their own curiosities, and this is what gives the subject richness and vibrancy. Nonetheless, five common themes have emerged, inductively as it were: theorizing the practice(s) of ethics; understanding and combating corruption; managing integrity; ethics across boundaries; and expanding ethical policy domains. We introduce each of the chapters in turn and add our own commentary. We leave consideration of future research themes and directions, and the extent to which they are international or even global, to the concluding chapter of this volume.

Problematizing ethics in public policy and management

Many of the issues that concern us are problematized as either/or and offer a black-and-white picture of the issues that may not be useful. We are asked to choose between the public and private delivery of public services; between a compliance or an integrity approach regulating ethics; between public policy for the lifetime of the government or for future generations; between individual interests or common interests. Even the simple choice between consequentialist ethics, the ethics of ends, and deontological ethics, the ethics of means, is not helpful. Life is much more complex.

Thus, it is extremely difficult to put a boundary around the private lives of, in particular, elected politicians, and any attempt can be challenged. In the UK, for example, former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was found guilty by the regulatory body, the Standards Board for England, of bringing his office into disrepute. On leaving a civic function, he was approached by a newspaper reporter, there was an exchange of words and Mr Livingstone accused the reporter of being like a Nazi war criminal. The reporter is Jewish. A complaint was made to the Standards Board by the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the grounds that Mr Livingstone had brought his office into disrepute. The Standards Board found that Mr Livingstone was still acting in an official capacity and had breached the code of conduct, and was suspended by the Standards Board for four weeks. Mr Livingstone appealed to the High Court of Justice, and Mr Justice Collins found in favour of Mr Livingstone and ruled that the Standards Board decision be quashed.

In terms of organizational status, it is the case that public services are delivered by a range of different types of organizations, both private and voluntary, sometimes acting alone and sometimes in collaboration. It is too simplistic to suggest that individuals working in different organizational types will have different motivations and this could impact, adversely, the quality of public services.

We have already hinted that the boundaries of ethics are contestable, and while we do distinguish between ethical and unethical behaviour, we constantly come up against the thorny problem of cultural relativism. At the same time, cross-cultural and global research does indicate that certain ‘virtues’ such as integrity seem to be regarded highly in just about all of the countries researched. Also, our understanding of ethical and unethical behaviour changes over time, and what might be acceptable in one period is deemed unacceptable in the next period. We explore this in more detail in the concluding chapter.

The study of corruption sees corruption as either an individual action problem or a systemic problem of the ‘commons’. Both approaches reflect the economists’ concern with rational action. Can the problem of corruption be seen in a different way? We might distinguish between the ideal and the needs of ordinary life, between our goals and our moral capabilities. That is, perhaps by focusing upon what is required to survive within a particular set of norms, customs and values, rather than upon some abstract ideal state of affairs, we might not be so disappointed with the lack of progress in curbing corruption.

Finally, we turn to that old chestnut of rules versus values, and the recognition, increasingly, that most integrity regimes will include a combination of both. What we do not know is which configuration and combination of the different tools, institutions and processes works best in any given situation. Is it ethical leadership that makes the difference? Is it the code of conduct that is the most effective trick in our repertoire?

Themes to the book

We grouped and categorized the contributions to this edited volume under five broad themes: (1) theorizing the practice(s) of ethics; (2) understanding and combating corruption; (3) managing integrity; (4) ethics across boundaries; and (5) expanding ethical policy domains. Here, we describe each theme and highlight the key contributions and contents of each chapter.

1 Theorizing the practice(s) of ethics

It is always tempting to ‘cut to the chase’ and commence with the realities of corruption, ethical and unethical behaviour, (un)ethical leadership, codes of conduct, ethics training and so on. However, the more fundamental discussions concerning the nature of ethics itself still engage our attentions and are a precursor to understanding the issues as ethics gets played out in the practice of policymaking and management. We include three chapters under this theme, which challenge the reader to reflect upon their own understandings and assumptions of ethics.

Helen Stensöta introduces the public ethics of care as a general public ethic and builds on the idea of human interdependency. In this way, she is able to move beyond a simple distinction between universal and particularistic ethics. Following on from Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking work, Stensöta builds upon her own previous research and outlines a public ethics of care that has four central notions: interdependence, the significance of relations, responsibility and context sensitivity. In line with several of our other contributors, she argues that rule following provided insufficient guidance and finds that under New Public Management, care has been commodified. Stensöta argues that a public ethics of care can inform a diverse range of policy areas, including housing and city planning such that policy goals can sustain relations with the environment and accommodate future generations. It can underpin political responsibility and accountability; indeed, it is a matter of common interest that it does so.

Our second contribution under this theme is from Marcel Becker and Jitse Talsma, who take a virtues approach to understanding the practice of ethics, and identify its usefulness in ethics training and education for public officials. In their view, virtue ethics bears twenty-first-century relevance as it is instrumental in contemporary integrity vocabulary, which has highly dualistic tendencies. In their view, on the one hand, popular integrity concepts often revolve around, and reinforce, the dichotomy between right and wrong. On the other hand, a stream of literature has emerged that intends to describe integrity in a more gradual and positive way. Their chapter discusses the merit of virtue ethics as one of these positive approaches. After arguing how the concepts of integrity, the grey area and the dilemma can lead to overly negative and oversimplified, black-and-white distinctions, they discuss in-depth three concepts from virtue ethics (the excellent mean, the development of virtues and shared practices), which enable graduality and a positive approach to ethics and integrity. The authors provide practical suggestions for how these three concepts may serve as valuable and practical enrichments to current integrity discourse, and dilemma workshops and ethics training programs.

Our final chapter in this section is from Michael Macaulay, who applies a critical philosophical perspective to the way in which the field of public administration has developed in recent decades. In particular, he argues that there has been an absence of a coherent philosophical underpinning as such. Macaulay commences his discussion by looking at the power of myth and offers an example of how myth underpins key policy areas such as the myth of the deserving and undeserving poor. Such myths are often used to propagate dichotomies, black or white views of the world, and he argues that we should be seeking to broaden our views and not necessarily seek to reconcile opposing views. Drawing upon the work of the German idealists, and Hegel in particular, he calls for an intersubjective philosophy of public administration that can maintain the link between politics and administration.

2 Understanding and combating corruption

Given all the anti-corruption measures that have been put in place around the world and given the continued growth of corrupt activities, is it time to re-conceptualize corruption? The contributors under this theme take different approaches and offer fresh contributions to our understanding of corruption.

Toon Kerkhoff and Pieter Wagenaar argue for an often missing historical approach to administrative ethics, taking into account time and context. Contingency and contextuality of social phenomena, including corruption, seem to be underestimated in our research and theories. The authors argue that the dominant present approach seems currently to be the near exclusive domain of organization science, (new) public management or policy studies. The historical study of cases of corruption provides an opportunity to investigate discussion, disagreement and public value-conflict that make up public ethics at different times and places. In addition, they argue in this chapter that a historical approach also offers insight into important practical and normative questions in today’s policy and research concerning good governance, corruption and public integrity. Kerkhoff and Wagenaar are critical of a research community that seems to be dominated by ‘universalism’, with an abundance of (quantitative) research based on corruption indexes, etc., resulting in an ‘anti-corruption industry’ that has pushed ‘particularistic’ research (by anthropologists and historians) to the fringe of corruption studies. As a consequence, we seem to be left with serious problems. The authors argue that ignoring the significance of context and time will have important normative consequences for today’s research and policy on ‘good governance’, corruption and public integrity, in line with Samuel Huntington’s statement: ‘what is universalism to the west is imperialism to the rest’ (1997, p. 184).

In the second contribution in this section, Olivia Monaghan and Adam Graycar provide a new typology for understanding integrity violations and expanding current definitions of corruption, which they illustrate with four vignettes from different governance settings. They conclude their chapter with an overview of specific policy instruments and their supposed effectiveness for the three main types of integrity violations they distinguish: corruption, misconduct and maladministration. First, the authors focus on this differentiation between the three phenomena as a means through which more targeted integrity processes and preventive strategies can be built. Second, they identify some challenges to organizational integrity. By considering the factors (both internal and external) that affect an organization’s integrity, an organizational culture can be more effectively safeguarded. Third, they relate these challenges to a number of integrity-building processes and preventive strategies that can be easily adopted into an organization’s operational system. An applicable, practical method of building integrity in the public sector reduces the risk of a band-aid approach. Such an approach assumes that corruption, misconduct and maladministration take the same form in every organization and that they can be targeted through a similar approach. The analysis of the three phenomena highlights some of the problems with this assumption.

Caryn Peiffer and Heather Marquette, in their contribution, suggest that part of the explanation for the continuing failure of programmes to curb corruption lies in the inappropriate theoretical foundations that underscore their design. Such programmes are overwhelmingly influenced by principal-agent theory, which assumes that there are ‘principled principals’, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Ethics in Public Policy and Management
• Ethics in Public Policy and Management
• Preface
• IIntroduction
• 1 The Scope and Scale of Ethics in Public Policy and Management
• IITheorizing the practice(s) of ethics
• 2 A Public Ethics of Care
• 3 Adding Colours to The Shades of Grey
• 4 Discourses of Deceit
• IIIUnderstanding and combating corruption
• 5 History, Public Ethics and the Anti-Corruption Industry
• 6 Building Integrity in Public-Sector Operations
• 7 Theoretical (Mis)Understanding?
• 8 The Ethics of Public Officials in the United States
• IVManaging integrity
• 9 Institutionalizing Integrity Management
• 10 Ethical Leadership Research
• 11 The Limits of Rule Governance
• 12 Researching and Improving The Effectiveness of Ethics Training
• VEthics across boundaries
• 13 Public Service Motivation in a Complex Public Sector
• 14 What Does Working in Public Services Mean?
• 15 Conflicts of Interest and Ethical Decision-Making
• VIExpanding ethical policy domains
• 16 Ethical Decisions and the Great Moral Challenge of our Time
• 17 The Undiscovered Country
• VIIConclusion
• 18 Towards a Global Ethics
• Index