Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration

281 Pages·2012·1.04 MB·English

by  Cox, Raymond W.

Ethics and Integrity
in Public Administration

Ethics and Integrity
in Public Administration
Concepts and Cases
Edited by Raymond W. Cox III
M.E.Sharpe
Armonk, New York
London, England
Copyright © 2009 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ethics and integrity in public administration : concepts and cases /
edited by Raymond W. Cox III.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7656-2310-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Public administration—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Public administration—Moral and
ethical aspects—Case studies. I. Cox, Raymond W.
JF1525.E8E8524 2009
172'.2—dc22 2008033386
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
~
MV (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction
Raymond W. Cox III, Terrel Rhodes, Leo Huberts,
and Emile Kolthoff vii
I. Ethical Foundations and Perspectives 1
1. Democratic Morality: Back to the Future
Thomas Dexter Lynch and Cynthia E. Lynch 5
2. The I That Is We: Recognition and Administrative Ethics
Michael Macaulay 26
3. Ethical Failings, Incompetence, and Administrative Evil:
Lessons From Katrina and Iraq
Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour 40
II. Ethical Management and Ethical Leadership 65
4. Administrative Leadership and Transparency
Charles Garofalo and Dean Geuras 69
5. Implications of Organizational Influence on Ethical Behavior:
An Analysis of the Perceptions of Public Managers
Rodney Erakovich and Sherman Wyman 77
6. Public Management in a Culture of Waiver
Harold Moeller 92
7. Ethics Management and Ethical Management
Alan Lawton and Michael Macaulay 107
III. International and Comparative Perspectives 121
8. Politics and Numbers: The Iron Cage of Governance Indices
Tero Erkkilä and Ossi Piironen 125
9. Fighting Corruption Globally and Locally
Kalin Ivanov 146
10. Global Versus Local Perspectives of Anticorruption
Reforms in Italy
Maria Laura Seguiti 155
11. Ethical Management and Leadership: Is an Ethical Perspective
a Necessary Component of Good Management and
Organizational Leadership?
Alessandra Storlazzi 182
12. Measuring Integrity: A Dutch-American Comparative Project
Emile Kolthoff, Raymond W. Cox III, and Terrance Johnson 197
13. A Two-Pronged Methodological Approach for Measuring
Public and Private Sector Organizational Core Values:
The Importance of Content and Context
Zeger van der Wal 212
14. Developing the “Ethical Competence” of Public Officials:
A Capacity-Building Approach
Howard Whitton 236
About the Editor and Contributors 257
Index 265
Introduction
Raymond W. Cox III, Terrel Rhodes,
Leo Huberts, and Emile Kolthoff
In June 2005, the Section on Ethics of the American Society for Public Ad-
ministration (ASPA) and our partner, the Study Group on Ethics and Integrity
of the European Group on Public Administration (EGPA), co-sponsored the
Transatlantic Dialog on Ethics and Integrity in Leuven, Belgium. The success
of that event convinced us that we should continue this arrangement. Thus it
was agreed that we would continue to hold these conferences biennially. The
broad goal of the 2007 conference, as with the one in 2005, was to strengthen
co-operation between European and U.S. scholars on the workshop topic.
Toward that end, all relevant aspects of administrative ethics were discussed
with particular attention given to the similarities and differences, both in theory
and practice, between Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world.
The title for the 2007 conference was New Concepts, Theories and Methods
in the Study of Ethics and Integrity of Governance.
Papers were submitted from the United States, Canada, and Peru from this
side of the world, from both Eastern and Western Europe, and from Africa,
India, and Australia. If a measure of the success of a conference is the breadth
and diversity of interest in participation, then we have been successful. The
topics and approaches ranged from normative foundations of ethics in ad-
ministrative law to democratic morality; from public accountability to anti-
corruption reforms; and from administrative leadership to developing ethical
competence. We addressed straightforward problems and concerns of ethical
practice and we explored theoretical and normative issues.
While this text includes only a selected group of papers from that confer-
ence, it does, we believe, accurately depict the scope and breadth of topics
discussed during the workshop. As such, it represents a good cross-section of
the current issues, whether of practice or of theory, that face the public sector
around the globe. Equally important, as attested to by the vigorous discussion
during our closing plenary session, we do not always begin from the same
starting point (and, therefore go to different end points) when we address the
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
issue of public ethics. That is both the fascinating and thought-provoking
element of our shared endeavors.
To make sense of the differences between what we are simplistically de-
scribing as the European and American approaches, it is necessary to note
the choice of the title for the conference—“Ethics and Integrity.” For all the
easy shifting between the words, we have found that the European academics
strive to distinguish between the two; the Europeans are more comfortable
using the concept of integrity rather than ethics. Integrity connotes (to them)
behavior in a way that ethics does not. Integrity encompasses both the intel-
lectualizing (we usually call this thinking) and the doing. It implies propriety.
It implies competence. It implies what Americans (United States) would
associate with the term professionalism. It is about doing things “right.” It
does not imply choice. It does not imply an activist or “makes things right”
approach that is common among those (American academics), who are as-
sertively and even aggressively “ethical.” For some “American” academics,
ethics has both political and organizational overtones. For the Europeans,
integrity is primarily an organizational precept. That activist tone struck the
Europeans as somewhat odd. They saw integrity as fundamentally a conser-
vative notion—one that protects, promotes, and preserves the status quo. It
is about values that are central to the operations of government as a tool of
governance. It is a positive term.
In truth we have different foci because the ground rules and standard
practices within the respective bureaucracies are different. Therefore, as
already suggested, the American academics use ethics rather than the term
integrity, for some of the very reasons the Europeans use integrity. A gen-
eration of academics in American public administration has placed ethics
and ethical decision making at the core of “good” management. It has been
assumed to be the basis of organizational leadership. From this standpoint
ethics is synonymous with governance and management reform. Thus, for
example, Americans distinguish between two types of ethics codes: those
that define present behaviors (legalistic codes) and those that define future
behaviors (aspirational or normative codes). There is a strong bias within
the academic community for normative or aspirational ethics. We both study
and teach norms and aspirations. The Europeans are much more interested
in the present behaviors of public servants. This focus on “professional bu-
reaucratic” activities and actions emphasizes a behavior based in concepts
such as the “rule of law.” Their studies are more likely to use traditional
social science research methods to study integrity, while Americans struggle
to search for norms and often eschew social science methods, and especially
quantitative methods.
Those differences—in research approaches and in the focus on the present
INTRODUCTION ix
or future—are undercurrents in all chapters in this book. It is not a matter of
one approach being better than the other. Nor do the chapters neatly fall into
the broad categories and generalizations presented here. That aside, we have
much to learn from each other and we hope that the readers of this volume
will learn from those varied perspectives.
The text is divided into three parts:
1. Ethical Foundations and Perspectives;
2. Ethical Management and Ethical Leadership; and
3. International and Comparative Perspectives.
Scholarship on ethics inevitably begins with an exploration of the fun-
damental principles and core theories that define ethics. Part I of this book
begins by looking at some of the central issues in normative ethics; moral
values, other-directedness, and the problem of evil. The first three chapters
take three distinct approaches to the issue of normative ethics. Chapter 1, by
Cynthia and Thomas Lynch, asks the important question of the role of values,
particularly democratic morality in defining and reinforcing ethical behaviors.
As they note, integrity depends on improving institutions: “[U]nfortunately,
institutions too often foster and even encourage the erosion of virtues within
public administrators. Thus, reformers must reinforce the development of
virtues within public administration by addressing both the individuals and
the institutions.” In their endorsement of an Aristotelian approach, the authors
encourage us to think “beyond” Kant.
Chapter 2 takes us into a different realm, arguing “that one of Hegel’s
most important concepts—recognition—can provide some key insights into
problems of administrative ethics.” Michael Macaulay goes on to assert that
administrative ethics is predicated upon a rather simple question: Is there any
moral force to guide public officials? He answers in the affirmative; but he
also warns that “[I]f morality emerges from humanity—in which the idea of
recognition is wholly immersed—then it simply cannot ignore or overlook
lived human experience both rational and emotional.”
Chapter 3 tackles directly a problem introduced in the first two chapters:
administrative evil. The work of Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour is well
known. They take their developed theory and look at two distinct events:
the war in Iraq and the relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. They ask the
provocative questions: is incompetence unethical, and do they fit within the
definition of administrative evil? Their sobering conclusion is that in both
instances “the failures arguably would have been less serious had adminis-
trators recognized the limitations of their ideological solutions and explored
more modest, yet achievable goals. Yet . . . most were not in a position to