Handbook of Administrative Ethics_1 ppt

1 The Emergence of Administrative Ethics as a Field of Study in the United States Terry L. Cooper University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California One might reasonably argue that administrative ethics has been a topic of sustained interest at least since the founding of Public Administration Review (PAR) in 1940 (Nigro and Richardson, 1990). One might even assert that administrative ethics has been of concern both to practitioners and scholars since the founding era of the United States (Richardson and Nigro, 1987). However, this chapter will maintain that the study of administrative ethics as an ongoing scholarly enterprise with the trappings of a subfield of academic inquiry does not predate the 1970s. Although there have been numerous articles dealing with administrative ethics in some way in PAR since 1940, as Nigro and Richardson have demonstrated, one does not find anything approximating a systematic and developmental treatment of the subject until the last three decades. Even during these years the study of administrative ethics has lacked sufficient emphasis on some of the elements necessary to come to full fruition as a developmental subfield. Through the 1990s the field of study has continued to develop rapidly, as reflected in the literature produced, treatment in con- ferences, and the creation of new institutions. Empirical research on administrative ethics has expanded, but still represents the area of the field of study needing the most develop- ment. The primary criterion assumed here for a field of study is the existence of a group of scholars with a sustained interest in the subject, at least some of whom identify them- selves as specialists. The second is a consistent flow of published materials in books, leading journals, and conference sessions devoted to the advancement of theory. This stream of literature should focus on: critically analyzing, reflecting, and building on each other's work; development of methodology for research and analysis; empirical research on specific issues, problems, and testing specific theories; and integration of theories and research findings into comprehensive frameworks. A third criterion is the establishment of academic courses in university professional education programs. The focus of this chapter will be on the literature of administrative ethics from the late nineteenth century through the early 1990s as it has contributed to the development of a full-fledged field of study within public administration. It will examine the treatment of this subject in books, articles in PAR, Administration & Society (A&S), and sessions 2 Cooper at the national conferences of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). 1 There is no presumption here of comprehensiveness. This chapter is offered not as an exhaustive review of the ethics literature, but a consideration of representative works that mark the significant milestones in the emergence of administrative ethics as a recognized subject of research, theory building, scholarly publication, and professional education. Since the first edition of this Handbook of Administrative Ethics, numerous articles have regularly appeared in other journals which have emerged as significant venues including Public Integrity, Administrative Theory & Praxis, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and the American Review of Public Administration. First, the early years of public administration as a subject of study, from the late nineteenth through the middle of the third decade of the twentieth century, will be reviewed through a few classic pieces of literature. This is to demonstrate the inattention to the study of administrative ethics during that era. Then a body of literature from the late 1930s through the 1960s will be examined as forming the foundation for a field of study focusing on administrative ethics. Finally, the material of the 1970s through the early 1990s will be treated as representing the actual emergence of what may now be understood as a field of study. The most recent body of work from the early 1980s through the early 1990s will be discussed more briefly than that which came earlier since it is too voluminous to examine in detail and it is amply dealt with elsewhere in this handbook. The most recent literature, with a very few notable exceptions, will not be reviewed in this chapter since it is covered well in the revisions of those chapters that follow. I. THE EARLY YEARS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A FIELD OF STUDY Van Riper (1983) has argued persuasively that the study of American public administration predates Woodrow Wilson's famous essay (1887). He has suggested Dorman B. Eaton's (1880) examination of the British civil service, with U.S. application in mind, seven years earlier as a more appropriate point of origin. 2 Although any such specification is somewhat arbitrary, Eaton's study will be taken as a starting point here. Upon examining Eaton's work, it is clear that he viewed civil service reform as a fundamentally ethical act. Lamenting ' 'the long practice of making merchandise of public authority," he maintained that this practice "had vitiated and benumbed the moral sense of the English nation on the subject, so that reform had become tenfold more difficult; just as the moral sense of this nation [the U.S.] has, from like causes, become blunted to the immorality of levying assessments and bestowing office for mere partisan purposes'' (pp. 23-24). Eaton saw the shift from appointment to office by a "corrupt and arbitrary king'' to merit criteria based on character and competence as an advance in ' 'justice and liberty" (p. 357). Civil service was understood, not merely as a method of conducting public business, but as "a test and expression of the justice and moral tone of a nation's politics" (p. 358). In Eaton's work, the emphasis on the moral sense and tone of the nation, together with the identification of justice and liberty as the determinative principles were strikingly different from the emphasis on efficiency and making government more businesslike which were central to Wilson's essay (1887). In "The Study of Administration" Wilson reflected the assumptions of the American Progressive reform movement that efficiency was the hallmark of good government and the development of a scientific approach to The Emergence of Administrative Ethics 3 administration was the way to achieve it. Furthermore, his work evidenced continuity with the assumptions of the Federalist philosophy of human nature which underpins the U.S. Constitution. The improvement of human nature through education and reason could not be counted on to produce ethical conduct in public affairs; authority and structural con- straints on discretion were considered the primary guarantors of good government. Although the Progressives were concerned about the unfairness of unequal treatment of the citizenry based on willingness to lend support to a political machine, they were even more disturbed by the inefficiency of those informal governments. Simply by dint of the amount of attention given to efficiency and the methods of science in the Progressive literature, one comes away with the impression that the more serious defect in machine government was thought to be its inefficiency rather than its lack of justice or liberty. Ethical conduct for the Progressives was efficient action by public servants in carrying out impartially and scientifically the policies adopted by the political leadership. While there was a difference in emphasis on the ethics of public administration between Eaton and Wilson, both tended to view the means of achieving ethical conduct similarly. It was a matter of certain procedural reforms involving selection for public service based on job-related merit criteria instead of ties to a political boss, and promotion based on performance rather than political favors rendered. It should not be surprising then to find no call by Eaton or Wilson for the study of administrative ethics. If one assumed that ethical conduct, as well as more efficient government, could be attained through the establishment of a merit-based civil service system then the appropriate focus of study was how to accomplish these changes, not the normative content of public service ethics, or ethics training for those in the public service. What constituted ethical conduct was not a matter of great dispute, just how to secure it. This same general orientation was reflected in Goodnow's Politics and Administra- tion: A Study in Government (1900). His focus was on popular government and efficient administration. Goodnow offers no direct treatment of administrative ethics, nor are there entries in the index for terms such as "ethics," "morality," "public interest," or "com- mon good." "Responsibility" was the only concept employed from which one might infer an administrative ethic. Goodnow's treatment of the problem of the political boss (pp. 168-198) made it clear that public administrators are responsible only for the execution of policy determined by elected officials. There was no recognition of the unavoidable discretionary power of administrators in the modern state and the policymaking role which necessarily follows. One achieved ethical administration through a merit-based civil ser- vice system controlled by "reasonable concentration and centralization" of authority; this constraint of administrative action from above made government more responsible. Willoughby's textbook, The Principles of Public Administration: With Special Ref- erence to the National and State Governments of the United States (1927), continued along similar lines. One finds there the same focus on efficiency and the quest for generic scien- tific principles of administration as the means of achieving it. The civil service merit system was viewed as a moral structure which would lead to ethical public administration. Ethics was not considered as an individual professional skill involving a discrete body of knowledge and analytical techniques. Rather it was subsumed under organization and personnel theory as the product of certain scientifically grounded arrangements, proce- dures, and rules. There is one brief section in Willoughby's volume in which he did resort to the language of ethics in arguing for the importance of a just personnel system. He described such a system as one which "offers equal opportunities to all citizens to enter the govern- 4 Cooper ment service, equal pay to all employees doing work requiring the same degree of intelli- gence and capacity, equal opportunities for advancement, equally favorable work condi- tions, and equal participation in retirement allowances, and makes equal work demands upon the employees" (p. 230). Absent these conditions, loyalty, esprit de corps, and will- ingness to work—all of which he viewed as essential to efficiency—would be impossible to secure. However, once again Willoughby was describing system traits and the requisites of organizational efficiency. Later in the book he did mention the importance of character traits such as honesty, but Willoughby noted the difficulty of assessing these attributes, thus leaving them clearly secondary to external controls provided by the organization. II. LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR ETHICS AS A FIELD OF STUDY Almost a decade after Willoughby's book, with the publication of The Frontiers of Public Administration by John M. Gaus, Leonard D. White, and Marshall E. Dimock (1936), one can see stress cracks in the dominant consensus appearing that prepared the way for greater significance for administrative ethics. In "The Meaning and Scope of Public Administration" (pp. 1-12), Dimock cautioned against "going too far in the formal sepa- ration between politics and administration" (p. 3). He then pointed out that researchers soon discover "the important differences in place, time, local tradition, and objective which need to be given their full weight" (p. 4), thus subtly calling into question the possibility of a science of administration. John Gaus, in "The Responsibility of Public Administration" (Gaus et al., 1936: 26-44) asserted that public administrators exercise considerable discretion and raised the question concerning to whom or what are they responsible for this discretionary judgment. Responding to his own question, Gaus introduced the term ' 'inner check'' which he had borrowed from debates in the literary journals of his time. As a form of responsibility more relevant to modern government than accountability to elected officials, Gaus argued for an "inner check" consisting of obligation acknowledged by individual civil servants "due to the standards and ideals" of their profession (pp. 39-40). With this kind of argument, ethical reflection and normative judgment seem to have been only a short step away. Dimock further reinforced Gaus' case for the existence of more administrative dis- cretion than had been allowed previously in "The Role of Discretion in Modern Adminis- tration" (Gaus et al., 1936: 45-65). He not only observed that "the discretionary power of administrative officials has grown relative to that of courts and legislatures," but pre- dicted that it would continue to increase (pp. 45, 64). In the concluding chapter, ' 'The Criteria and Objectives of Public Administration'' (Gaus et al., 1936: 116-133), Dimock attacked the validity of the central value of Progres- sive public administration—efficiency. He noted that the highest compliment for a govern- ment in the United States is to suggest that it is efficient. Furthermore, he proclaimed: "It is no exaggeration to say that, particularly in the last fifty years, American citizens have developed an attitude toward the term 'efficiency' which is nothing short of worship- ful" (p. 116). However, according to Dimock, this was all done uncritically and efficiency had become a "slogan" (Gaus et al., 1936: 116). He was then moved to question why criteria and values are important to public administration, and finally to comment briefly on the The Emergence of Administrative Ethics 5 desirability of a broader administrative philosophy that would include "the virtue of loy- alty, as well as honesty, enthusiasm, humility, and all the other attributes of character and conduct which contribute to effective and satisfying service" (p. 132). Dimock's call for an administrative philosophy, focused on the character of the individual administrator, together with his attack on the adequacy of efficient organiza- tions, his and Gaus' claims concerning the discretion of administrators, Gaus' argument for the importance of an "inner check," and Dimock's worry about separating politics from administration, all reflect a gradual but certain tectonic shift in administrative thought which made it almost inevitable that ethics would receive major attention sooner or later. The running debate between Carl Friedrich and Herman Finer during the years 1935-1941 further focused attention on the validity of the internal controls represented by professional values, standards, and ethics as replacements for, or complements to, the external controls of political superiors and the laws they produced. Friedrich insisted on the inadequacy of external controls to maintain responsible administrative conduct in modern complex organizations and called for the cultivation of a form of' 'inner check'' advocated by Gaus, while Finer pointed out the weakness of internal controls in the face of human propensity for rationalization and reaffirmed the necessity for political control of adminis- trators through laws, rules, and sanctions (Friedrich, 1935; Finer, 1936). 3 By 1940 one could discern a synthesis of the Friedrich-Finer dichotomy in Public Management in the New Democracy, edited by Fritz Morstein Marx. 4 Specifically, in a chapter authored by Marx, "Administrative Responsibility" (Marx, 1940: 218-251), he opined that legislative control was no longer adequate to insure responsibility (p. 237). Although he considered it, along with judicial restraint, still necessary as a foundation for responsible conduct, Marx offered a bold prescription that moved well beyond legal control: The heart of administrative responsibility is a unified conception of duty, molded by ideological and professional precepts; a firm determination on the part of the official to sacrifice personal preference to the execution of legislative policy and to infuse his energies and his creative impulse into his task; a wakeful consciousness of the defer- ence he owes to the people and its vital interests. Administrative responsibility ema- nates from an attitude of true service. In the shaping of this attitude, the ethical outlook of the official is only one, though a very important, factor (Marx, 1940: 251). Here one can see clearly the emergence of a role for ethics along with the more traditional instruments of political oversight and legal control. Administrative ethics in- volved, according to Marx, an understanding of duty that contained both ideological and professional elements, subordination of personal interests to those of the citizenry, and an obligation to the role of servant of the public. Tugwell's article in the first volume of PAR in 1940 struck a new chord by focusing on the concept of ' 'the general interest'' as an appropriate central criterion for evaluating the planning commission of the city of New York. At an earlier time "efficiency" would have been a more likely candidate. Tugwell seemed to assume that there was sufficient general agreement about the meaning of the concept to make it useful, although his own treatment evidences only a gross distinction between individual and private interests on the one hand, and the larger interests of the city on the other. There was no real conceptual or theoretical development, only general application. For the most part, the literature of the 1940s following Marx's edited volume was a period during which the same themes and complaints were churned over, reexamined, and digested. One sees little systematic development of a study of administrative ethics, 6 Cooper only reaffirmation of flaws in the old formulation of the administrative role, calls for a new place for ethics, and a few tentative suggestions about the directions which should be taken in developing a professional ethic. For example, Levitan (1942) joined the growing chorus against too firm and precise a notion of the neutrality of public servants. While affirming the need to limit the direct influence of political parties in administrative appointments and the involvement of admin- istrators in partisan activities, he asserted the requirement of administrative loyalty to the citizenry and a devotion to democracy. He advocated education in citizenship and the American democratic tradition for the entire civil service. In this sense public administra- tors were obligated to political commitments. Similarly, Caldwell (1943) resorted to historical reflection on Thomas Jefferson for a precedent for challenging administrative neutrality and affirming the political obligation of public servants. He found in Jefferson an understanding of the responsibility of the administrator to the Constitution as having priority over their accountability to the legisla- ture. To address the problematic nature of the emerging administrative state for democratic control, he used this precedent to argue that administrators must always remember that they are "the servants of the people, not their masters" (p. 253). He concluded: So long as men retain a sense of social obligation and a love of personal liberty, and so long as public administrators are governed by the conceptions of service and self- restraint which Jefferson exemplified, America has nothing to fear from the expanding role of administration in the contemporary state (Caldwell, 1943: 253). The outstanding exception to this tendency to repeat the attacks on the old consensus, call attention to discretion, and reaffirm the political and value-laden nature of public administration was a landmark article by Leys (1943). There Leys clearly linked adminis- trative discretion with the need for greater attention to professional ethics using philosophy as the primary focus of study. In effect, he began a conceptual outline for an approach to the study of administrative ethics. Arguing that administrative discretion is not merely the result of legislative vagueness, but a positive necessity in modern industrial society, Leys observed the need for wisdom in the exercise of discretionary power. He found the negative approach which focuses on ways of limiting discretionary judgment to be inadequate and called for greater attention to ethics. However, Leys made it clear that he was not particularly interested in codes of ethics since they tend to ' 'prescribe standards for the administrator's own con- duct" (p. 11). His concern was with administrative decisions that affect others such as citizens, departments, corporations, and subordinates. These he called policy decisions although they may be only discrete decisions in the course of one's administrative work. 5 Leys then made his case for a philosophical foundation for administrative ethics. He explained that the philosopher's focus on how one links general standards of conduct to specific standards fits precisely the administrator's need to move from general legisla- tion to particular actions, as well as from specific deeds to the general principle which informs them. Leys then discussed two approaches to philosophical ethics that might be employed by administrators—duty to certain values and principles on the one hand, and utilitarian concern for the consequences of one's acts on the other. 6 Leys coupled with his argument for philosophical ethics a more complex typology of discretion than had been proposed previously. These are technical discretion, discretion in social planning, and discretion in reconciling political conflict. He concluded with an The Emergence of Administrative Ethics 7 assertion that the ' 'classical methods of ethics'' should be helpful with all three forms. They would be useful in "testing the compatibility" of "technically defined rules with a settled criterion," clarifying and articulating the vague criteria which may be inherent in social planning, and in "rationalizing debate where the criteria are in dispute" (Leys, 1943: 23). In the immediate aftermath of World War II one can still discern little real develop- ment of ethics as a field of study beyond the advances represented by Leys' article. Appleby, in a PAR article entitled, "Toward Better Public Administration" (1947) and a book called Big Democracy (1949) worked over the political nature of public administra- tion, its participation in "the creation of opportunity for the fructification of moral ends" (1947: 95), its obligation to support democratic values, its duty to be responsive to the citizenry (officials are "especially responsible citizens" [1947: 99]), and its focus on the public interest. As always, Appleby said it well, perhaps better than his predecessors, but there was nothing in these works that directly contributed to the development of adminis- trative ethics as a field of study. One might respond that Appleby's presentation of these ideas cogently and in an integrated fashion solidified the ground for administrative ethics. That may well be a valid observation, but the significance of these additions to the litera- ture lies more in their contribution to the development of a political theory for public administration than in advancing the study of ethics. White's third edition of Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (1948) treated ethics exclusively in terms of external controls under the rubric,"codes of ethics" (p. 485). He discussed codes mainly as an essential element of professionalization which is needed "to attract favorable public attention and help to raise prestige" (p. 485). He pointed to the code adopted by the International City Managers' Association as a prime example. White recognized that such codes were not fully adequate to deal with the full range of ethical concerns of administrators and gave examples of complicated situations arising out of the organizational context for which codes are not very helpful. He con- cluded his brief treatment of ethics by acknowledging that "We lack any general study of civil service ethics, but a subject which offers such interesting possibilities will doubt- less soon be explored" (p. 489). This appears to have been the first explicit admission that administrative ethics is worthy of "general study," but that nothing up to that point amounted to such an effort. However, greater vigor in the call for attention to administrative ethics and new momentum toward the development of ethics as a field of study in public administration began to develop in the next year with the publication of Marx's article "Administrative Ethics and the Rule of Law" (1949). 7 Marx began by observing the dependence of admin- istrative conduct on "conscious or unconscious self-interest" and "the maturity of indi- vidual judgment and insight." The significance of the impact of administrative judgment on public policy suggested to Marx that these were not sufficient. Since they could ' 'not be said to spring from any common agreement entered into by the civil-service profes- sion," he asserted the need for a more "coherent body of administrative ethics" (pp. 1120-1121). Marx did not understand this lack of agreement to mean that there was no basis for arriving at such a consensus; there was "a considerable degree of uniformity" that "arises even from purely individual responses to issues of morality that recur in the occupational experience of the civil servant. The problem was that' 'in contrast with other professions, . . . public management has devoted less effort to evolving something in the nature of a general code of conduct" (pp. 1121-1122). Marx draws support for this assess- 8 Cooper ment of the state of administrative ethics by quoting White's statement above concerning the absence of any general study of the subject. Marx then began to outline an ethical theory for public administration by asserting that ' 'the highest task of public administration is to serve as an effective instrument in attaining the purposes of the political order" (Marx, 1949: 1127). This was not simply a revival of the politics-administration dichotomy, but a broader and deeper recogni- tion that "administrative morality . . . acquires its inner logic from the political ideology which the machinery of government is expected to translate into social reality." He contin- ued, "the core of all administrative ethics lies in the ideas that nourish the political system. In the United States, therefore, the morals of public management are inseparable from the egalitarian conception of popular government embedded in the American tradi- tion" (pp. 1127-1128). This implied to Marx that administrators were not free to follow their own personal values in the course of their professional activities, but were obligated to be "conscious agents of a democratic community" and "to direct their actions toward promoting the healthy growth of a free society dedicated to the common good" (p. 1128). This general formulation of an approach to public administration ethics anticipates arguments for regime values, founding thought, and citizenship put forth during the last two decades. It differs both from Leys' earlier advocacy for philosophy as the principal normative source for the field and the New Public Administration's preoccupation with one particular philosophical ethic—Rawlsian social equity—by grounding administrative ethics in democratic political theory and, more specifically, the American political tradi- tion. Marx pursued the point by identifying "civic lethargy" with the public perception that professionalized public administration had obviated the need for active citizenship. He insisted that seeking ways of stimulating civic participation in public management is a corollary of the ethical derivative stated earlier—that administrative officials are bound by duty to promote "the healthy growth of a free society" (p. 1131). Marx understood this to require a general orientation "toward a long-range concept of the general interest" (p. 1132). Rejecting the adequacy of the external controls advocated by Finer, Marx maintained that ' 'infinitely more important than compelling administrative officials to live up to mi- nutely defined requirements of control is their acceptance of an ethical obligation to ac- count to themselves and to the public for the public character of their actions. That is to say, they must answer for any failure to make each action breathe the general interest" (pp. 1134-1135). Furthermore, it is incumbent upon public administrators patiently to enter into the process of public consensus-building. He argued that, "the democratic pro- cess begs for time—time to establish mutual confidence, time to identify the common denominator, time to gather even the subdued relevancies, time to work out a joint conclu- sion." Marx recognized the tension this time-consuming process created under "budget- ary pressures," but insisted on its fundamentality in the ethical obligation of administrators (p. 1141). Sayre (1951) reinforced the perspective advanced by Marx as he reviewed the role of values at the end of the first decade of PAR's publication. He concluded that the field had moved from a focus in 1940 on becoming a science set apart from values to a point in 1950 where "the indispensable function of values in public life is now conceded on all sides" (Sayre, 1951:9). Moreover, Sayre observed that "this suggests that the basic The Emergence of Administrative Ethics 9 search in the study of administration is more for a theory of government than for a science of administration" (p. 9). The next year brought with it the first two volumes, by Appleby and Leys, devoted entirely to administrative ethics. Appleby's Morality and Administration in Democratic Government (1952) attempted an integration of democratic values and bureaucracy. After developing his argument for the morality of democratic government, Appleby contended that hierarchy within organizations represents a structure of responsibility that makes ad- ministration responsive to popular will. It represents a flow of information designed to maintain accountability to democratically-arrived-at policy. Admitting that bureaucratic organizations do not always work that way, Appleby discussed the pathologies that lead them astray and offered a variety of reforms for dealing with those problems. Appleby's book was an important one, if for no other reason than its attempt to resolve the tension between bureaucracy and democracy. However, its commitment to the priority of democratic values as the appropriate foundation for administrative ethics carried forward the position staked out by Marx, representing a substantial contribution in itself. Also, Appleby's volume unmistakably linked administrative ethics to the organizational context, an important connection sometimes forgotten by subsequent authors. Further- more, it drew clear distinctions between public and private management. Its weakness was that it largely stopped with the organization structure and did not address significantly the situation of the individual administrator confronted with specific ethical decisions. Leys' book of the same year (1952), Ethics for Policy Decisions: The Art of Asking Deliberative Questions, filled the defect in Appleby's work by providing an elaboration of the perspective first presented in his article, ' 'Ethics and Administrative Discretion'' (1943). While it did not deal with the organizational context, as Appleby did, nor did it distinguish between public and private sector administration, it did lay out a systematic way of analyzing and resolving the ethical problems of individual administrators, which Appleby did not. Leys summarized an array of philosophical perspectives which one might bring to bear on ethical decisions including utilitarianism, casuistry, classical Greek thought (Plato and Aristotle), Kantian philosophy, along with the ideas of the Stoics, Hobbes, Butler, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and linguistic analysts. He then worked through cases showing how these different philosophical approaches might be employed. The greatest deficiency of this volume was that Leys did not adopt a specifically managerial perspective, and even more specifically a public managerial one, but rather viewed the cases from the vantage points of the various interested parties. During the remainder of the 1950s, administrative ethics received little attention. In the two articles dealing directly with the subject, the emphasis was largely on external controls in the spirit of Herman Finer's earlier arguments. Although it is only conjecture, one might understand this emphasis as a predictable reaction to the series of scandals which occurred in the federal government during those years. Americans typically seem to respond to serious and visible scandals by resorting to the imposition of laws, rules, and other forms of external control—the quick fix. Moneypenny (1953) presented an argument for developing a code of ethics for pub- lic administration and referred to some efforts underway by a U.S. Senate committee. Although he acknowledged that "conversion" must "take place from the inside" if con- formance is to be achieved, Moneypenny's approach to bringing about this "conversion" was largely through a heavily external control orientation by management (p. 186). There 10 Cooper is no attention to the cultivation of internal professional standards and ethics as a means of securing compliance with the code. Wood (1955) advocated an even more mechanistic control orientation in the hands of superiors. Explicitly rejecting the approach of developing professional standards as too long-run, Woods called for a shorter term solution—"the systematic employment of administrative investigatory facilities." These would be "staff devices that provide an executive with information about the personal conduct of his employees" (p. 3). The value of these mechanisms would be to expose wrongdoing from inside and preserve the reputation of the agency. Wood seems not to have recognized the pernicious possibilities of such units. In 1962 Golembiewski raised again the concern over the relationship between ethics and the organizational context initially addressed by Appleby a decade earlier. In ' 'Organi- zation as a Moral Problem" (1962), he began by observing that "organizing has been considered a technical problem " and then insisted, "the neglect of organization as moral problem cannot be condoned. For the man-to-man relations implied in patterns of organization have more than a technical aspect" (p. 51). Instead of turning either to the Western philosophical tradition or the American political heritage for a normative orienta- tion, Golembiewski looked to religion by advocating "Judeo-Christian values" as the moral touchstones for organizational leadership and relations among organizational mem- bers. In contrast with traditional hierarchical, controlled-from-the-top organization theory with its view of workers as objects to be constrained and manipulated, this perspective required work that is "psychologically acceptable, generally non-threatening," allows "employees to develop their faculties," provides "room for self-determination," permits workers to "influence the environment within which they work," and does not believe "the formal organization is the sole and final arbiter of behavior," but is itself subject to an external moral order (pp. 52-53). These themes were developed further and elaborated in a subsequent book, Men, Management and Morality: Toward a New Organizational Ethic (1965). In this volume, Golembiewski faced fully the problems of individual freedom in an organizational society which had been identified and discussed by authors such as William H. Whyte in The Organization Man (1956) and Kenneth Boulding in The Organizational Revolution (1953). He continued to assert Judeo-Christian values as a source of optimism and individ- ual freedom if adopted as guiding norms for organizations. Golembiewski's focus on Judeo-Christian values as the normative foundation for an administrative ethic seems much too parochial in a time when Western values are being criticized severely as too limited for the burgeoning diversity of American society. Perhaps they were so perceived even then since they never became a major theme in public admin- istration ethics. However, his attention to the moral importance of the organizational con- text was a significant and lasting contribution. The first fully developed emphasis on the internal controls advocated earlier by Friedrich was advanced by Stephen Bailey in a PAR article entitled, "Ethics and the Public Service" (1964). Bailey focused on the personal character traits of the administrator by identifying three essential mental attitudes and three necessary moral qualities for ethi- cal conduct. This new tack in the development of administrative ethics as a field of study was widely supported and cited. However, it did not become a major theme until much later with the emergence of a body of literature on virtue understood largely as character traits. [...]... Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg," provides an excellent overview of Kohlberg's thought and research, a review of the attacks on his work, the defense of his work, and an argument for the potential fruitfulness of cognitive moral development research for administrative ethics VI CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS ON ADMINISTRATIVE ETHICS One indication of the development of administrative ethics as a field of study... perspective However, it is possible to make use of some of his conceptual distinctions concerning the nature of responsibility, the function of internal unwritten "codes," in public administrative ethics, and even to adapt some of his analysis of the moral functions of the executive to the values of democratic public service without also accepting the problematic nature of his assumptions about the need for... Moore's (1981) Public Duties: The Moral Obligations of Government Officials was the product of seminars conducted over a two-year period by the Faculty Study Group on the Moral Obligations of Public Officials, sponsored by the Institute of Politics of the Kennedy School at Harvard It provided a multi-faceted treatment of governmental ethics that covered both administrative and political roles Generally avoiding... Virtue, and the Practice of Public Administration: A Perspective for Normative Ethics," which advocated the use of Maclntyre's concept of ' 'practice'' to conceptualize the normative identity of the public administrator rather than the frequently adopted one of "professional." In this schema, the virtue of the administrator provides the major protection of the internal goods of public administration... paradigm of civic humanism, with its attendant 'ethics of character' " (p 101) This is a prime example of the intertwining of major themes in the literature once a particular theme has risen to prominence The weight of this piece, however, is on examining and developing the implications of the civic humanist tradition for an administrative ethic of virtue Its congruence with founding thought is offered... Leadership in Government, presented character studies of eleven public administrators by fourteen scholars Each of these attempted to weigh the character of some practitioner of public administration and build a case for him or her as an exemplar of virtue The purpose of this volume was to provide an empirical test of the viability and usefulness of the concept of virtue, as well as to identify positive role... issue of PAR and elsewhere, Rawls' two principles of justice were used to argue for particular policy prescriptions, thus providing evidence of the practical significance of administrative ethics and building confidence in the possibility of developing it as a field of study Ultimately social equity was not adopted by others in the field of public administration as the central principle for an administrative. .. such piece in PAR devoted entirely to the teaching of administrative ethics, and as such it represented a signal that the study of administrative ethics had reached a new stage of development It both reflected the rise of interest in offering courses on ethics in public administration education and provided encouragement to such activity The Emergence of Administrative Ethics 13 In this article as well... associated with the study of character, and encourage consideration of a variety of analytical techniques C Founding Thought and the Constitutional Tradition Just as it now seems inevitable that democracy and citizenship would eventually form part of the foundation of administrative ethics, so also does it seem predictable that the values of the founders and the principles of the U.S Constitution would... conflict between organizations and professional values in either of the two journals under consideration was "Professional Values and Organizational Decision Making" by Bell (1985) In that piece he examined the displacement of values rooted in public finance theory held by policy professionals at the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by . the nature of a general code of conduct" (pp. 11 21- 112 2). Marx draws support for this assess- 8 Cooper ment of the state of administrative ethics . civil-service profes- sion," he asserted the need for a more "coherent body of administrative ethics& quot; (pp. 11 20 -11 21) . Marx did