The Responsible Administrator E-Book

Terry L. Cooper

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 573

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Those who serve the public trust must take special care to ensurethey make ethical and responsible decisions. Yet the realities ofbureaucracies, deadlines, budgets, and demands for quick resultsmake the payoffs for dealing formally with ethics seem unclear.Since its original publication, The ResponsibleAdministrator has guided professionals and students alike asthey grapple with the challenges of making ethical, responsibledecisions in real world situations. This new edition includes information on coping with new demandsfor accountability, as well as new cases and examples, anexamination of current issues relevant to administrative ethics,and supplementary materials for professors. Cooper's theoretical framework and practical applicationsand techniques will help you consider all of the factors involvedin a decision, ensuring that you balance professional, personal,and organizational values. Case studies and examples illustratewhat works and what does not. The Responsible Administratorhelps both experienced and novice public administrators andstudents become effective decision makers, provides them with asolid understanding of the role of ethics in public service and theframework to incorporate ethical and values-based decision makingin day-to-day management.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

The Author

Chapter One - Introduction

What Is Ethics?

Responsibility and Role

The Responsible Administrator

A Design Approach

Overview of the Contents

Chapter Two - Understanding Ethical Decision Making

Ethical Problems

Ethics as an Active Process

A Decision-Making Model

Summary

Part One - Ethics for Individual Administrators

Chapter Three - Public Administration in Modern and Postmodern Society The ...

Problems with Modernity in a Postmodern World

Implications for Public Administration

Political Theory and Administrative Ethics

Conclusion

Chapter Four - Administrative Responsibility The Key to Administrative Ethics

Objective Responsibility

Subjective Responsibility

“What to Do About Mrs. Carmichael”

Conclusion

Chapter Five - Conflicts of Responsibility The Ethical Dilemma

Conflicts of Authority

Role Conflicts

Conflicts of Interest

Maintaining the Public Trust

Conclusion

Part Two - Ethics in the Organization

Chapter Six - Maintaining Responsible Conduct in Public Organizations Two Approaches

Internal and External Controls

External Controls

Internal Controls

Assumptions About Human Nature

Chapter Seven - Integrating Ethics with Organizational Norms and Structures

Conflicts Among Internal and External Controls

The Components of Responsible Conduct

“Much Ado About Something”—Revisited

Conclusion

Chapter Eight - Safeguarding Ethical Autonomy in Organizations Dealing with ...

Responsibility to Superiors

Sources of Organizational Pressure: The Team Play Ethic

Organizational Remedies

Individual Responsibility

Individual Ethical Autonomy in Organizations

Components of Individual Autonomy

Part Three - The Design Approach

Chapter Nine - Applying the Design Approach to Public Administration Ethics

The Design Approach to Public Administration Ethics

General Application

A Specific Application

Conclusion

Chapter Ten - Conclusion Responsible Administration

The Responsible Administrator

A Model of Responsible Administration

References

Index

Copyright © 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cooper, Terry L., date. The responsible administrator: an approach to ethics for the administrative role / Terry L. Cooper.—5th ed.

p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass social responsibility series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-7651-4 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-7879-7651-2 (cloth)

1. Civil service ethics—United States. 2. Government executives—Professional ethics—United States. I. Title. II. Series.

JK468.E7C66 2006

172’.2—dc22 2006014170

Preface to the Fifth Edition

As I write these introductory comments for the fifth edition of The Responsible Administrator, I am struck by the fact that when I wrote the first edition, I never envisioned that the field of administrative ethics would grow so robustly that there would be four subsequent editions of this book. Indeed, this fifth edition is testimony not only to the growth of the field, but to the continued relevance of administrative ethics and the problem of responsibility. This fifth edition seeks to acknowledge the changes in the field and the advances in research while remaining true to the basic framework of the first edition.

The Responsible Administrator was written for students and practitioners of public administration who want to develop their ethical as well as technical competence. It is for men and women in public service, or preparing for it, who sometimes worry about the right thing to do, but who either have not taken the time to read books on ethical theory or suspect that such treatises would not be helpful at the practical level.

The education, training, and day-to-day practice of public administrators tend to be dominated by the practical problems of getting the job done. Concerns about what should be done and why it should be done get swept aside by the pressures of schedule and workload. Modern society is preoccupied with action, to the exclusion of reflection about values and principles. Theory is diminished to theories that concern means—“how to” crowds out “toward what end?”

Ethical theory, in particular, tends to suffer under the sway of this mentality. Because ethics involves substantive reasoning about obligations, consequences, and ultimate ends, its immediate utility for a producing and consuming society is suspect. Principles and values, “goods” and “oughts,” seem pretty wispy stuff compared to cost-benefit ratios, GNP, tensile strength, organizational structures, assembly lines, budgets, downsizing, deadlines, outsourcing through contracts, interest group lobbying, and political pressures. The payoff for dealing formally with ethics is unclear for individual administrators and for organizations as well.

The result is a tendency either to totally ignore the study of ethics or to deal with it superficially. A study conducted by the Hastings Center two years before the first edition of this book was published revealed that “few higher-education institutions offer courses in ethics” (Watkins, 1980, p. 10). The researchers attributed this neglect primarily to the controversial nature of the teaching of ethics. Academicians apparently had difficulty agreeing on who should teach these courses, as well as some apprehension about “the dangers of indoctrination” (p. 10).

Since 1980 interest in administrative ethics seems to have mushroomed. (See Cooper, 2001b, for a review of the emergence of ethics as a field of study.) The demand for in-service training sessions has increased substantially, more articles on ethics have appeared in the professional literature, sessions on ethics have grown in number and attendance at the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), and in 1989 ASPA conducted its first national conference on governmental ethics in Washington, D.C., with seven hundred participants, including both practitioners and scholars. ASPA now has a standing Section on Ethics (see www.aspaonline.org/ethicscommunity), which boasts a membership of four hundred scholars and practitioners and has hosted a number of conferences, including the first international conference in 2005. It publishes a thirty- to forty-page online electronic newsletter four times annually that has won the Best Section Newsletter Award from ASPA every year since its inception almost ten years ago.

In 1991 the first Conference on the Study of Government Ethics was held in Park City, Utah. The conference was led by George Frederickson and sponsored by the Section on Public Administration Research of ASPA, the Ethics in Public Service Network, the Institute of Public Management of Brigham Young University, and the Public Administration Program at the University of Utah. This two-day event focused on research on public ethics, the fifty to sixty participants consisting mostly of scholars from around the nation. The nine sessions, with a total of twenty-one presentations, covered topics including Ethics and Organizational Controls, Ethics and Independent Controls: The Role of Commissions, Ethics and Professional Culture, Codes of Ethics, Administrators’ Attitudes Toward Ethics and Professional Conduct, Legislative and Political Corruption and Ethics, Conflicts of Interest, Policy Ethics, and Organizational Ethics. The range of topics, participants, and research methods reflected in the program indicated that serious research was well under way on public ethics.

The next major milestone was the National Symposium on Ethics and Values at the Public Administration Academy in Tampa, Florida, in 1995, organized by James Bowman and Donald Menzel. This was the first national forum for examining the treatment of values and ethics in curricula, academic professional ethics, the ethical dimensions of faculty-student relations, research ethics, virtue approaches to ethics education, and the role of the academy in educating ethics officials in government. More than a hundred persons, mostly academics, participated in the two and a half days of deliberations, including thirty-one presentations.

The rapid development of research on administrative ethics is reflected in the publication of the first Handbook of Administrative Ethics (Cooper, 1994). The second edition of this volume (Cooper, 2001a), an overview of the state of the art in administrative ethics research, contains thirty-four chapters by forty-one scholars from around the world. The first edition of this book would have been inconceivable only ten years earlier; the expansion of the second edition after just six years is testament to the growth and relevance of the field. I have recently examined some of the major research questions before us in “Big Questions in Administrative Ethics: A Need for Focused, Collaborative Effort” (2004a).

Another important indication that administrative ethics had passed beyond the academic fad stage was the 1997 publication of Public Integrity Annual, sponsored by the Council of State Governments and ASPA. This book included chapters by both academics and practitioners and focused largely on practical administrative problems and applications (Bowman and Ensign, 1997). It was so well received that it is now a quarterly scholarly journal, Public Integrity, currently edited by James S. Bowman. It is currently considered a very high-quality journal on administrative ethics.

In spite of these significant developments in scholarship, the academy nevertheless seemed slow to adapt to these trends in the curricula of professional education for the field. April Hejka-Ekins (1988) surveyed 139 of the more than 200 schools and departments that belong to the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) and found that only 66 (31.4 percent) had offered an ethics course during 1985–86 and 1986–87. It appears that academe responded weakly to the emerging interest in ethics; there was a disturbing lag in developing courses as part of the core curriculum of public administration education.

Although it now seems that the treatment of ethics in graduate courses in public administration is growing, there are no current comprehensive statistics on the number of programs offering or requiring ethics courses. Fragmentary data suggest that graduate programs are increasing their emphasis on ethics. Catron and Denhardt (1994) reviewed the thirty-nine NASPAA self-study reports for 1989–91 and found that 18 percent not only offered ethics courses but required them. This amounted to a substantial increase in the number of required courses over an earlier study they conducted. Menzel (1997) indicates that 78 of the 225 NASPAA programs (35 percent) he surveyed in 1996 now offer ethics courses. My own review of the curricula of the twelve programs ranked in the top ten by U.S. News and World Report (March 20, 1996) indicates that eight (67 percent) offer an ethics course and four (33 percent) do not. None requires such a course.

The number of freestanding courses devoted entirely to ethics does not really tell the whole tale, however. Catron and Denhardt (1994, p. 52) point out that in 1989, a new NASPAA curriculum standard went into effect mandating that “the common curriculum components shall enhance the student’s values, knowledge, and skills, to act ethically and effectively.” In the self-study report instructions adopted in December 1996 (National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, 1996), this was made more specific:

4.21 Common Curriculum Components

The common curriculum components shall enhance the student’s values, knowledge, and skills to act ethically and effectively:

In the Management of Public Service Organizations, the components of which include: Human resources; Budgeting and financial processes; Information, including computer literacy and applications.

In the Application of Quantitative and Qualitative Techniques of Analysis, the components of which include: Policy and Program formulation, implementation and evaluation; Decision-making and problem-solving.

With an Understanding of the Public Policy and Organizational Environment, the components of which include: Political and legal institutions and processes; Economic and social institutions and processes; Organization and management concepts and behavior.

This section is followed by a further requirement to indicate how ethical conduct is cultivated:

4.21.B. Ethical Action: Describe how the curriculum enhances “students’ values, knowledge, and skills to act ethically and effectively.” In the current standards revised in January 2002, the standards concerning ethics education are essentially the same except the 4.21.b requirement to spell out how the curriculum accomplishes the kind of ethics outcomes that are desired has been dropped.

The adoption of curriculum standards and reporting requirements by NASPAA has likely led to some treatment of ethics in all of the NASPAA programs, but that does not mean that all will have separate courses. In many cases, ethics has been integrated broadly into the curriculum by incorporating modules in various courses on management, policy analysis, human resources, public finance, quantitative methods, and research design. Responses to a query sent out on the NASPAA listserv about ethics courses produced responses that suggested that many programs prefer this approach and in some cases are too small to be able to offer a separate ethics course. For a period of about ten years, Robert Cleary, now an emeritus professor at American University, analyzed the NASPAA directory listings every two years and confirmed in a personal e-mail message that integration into courses on other subjects is the predominant mode of delivery. The possibility of requiring a freestanding course in all NASPAA accredited programs has been raised a number of times at both NASPAA and ASPA conferences but has received little support beyond those whose focus is administrative ethics.

At an earlier stage, there seemed to have been an uneasiness with the formal study of ethics rooted in an assumption that ethics is simply a matter of relativity and subjectivity. In a pluralistic society, where no one religious or cultural tradition is dominant, ethics has been viewed as a private, individual matter, not susceptible to the canons of rational inquiry. To address the study of ethics openly in an academic setting was thought to run the risk of either creating unresolvable conflicts among those who hold differing ethical perspectives or unfairly propagandizing for one particular point of view. However, Americans appear to have become more comfortable with the topic of ethics in public life and with offering academic courses on the subject or treatment of it in courses on other topics. One change since the fourth edition is that the role of religious faith and belief in public administrative ethics has become an increasing point of controversy in conferences and on the Section on Ethics “Ethtalk” listserv, although it has not yet surfaced in a major way in publications.

Although significant progress seems to have been made in accepting the legitimacy of studying administrative ethics, it is still true that once students leave school, they are probably not well equipped to think about the ethical problems they face regularly on the job and shape their conduct accordingly. Yoder and Denhardt (2001) argue, “No guarantee exists that even if public administration /affairs schools integrate and teach ethics in the most effective manner, administrators will practice what they have learned and act ethically” (p. 74). The mere acceptance of the academic legitimacy of ethics still sends a clear message to those preparing for careers in public service that it is not a top priority. The essential value-orientedness of the field of public administration remains largely unacknowledged. We should not be surprised, then, to see expedience and technical considerations dominate decision making. Even when ethical issues are recognized, often they are considered hopelessly frustrating and beyond the domain of rational analysis. We can predict that decisions involving value conflicts will not be engaged as systematically, seriously, or openly as matters of economics, politics, and organizational survival. Menzel concludes his 1997 study on the impact of ethics courses with the assertion that ethics instruction has definitely found a niche in public administration schools and that however the topic is handled in the classroom, it seems to be making a difference in the professional lives of the students—but not enough of a difference. So there is still work to be done by those who believe that competence in ethical analysis and decision making are central to the field and should shape administrative practice.

Practitioners, however, do seem to have recognized the importance of ethics in their professional roles. Bowman and Williams’s 1997 study of 750 public managers who are ASPA members concludes, “The respondents indicate that ethics is hardly a fad and that government has the obligation to set the example in society. They further hold that ethics in the workplace can be empowering, although not all organizations and their leaders have a consistent approach to accomplish this. The findings emphasize the key role of leadership—both by its presence and absence—in encouraging honorable public service” (p. 525). Their empirical findings reflect a substantial increase in the importance attributed to ethics by public administrators as compared to a similar study published by Bowman in 1990. This is a hopeful sign; perhaps academe will respond to these perceptions of practitioners more forthrightly in the years ahead.

Acknowledgments

Twenty-four years since the first edition of The Responsible Administrator was published, my intellectual honesty and humility still require admitting that writing a book is not a task for which an author ought to take sole credit. The more I write and reflect, the more I interact with students in the classroom, and the more I converse with colleagues around the world, the clearer it becomes that scholarship is truly a collective enterprise.

I am indebted to the many undergraduate students who have taken my course in Citizenship and Public Ethics as part of the undergraduate program in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California. Their blunt questions and serious challenges have deepened my thinking and forced me to be clearer in expressing my views. Their interest in the subject of public ethics and the intensity of their struggles with their own professional obligations have stimulated lively debates that have caused me to rethink my own perspective.

I express my deepest appreciation to the women and men at all levels of American public service who have shared their struggles, insights, and creativity with me. Their cases and ensuing discussions in ethics workshops I have conducted since 1975, as well as in my graduate course on Public Ethics more recently, are the empirical basis for this book and a major source of any knowledge I may be able to pass along. I have been deeply impressed by their intention to do the right thing in the face of formidable impediments. I hold their contributions to ethics in public administration in respectful trust and pass it along as their gift to the reader.

I thank my colleagues around the world who are teaching and engaging in research on administrative ethics. Our numbers have grown substantially since 1982 when The Responsible Administrator first appeared. Through sessions at the annual conferences of ASPA and at other smaller meetings in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Belgium, and Australia, I have observed that a genuine community of scholars and practitioners is emerging worldwide that is committed to the development of public administrative ethics. In particular, I thank Terry Lui, formerly on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, for collaborating with me on two research projects on administrative ethics in Hong Kong during my year there as a Fulbright Professor in 1989, and again during the 1993–1997 period. Working with her has enriched and expanded my understanding of public sector ethics.

My thanks also go to the reviewers, who once again carefully examined the previous edition of this book and gave me their constructive advice, and to Allison Brunner at Jossey-Bass, whose competent editorial guidance has been invaluable.

I express again my continuing gratitude to my dearest and best colleague, my wife, Megan, whose inspiration, insights, writing skill, knowledge of the field of public administration, practical insights, and personal support have been freely and warmly given since the first edition, and again at every stage of this project.

I must also acknowledge a moral guide in my life who has become more insistent and instructive since the previous edition, my daughter, Chelsea. Throughout her twenty-one years of life, she has caused me to take my own ethics more seriously. Her honest and direct questions have called me up short and caused me to reflect. Her “Why?” questions and her observations about the gap between what I say and what I do have deepened my moral life. This book has made its way through four previous editions as she has grown up. Observing her own moral development from infancy to young adulthood has illuminated my understanding of how we humans are most fundamentally valuing creatures.

Finally, I express my deep appreciation to Diane Yoder, whose scholarly knowledge and superb writing and editorial skills have been absolutely essential in getting this fifth edition to press. During the months preceding the publication deadline, I struggled with health problems, and Diane stepped in to handle the final editing process. She is a teacher and scholar of administrative ethics with whom I have collaborated on other work, and I look forward to further collaborative efforts with her.

All of these people and many others have helped to broaden and sharpen my thoughts. I deeply appreciate their gifts to me and hope that what I have done with them in these pages is worthy of their respect.

Los Angeles, California

TERRY L. COOPER

January 2006

The Author

Terry L. Cooper is The Maria B. Crutcher Professor in Citizenship and Democratic Values (Social Ethics) at the University of Southern California (USC). His research centers on citizen participation and public ethics. He is one of the coprincipal investigators in the USC Neighborhood Participation Project (NPP), conducting research on the role of neighborhood organizations in governance in the City of Los Angeles through the system of neighborhood councils established in 1999. Also, he is the director of the USC Civic Engagement Initiative, which is expanding the work of the NPP beyond neighborhood councils and beyond Los Angeles.

Cooper is the author of The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (4th ed., 1998) and An Ethic of Citizenship for Public Administration (1991). He is the coeditor of Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Leadership in Government (1992) and the editor of Handbook of Administrative Ethics (2nd ed., 2001). His articles have appeared in Public Administration Review, Administration and Society, International Review of Administrative Sciences, International Journal of Public Administration, Administrative Theory and Praxis, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, Public Budgeting and Finance, and The Bureaucrat. He is a past member of the editorial boards of Public Administration Review and Administrative Theory and Praxis and currently serves on the editorial board of The American Review of Public Administration. Cooper is the editor of the Exemplar Profile series in the journal Public Integrity.

Cooper has previously served as chair of the Section on Ethics of the American Society for Public Administration. He has conducted ethics training for many professional groups at different levels of government around the United States and in several other countries.

Chapter One

Introduction

The Responsible Administrator is one attempt to respond to the need for a systematic treatment of public administrative ethics that is grounded in both the realities of practice and the requirements of sound scholarship. It is important to identify the particular contribution intended here. The conceptual focus of the book is the role of the public administrator in an organizational setting; the central integrating ethical concept used in dealing with that role is responsibility. The central ethical process adopted for addressing ethical problems associated with administrative responsibility is a comprehensive design approach.

What Is Ethics?

Ethics is defined in various ways, some more technical and precise than others. The usual brief textbook or dictionary definitions define ethics as “the attempt to state and evaluate principles by which ethical problems may be solved” (Jones, Sontag, Becker, and Fogelin, 1969, p. 1), “the normative standards of conduct derived from the philosophical and religious traditions of society” (Means, 1970, p. 52), or “the task of careful reflection several steps removed from the actual conduct of men” concerning “the assumptions and presuppositions of the moral life” (Gustafson, 1965, p. 113). Preston (1996) becomes a bit more specific by suggesting that “ethics is concerned about what is right, fair, just, or good; about what we ought to do, not just about what is the case or what is most acceptable or expedient” (p. 16). Martin (1995) defines ethics as moral philosophy and stipulates that it includes four main goals or interests: clarification of moral concepts; critical evaluation of moral claims focused on “testing their truth, justification, and adequacy” (pp. 7–8); constructing an inclusive perspective by elucidating the interconnections among moral ideas and values; and providing moral guidance through improving practical judgment.

Gibson Winter (1966) defines ethics more comprehensively by describing the functions it serves in the social world. As an active enterprise, he says, “Ethics seeks to clarify the logic and adequacy of the values that shape the world; it assesses the moral possibilities which are projected and betrayed in the social give-and-take” (p. 218). Anyone engaged in ethical reflection takes on the task of analyzing and evaluating the principles embodied in various alternatives for conduct and social order. Ethics is, according to Winter, “a science of human intentionality” (p. 219).