Ethics and Management in the Public Sector

Alan Lawton, Julie Rayner, Karin Lasthuizen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136204845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Grappling with ethical issues is a daily challenge for those working in organizations that deliver public services. Such services are delivered through an often bewildering range of agencies and amidst this constant change, there are fears that a public service ethos, a tradition of working in the public interest, becomes blurred.

Using extensive vignettes and case studies, Ethics and Management in the Public Sector illuminates the practical decisions made by public officials. The book takes a universal approach to ethics reflecting the world-wide impact of public service reforms and also includes discussions on how these reforms impact traditional vales and principles of public services.

This easy-to-use textbook is a definitive guide for postgraduate students of public sector ethics, as well as students of public management and administration more generally.

Chapter 1

Managing ethics in the public services

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you should:

• be clear about the overall structure of the book
• understand why ethics is important for public service organizations and the individuals who work in and for them
• understand what it is that makes an issue an ethical issue as distinct from, say, a legal or a political issue
• have a sense of the scope of ethical decisions.

KEY POINTS IN THIS CHAPTER

• Ethics is an integral part of the public services and is not a ‘left-over’ to be considered after other issues have been taken into account.
• Ethics is not just about resolving dilemmas.

KEY TERMS

• Public officials – defined generically to include elected politicians, appointed administrators and managers, and professionals who deliver public services such as social workers, teachers, doctors and nurses, the police, fire-fighters and so on.
• Ethical issues – those issues, distinct from political, legal or social, that are concerned with right and wrong actions and outcomes for both individuals and the organizations they work for.
• Ethics is defined as a set of principles that provide a framework for right action; an individual acts in accordance with that set of principles.

WHY SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED WITH ETHICS?

This might seem a trite question. ‘Of course we should be concerned with ethics’ you might respond. However, it seems to us that if this was so obvious, why is it that we read in the newspapers every day about a corrupt public official in this part of the world, or a rigged election in that part of the world? As much as we might like to think that such things never happen in our own countries, they do and will continue to do so. Two of the authors of this book have lived in the UK, a country that generally has a reputation for being relatively ‘clean’ and where corrupt behaviour on the part of public officials is considered to be the rare exception rather than the rule. And yet, during 2009–10, there was revelation after revelation concerning Members of Parliament fiddling their expenses, as part of a selfdetermined and self-policed expenses regime (see Kelly 2009). The integrity of MPs plummeted to an all-time low. As a result, a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was added to the already existing committees and agencies that have some responsibility for dealing with standards of conduct of public officials both appointed and elected. It appears to be no longer the case that we can rely on the personal integrity of officials to act according to ethical norms and we need to put in place compliance mechanisms to patrol the behaviour of individuals. We examine the balance between a compliance approach and an integrity approach to ethics in Chapter 6 and 7.

Not that there is anything new about such revelations. In the UK, recent history has seen numerous examples of unethical behaviour from the scandals involving property development and local authority contracting in the 1960s, the so-called Poulson Affair (see Doig 1984) to more recent concerns with ‘cash for questions’ that hastened the end of the Conservative government in 1997 and led to the creation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the drafting of the Principles of Public Life, the so-called Nolan Principles. In Queensland, Australia, the Fitzgerald inquiry into political and police corruption (1987–9) precipitated the collapse of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government and in Hong Kong the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was created in 1974 to clean up endemic corruption in government and the police force. We can reach back in time and across continents to find examples of unethical and corrupt behaviour. A key question then becomes, to what extent is human nature corrupt or corruptible? Will there always be such examples or is there something in cultures – social, organizational, national or ethnic – that condones or encourages corrupt behaviour? We address this question in Chapter 5.

Of course, public sector organizations are not the only places where corrupt behaviour is found. You will, no doubt, be familiar with examples of corrupt behaviour in the private sector (such as Enron), and ongoing investigations into multinationals (such as BAE) for bribery and corruption in the armaments industry. At the time of writing this chapter, headlines in the morning papers report on four executives of the Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto being found guilty in China of bribery charges. The firm's Chief Executive, Tom Albanese, commented: ‘Ethical behaviour is at the heart of everything we do’ (Branigan 2010). No doubt you can provide your own examples. What is of particular interest for the purposes of this book is, first, how international agencies such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the United Nations have responded to what appears to be the globalization of ethical issues. Second, as public service organizations are encour aged to be more ‘business-like’ in the way they operate, to what extent have they become ‘corrupted’, as some critics claim, by engagement with the private sector?

WHAT MAKES AN ISSUE AN ETHICAL ISSUE?

It is not always clear as to what constitutes unethical behaviour as distinct from illegal or inappropriate behaviour. Indeed there is frequent overlap as ethical issues are often regulated through legislation, and what counts as unethical behaviour may vary from culture to culture and country to country. We know there is a grey area in, say, at which point a gift becomes a bribe. We might focus upon the act itself – what is done: examples might include fraud and corruption. Such acts are often legislated for and are clearly defined. Other acts, such as bullying or harassment, are, perhaps, less clear-cut. Huberts, Pijl, and Steen (1999) use a taxon omy of integrity violations as the basis for their research and these include corruption, fraud, theft, conflicts of interest, improper use of authority, manipulation and misuse of information, discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying, waste and abuse, and private time misconduct.

Apart from what is done we might be interested in how it is done. For example, how do public officials treat their patients, students or clients in terms of duty, obligations, care, equality and so on? It seems to us that much of the public services are about the quality of the relationships that are built up between citizens and the State, in all its forms. We might also be interested in who defines acceptable behaviour in the first place. Is it written down as a code of conduct, both for society as a whole in terms of a religious document, or for the organization in terms of a rule book? Is good conduct defined by a religious leader, a chief executive or by individual conscience? To what extent do individuals leave their personal values at the door when they enter organizational life and are they, as it were, ‘blank sheets’ upon which the organization can write its own values – ethical or otherwise – onto its employees? We explore these issues in Chapter 2 and 3.

One immediate issue that is raised is the extent to which there is agreement in a set of universal ethics. We have already introduced the question of when does a gift become a bribe; this simple question raises all kinds of complex issues of cultural relativity. The position we take in this book is that there are common problems that are given specific meanings locally. Thus, we might all recognize that injustice or inequality occurs in a given situation, but they may take different local forms. One simple manifestation of this was brought home to one of the authors when developing codes of conduct for government ministers, MPs, civil servants and judges in Ethiopia. Most codes of conduct will include a register of interests, either as an integral part of the code or as a separate document. Such a register of interests is to ensure transparency, particularly where there may be possible conflicts of interest. Tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ROUTLEDGE MASTERS IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Managing ethics in the public services
• 2 Ethical theory: What is the right thing to do and who is to say so?
• 3 The public interest: Is there such a thing and what purpose does it serve?
• 4 Public service motivation and ethos: Why do public officials work above and beyond the call of duty?
• 5 Ethical culture: What is it, is it universal and how can it be changed?
• 6 Compliance approaches: How can we enforce ethical standards and behaviour?
• 7 Integrity approaches: Can we trust public officials to regulate themselves?
• 8 Ethical performance: How do we know if we are doing the right thing and can we improve?
• 9 Leadership: Does ethical leadership make a difference?
• 10 Conclusion
• Index