Public Service Values

Richard C. Box

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317507543
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Politica sociale

Public service values are too rarely discussed in public administration courses and scholarship, despite recent research demonstrating the importance of these values in the daily decision making processes of public service professionals. A discussion of these very tenets and their relevance to core public functions, as well as which areas might elicit value conflicts for public professionals, is central to any comprehensive understanding of budget and finance, human resource management, and strategic planning in the public sector. Public Service Values is written specifically for graduate and undergraduate courses in public administration, wherever a discussion of public service ideals might enrich the learning experience and offer students a better understanding of daily practice.

Exploring the meaning and application of specific values, such as Neutrality, Efficiency, Accountability, Public Service, and Public Interest, provides students and future professionals with a 'workplace toolkit' for the ethical delivery of public services. Well-grounded in scholarly literature and with a relentless focus on the public service professional, Public Service Values highlights the importance of values in professional life and encourages a more self-aware and reflective public practice. Case studies to stimulate reflection are interwoven throughout the book and application to practice is cemented in a final section devoted to value themes in professional life as well as a chapter dedicated to holding oneself accountable. The result is a book that challenges us to embrace the necessity of public service values in our public affairs curricula and that asks the important questions current public service professionals should make a habit of routinely applying in their daily decision making.

1 The Public Professional and Public Service Values

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716626-1

The Importance of Values in the Public Sector

People often have something to say about values. We may read or hear phrases such as “That goes against her values” or “We support the values of the organization,” but many times the values themselves are not named or described. If we know something about the people and the circumstances, we may have a general feeling about what values are implied. The concept remains vague, though—an appeal to imagine what values are at stake. For example, we might think, “She seems to care about protecting endangered species” or “That organization appears to be committed to delivering public services efficiently.” Since the values in question have not been specifically identified, we may or may not accurately understand the perspectives and actions of the people involved.

Values have always been part of practice and research in public administration. From the beginnings of the modern era of American public administration in the late nineteenth century, values such as political neutrality, accountability, efficiency, honesty, integrity, and serving the public interest have been important. They continue to be important today, though people may think about them somewhat differently because of changes that have taken place in society.

A century and more ago, people who wrote about public administration favored a clearer separation between the politics of making laws and policies and the administrative work of managing public agencies. They were worried about political influence in basic functions such as hiring and promoting public employees, granting contracts for public projects, and deciding how public services would be delivered. To make public service more professional, reformers wanted partisan politics to be separated from the daily work of federal and state agencies and city and county departments. In this environment, we would expect a value such as political neutrality to be especially important. Neutrality suggests that career public professionals should do their work without regard to the demands or preferences of elected officials who might want them to hire a friend or relative, promote a certain policy orientation, give an attractive contract to a business the officials are associated with, or provide good services to people they favor while slighting others.

Neutrality is still important today, but the relationship between politics and administration, always complicated, can be even more difficult to sort out in the twenty-first century. We are no longer so interested in a clear separation of the two spheres, but we nevertheless recognize real and important differences between what political leaders do and what public professionals do. Here is another example of how perspectives on values can change with time. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, a school of thought called New Public Administration emphasized social equity as a value. Social equity is about fairness and justice for everyone who interacts with government. (New Public Administration is not to be confused with the New Public Management of the 1990s. Also, social equity is not about economic equality, which is a very different concept.)

Discussion of social equity was a response to the social change occurring then; during the 1960s and into the 1970s Americans recognized the seriousness of problems in areas such as racial discrimination, voting rights, clean air and water, protection of wild and sensitive lands and wildlife, women’s rights and roles in society, and extensive poverty in both urban and rural areas. Large-scale social movements formed and major federal laws and programs were created to deal with these issues. In public administration, social equity was initially given more attention by academicians than by public professionals, but it continues to be important today and has become a familiar value in teaching, research, and administrative practice. Advocates of New Public Administration assumed that the governments of advanced democracies, with their pluralistic, competitive politics, favor powerful, organized special interests as opposed to minorities who are without significant political and economic resources (Frederickson 1980, 7). Operating within existing laws and policies, public administrators could refocus governmental “responsiveness to the needs of citizens rather than the needs of public organizations” (6).

Since the 1980s, the public sector in many developed countries has experienced a significant shift in values, as ideas drawn from the private, market sector have been applied to government. In the United States in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and his administration moved away from the idea of government as a way of solving collective problems to characterizing government itself as the problem. They thought this situation could be dealt with by shrinking the public sector (though not the defense establishment) and allowing the states to take responsibility for some public services offered by the national government. The values held by the Reagan administration included self-government and individual freedom, in contrast to what they regarded as big-government liberalism and individual dependence on government.

In the 1990s, this shift toward favoring values of the private sector over those of the public sector moved into the specifics of administering public agencies. The idea of reinventing government (Osborne and Gaebler 1993) would have government run more like a private-sector business, emphasizing values and techniques such as entrepreneurship, innovativeness, profitability, performance measurement, and customer service. Importing these values into the public sector has inspired new ways of thinking about old problems, though values that work well in the private sector have not always fit comfortably into the legal, political, and operational context of the public sector (Box 1999).

The idea of running government like a business has been of more than academic interest, having significant effects on the daily operation of public agencies and the perspectives of public professionals. At the level of the structure of the public sector, today the idea that many services can and should be contracted out to nonprofit and private organizations is commonplace, and in some countries major public services have been privatized by being sold to private firms. At the level of daily organizational management, economic efficiency has become especially important, sometimes eclipsing values such as fairness and equity, social justice, constitutionalism and law, and citizen involvement in governance.

New Public Management (NPM) is a term commonly used to identify the application of private sector values to the public sector. It implies a connection with private sector management and distinguishes it from “administration,” which we associate with the public sector. It can be thought of as a reaction to the growth of the public sector in the period following World War II. As government met the challenges of a rapidly growing population, expanding urban areas, and an increasingly global economy, it grew larger and more intrusive in the daily lives of citizens and business people. Not surprisingly, this produced a political reaction that continues today, with demands to shrink government and make it less costly. However, citizens who complain about the cost of government generally do not want fewer services and benefits—at least not for themselves—and business leaders who want less regulation of the private sector may also want good schools and infrastructure, protection from the trade practices of other nations, and subsidies for their businesses.

In response to problems with the application of private sector ideas to the public sector, a focus on the value of public sector action has been emerging in the past several years (Benington and Moore 2011; Bozeman 2007; Moore 1995). In public administration, there is increasing interest in a complex of ideas and values that includes collaboration between government, nonprofit and private organizations, and citizens (Box et al. 2001; Denhardt and Denhardt 2011). This shared system of decision making and service delivery can be called a governance network (Koliba, Meek, and Zia 2011) or New Public Governance (Osborne 2010), and it can explicitly involve identifying and pursuing public values (Bao et al. 2012). Koliba, Meek, and Zia (2011, 31–35) suggest that such a governance system brings together the formal hierarchy and accountability of “classical” public administration; the competition and compromise of the market model; the collaboration and cooperation characteristic of government partnerships with private firms, nonprofits, and citizens; and the coordination of the activities of those working within a network.

Identifying, discussing, negotiating, and acting on the values held by everyone in a governance network can be complicated and demanding. Only time will tell to what extent this view of governance replaces the market-based values of NPM and how common its core values become in administrative practice. Meanwhile, though, it supports the idea that values are today, as they have always been, important in government and the public service.

A Focus on the Public Professional

The focus of this book is on values and the daily work of career public professionals. It is not uncommon in books about public administration to find the roles of public professionals, political appointees, and elected leaders mixed together as if they were the same, but they are quite different. Public professionals, political appointees, and elected leaders are different in how they are chosen for their positions, to whom they are accountable, what laws and policies determine the work they do, and what expectations members of the public have for their work performance and ethical standards. Given these role differences, we can expect that people in these three types of public sector roles identify and prioritize values differently.

When categories are applied to a complex situation, there will often be gray areas and exceptions. Nevertheless, a set of working definitions can be used in our examination of public service values. Elected leaders are just that; citizens choose them through election. They are accountable to the electorate, they follow the federal or state constitution or state and local laws applicable to local government, and they are involved in creating new laws at their level of government. The public expects them to show at least some awareness of the preferences of the majority of the people who elected them. The public also prefers that elected leaders behave in an ethical manner, but people may not be especially surprised when it is revealed that their elected officials are instead involved in personal, political, or financial misbehavior.

Political appointees are chosen by an elected leader such as the president or governor because they have demonstrated loyalty to a particular party or ideology or because they have relevant experience or expertise. (At the local level, there are political appointees in some places, but many governmental units have structural systems that do not include this category of leadership.) Cabinet secretaries (Defense, Treasury, and so on at the national level; departments of health services, natural resources, corrections, and so on at the state level), White House staff, and several thousand people who are appointed by the president to serve in senior agency management are all political appointees. Some of them will serve beyond the term of the elected official who appointed them, but most will leave office at the same time that person leaves. Political appointees are accountable to the appointing elected official (though they may also consider themselves accountable to, for example, the public, a party, or a view of the public interest); their actions are constrained by constitutions, laws, policies, and public expectations; and they are expected to have some capability or expertise related to the organization they lead. As with elected officials, the public would prefer that political appointees behave in an ethical manner, but occasional misbehavior is not unexpected.

Career public professionals (we can also use terms such as public-service practitioners) are never chosen by election. Instead, most are chosen in formal hiring systems that assess education, experience, and possibly performance on written and oral examinations. They are selected based on qualifications rather than personal or party loyalty or ideology, and most will serve across the terms of elected officials. Public professionals are accountable to those who appoint them, to the elected leadership of their organizations, and to the public at large. The roles of public professionals are more tightly defined and constrained than those of elected leaders and political appointees. These constraints include constitutions, charters, and laws; court cases; job descriptions; personnel rules or collective bargaining agreements; policies; administrative regulations; and the expectations of superiors, elected leaders, citizens, and peers. In addition to laws about financial conflict that may apply to everyone who works for a particular unit of government, expectations for ethical behavior are especially high for career people. These expectations may be reinforced by the codes of ethics of professional associations.

Public professionals are found at all levels of government. The class members in an academic course in public administration often represent an interesting cross-section of public-service occupations. They might include, for example, a city police sergeant, a manager in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a state probation officer, a county land-use planner, an officer in the military, and a state highway engineer. Other class members may work in nonprofit organizations, and some might now work in the private sector but plan to move into, or interact with, the public or nonprofit sector later on.

The values these people care about can be quite a bit different from those of legislators and other elected leaders. For example, a member of the federal House of Representatives, the governor of a state, and the mayor of a city are all likely to care about the value representativeness, the extent to which they represent the wishes of the people who elected them. Another value that may be of interest to many elected leaders is profitability, an expression of the financial health of the government jurisdiction they represent.

Both representativeness and profitability could be of interest to public professionals as well. Though they are not elected, they may consider whether their decisions and actions reflect the preferences of citizens in their jurisdiction. Public professionals may not think of what they do in terms of profit, but many are sensitive to the limitations of financial resources and the need to allocate them carefully. However, in addition to representativeness and profitability, they are likely to focus on values such as honesty, lawfulness, and accountability, which career public employees identify as important when asked by researchers (Molina and McKeown 2012, 381–382).

Much of what we read about public administration examines government organizations from the “outside,” searching for ways to make them more cost-efficient, more effective in delivering services, and more obedient in following the preferences of elected officials. In this book, though, public opinion, policy preferences, policy making, and partisan politics are viewed as important aspects of the political and economic environment in which public professionals do their work, but they are not our point of beginning. Instead, we adopt an “inside” perspective, beginning with career public professionals and exploring values that affect how they think about their roles and the public interest.

There are two especially good reasons for adopting this inside perspective. First, Public Service Values is about career people in public service; it is not about how to control or manage them—it is about the values that guide how they think through and respond to cues, pressures, and demands from the organizations and larger communities that surround them. Second, though media coverage of government is mostly about legislators, elected chief executives, and political appointees, a large majority of those working in government are career people. In 1992 (the most recent year for which figures for elected officials are available), there were 513,200 elected officials in the United States—542 federal; 18,828 state; and 493,830 local (U.S. Census Bureau 1992, 1). In 2011 there were 2,854,251 national government civilian employees (U.S. Census Bureau 2011a); 4,359,380 state government employees (U.S. Census Bureau 2011c); and 4,545,050 local government employees (not including those in education) (U.S. Census Bureau 2011b). Given the number and proportion of people in government who are employees rather than elected officials, it is especially important to examine the values that guide them in their work.

This examination of public service values may contribute to a sense of purpose and allow public professionals to more consciously choose what is important to them. Several characteristics of the public sector make it important to be aware of the values underlying public...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. The Public Professional and Public Service Values
• 2. Public Service Values Today
• 3. Neutrality: The Public Professional in a Democratic Society
• 4. Efficiency: The Economic Environment of Public Service
• 5. Accountability: Whom Do I Serve, and for What Purposes?
• 6. Public Service: The Personal Commitment
• 7. The Public Interest: Commitment to Society
• 8. Conclusion: Value Choices and the Public Professional
• References
• Index
• About the Author