“A partnership in virtue among all citizens”:(1) the public service and the civic humanist tradition

It is argued that the Founders’ intentions are most correctly interpreted through the virtue-centered paradigm of civic humanism, with its attendant “ethics of character.” Such an interpretation has major implications for the civic obligations of public servants. Among them are obligations to encourage civic autonomy; to govern by persuasion; to transcend the corruptions of power; and to become civic exemplars. Because these vital civic responsibilities have been neglected in recent years, it is argued that public administration should take the lead in promoting them as standards of good government.

The future of fin de siecle America is not bright, as each day brings us closer to some geopolitical, economic, or environmental disaster that will pitch us into the garrison state.

Because of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a banal self-seeking and “moral thoughtlessness, “⁽²⁾ we trail dispiritedly after leaders who have neither vision nor courage and who care only for the pomp, circumstance, and financial possibilities of their offices. Lost in the scramble for preferment and self-aggrandizement are the Founding values and the society they were to create.

A few call for a return to the ideals of the Founding, but who are to be the reformers? One area with real possibilities is public administration, for two reasons. First, it still respects the vestiges of the political philosophy of its tradition and, hence, does not automatically reject suggestions from moral philosophy as impractical. Second, many who joined the public service did so because of some sense, perhaps inchoate, of wanting to serve the “public interest.” We can build from this foundation.

In this spirit, then, what are the moral obligations of the public service? While public servants owe their organizations both efficient performance and compliance with the law, they also owe a great deal more because they are “public” employees. Publicness carries higher obligations than those entailed by private employment. To be of the public service is to accept moral obligations, bespoken in the oath of office, the basis of public accountability. At the base, the primary obligation is to know and to believe in the Founding values.

Second, public servants are obligated to embody those values intentionally in all their actions, whether with superiors, colleagues, subordinates, or the general public. Third is the obligation to secure the Founding values for the citizens of the Republic. The fourth obligation is that all are able to speak and write well in defense of the Founding values. These obligations are nonnegotiable.

The source of the problems of contemporary America is our collective loss of belief in and application of the Founding values. By loss, I do not mean to imply that we disbelieve, but rather that we are—following Hannah Arendt— “thoughtless” concerning them. They have become cliches, rather than the guiding principles for all individual and organizational actions. Even those who defend the Founding values are reluctant to deal with the difficult problems of belief, but knowledge of the Founding values must precede belief in them, and knowledge must be interpreted within a paradigm, of which there are at least two to which we may turn.     

The future of professionalization and professionalism in public administration: Advancements,barriers, and prospects

This article examines the advancements, barriers, and prospects of the field of public administration as it seeks professionalism through professionalization. Overall, this essay delves into six broad areas of advancement and an equal number of obstacles. The milestones focus on the criteria of a profession and public administration's fulfillment of those standards, far-reaching credentialization, the expanding entry of women and minorities, the development of performance criteria, intergovernmental networking, and an expansion of associations. The impediments to the further evolution of the field toward professional development include the continuing value conflicts over the ultimate purposes of the field; the persistent politicization of the federal workforce; the inability of public servants to affect the uses of privatization; the erosion of national, state, and local governmental human-resource capacity; the confusion over the teaching of ethics and the promulgation of operational codes; and the prevalence of authoritarian administration without significant democratic inroads. The respective enumerations were not intended to suggest an exact symmetry between accomplishments and obstacles in the field--only that progress and deficiencies are prominent and substantial. Nor were these considered lists intended as exhaustive.

The central theme of this article is that, paradoxically, the prospects of this profession are encouraging because of the growing public need for its services despite persistent, widespread unpopularity. This research concludes that public administrators face an ambivalent future in which their emerging profession continues to prosper and expand amidst increasing alienation and frustration from the public whom they serve. This irony may not be alleviated until there is a socially and politically agreed-upon agenda for public servants to execute. If such a consensus is ever forged, then public administrators may become popular as well as professionally effective.     

Professionalism,Responsiveness, and Representation: What do They Mean for City Managers?

The literature in public administration advances three important values for public administrators. In their roles as technical experts, public administrators are professionals whose decisions are guided by the norms and principles of the public administration profession. In their roles as appointed officials, public administrators are expected to be responsive to their elected superiors. As representatives of the community, they are expected to voice the concerns and demands of citizens. Professionalism, responsiveness, and representation all are considered fundamental values that must be reflected in administrative decisions and actions. Despite the importance of these three values for public administration, insufficient empirical research has been done to examine what these values mean for public administrators. That is, the critical question that remains unanswered is: “What activities of public administrators are associated with these three values?” Based on a nationwide survey of city managers, this article identifies critical activities in which public administrators get involved, then reduces these activities into factors (dimensions), and finally examines the correlation of these factors with attitudes of city managers towards professionalism, responsiveness, and representation. The findings of this research help make these three values more concrete by associating them with major policy and political activities of city managers.     

T. H. GREEN AND THE ETHICS OF SENIOR OFFICIALS IN BRITISH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

This article is an attempt to move away from microeconomics in the study of administration and to concentrate on British administrative ethics from a philosophical perspective. Thus, ethics is used here not in the sense of the ethics of managers dealing with accounts but as the ‘science’ of ranking moral values. The intention of the article is to examine how political theory can be used to help illustrate the dilemmas of public servants working in a climate which is distinctly hostile to disinterested ideals. The ideas of T. H. Green, the English Idealist philosopher who contributed so much to our understanding of public service, form the basis of the theoretical discussion, and the work of senior officials in Whitehall is the material used for illustrative purposes. Where do the loyalties of civil servants lie? What are their duties and responsibilities to ministers? To whom, for what, and how are civil servants accountable?     

Proud to Be a Public Servant? An Analysis of the Work-Related Determinants of Professional Pride among Dutch Public Servants

ABSTRACT

A proud public servant is defined as someone who works honorably, conscientiously, and with dedication. Although professional pride has several positive effects on the performances of public servants, it is not instantly apparent which instruments help to stimulate pride. This study combines the Job Demands-Resources model and the High Performance Work Practices taxonomy to analyze the determinants of pride. The analysis of a large dataset of Dutch public servants shows that their professional pride can barely be influenced by High-Performance Work Practices but is in particular determined by the work environment and personal experiences related to the work.     

Professional leadership in local government

Local public service professionals are experts who temper their use of expertise with public service ethics. Public service ethics differ from the ethical codes of most professions in that they stress external accountability. Ethical codes of private sector professions create a sense of responsibility to the profession and help undergird professional autonomy. Public service ethics emphasize public responsibility and help create public accountability. City and county managers show how public service ethics can help make experts accountable to the public.     

PRESENTATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND THE PURSUIT OF REGULATORY LEGITIMACY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF COMPETITION AND CONSUMER AGENCIES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND AUSTRALIA

Independent regulatory agencies, faced with multiple and often conflicting demands from regulatory stakeholders, yet operating at arm's length from government, may be under considerable pressure to demonstrate the legitimacy of their decisions and the regime they administer. This article considers how regulators employ presentational strategies to establish and maintain their legitimacy by documenting the findings of a comparative study of two independent agencies responsible for the regulation of trade practices in their respective jurisdictions: the UK Office of Fair Trading and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Its findings demonstrate that presentational activities may be an important means by which regulators give concrete expression to their obligations of transparency, promote the effectiveness of the regime they administer, and publicly demonstrate how their work serves the community. The mass media is relied upon by both agencies as the primary vehicle through which they seek to communicate to their targeted audiences and the public at large, actively seeking to manage the ambivalence that infuses the regulatory enterprise.     

Public servant stereotypes: It is not (at) all about being lazy,greedy and corrupt

As stereotypes strongly influence social interactions, this study explores the stereotypical associations regarding public servants, and about various professions in the public sector as well as the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. This leads to a better understanding of the theoretical and practical challenges, such as citizen behaviour towards public servants, attractiveness of and political decisions about public service jobs. With a mixed-method analysis of cognitive associations (7,470 associations by 415 respondents for 12 professions), the defining epithets of public servants are clarified, along with their positive or negative connotation. Despite the strongest associations for public servants being positive (caring, helpful and dedicated), as an overall category, it has a less positive connotation compared to some specific professions typical in the public sector (nurse, firefighter and police). However, cognitive associations are substantially more positive for public servants compared to politicians, lawyers and salesmen.     

THE VALUE OF THE REMUNERATION OF HIGH CIVIL SERVANTS IN BRITAIN IN THE 20TH CENTURY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

The article traces a large real and comparative decline in the rewards of high civil servants in Great Britain over the 20th century, accelerating since about 1970. It relates this to developments in the market for ‘high quality’ graduates and to changes in public and governmental attitudes which have affected the size, organization and role of the civil service. It discusses possible causes of the decline in top rewards in terms of three explanatory approaches suggested by social scientists – the ‘institutional’, the ‘cultural’, and the views of the ‘Chicago School’. Finally, following an examination of changes in the way senior British civil servants are now recruited and remunerated, it considers possible outcomes in terms of effects on the part they can play in the governmental process.     

A Power Horizontal. The Public–Private Enforcement of Judicial Decisions in Russia

Based on fieldwork done in Ekaterinburg, this article deals with the enforcement of legal decisions about economic disputes in the late 2000s in Russia. As state employees, bailiffs are responsible for the implementation of court decisions but their efficiency depends on the cases they deal with. In the most successful cases, they are backed by private enforcers, hired by the claimant and often coming from the law enforcement agencies. This common work reflects an informal public–private partnership from below in which bailiffs and private enforcers co-execute judicial decisions. Such autonomous public–private power configurations at local level challenge the governmental claim to build a ‘power vertical’ in Russia from the top.     

Public administrators and policy implementation--a social work perspective

Professional social workers in both macro and micro settings are vitally concerned with public policy, particularly that of social welfare policy, and its implementation. They are keenly aware of the quality and quantity of services and other end products of policy implementation. Social workers serve as public administrators and staff many public and private agencies that form the delivery system network. They are also concerned with social problem-solving as is the public administrator, and see themselves as behavior change agents. Their generalized value perspective addresses the political conflicts arising from the nature and causes of poverty and inequality, the role of government in society, and the nature and methodology of the decision-making process. Organization and administration become means to ends, not ends in themselves.

The conclusions arise that public administrators will have to assume more governmental responsibility, rather than less. This is seen as a natural evolutionary outgrowth of the need to regulate increased conflict fueled by growing interdependence and rapid societal change. While public agencies are continuing results of governmental intervention, they are condemned to operate in the midst of paradox.     

Short notes on some books received

This article challenges the thesis that local‐level bureaucrats need be part of any ‘dominant coalition’ at the village level. Based on a case study of Egyptian agricultural officials, the paper argues that local bureaucrats may well be more useless than dominant in any political or economic sense. In rural areas in which local officials lack the resources (supplies, funds) to do their jobs, they may well be quite inconsequential. In such situations their position as ‘public servants’ may be appropriated by members of the rich peasantry, who have no particular need to work closely with resource‐poor local government staff.     

Management 2000

Public Management 2000 will need to do much more if it is to perform more effectively in an increasingly difficult and challenging environment likely to emerge in the next decade. To make any appreciable difference, it must prepare itself now by internationalizing public service attitudes, adapting to the changing role of the state in society and assimilating the new public managerialism which is beginning to take hold in Western countries. Furthermore, it needs to be much less tolerant of public maladministration, it must improve its public relations image, and it should strengthen its commitment to public service. Above all, public managers must take their own professional commitments more seriously and their professional associations must play a bigger role in promoting better performance. But integrating science and practice will be worthless without professional integrity. Otherwise, Public Management 2000 will just follow Business Management 2000 and remain the poor relative doing an inferior job.

Public managers will look back on the 1980s with some nostalgia. Compared with the numerous challenges that will confront them long before the year 2000, the past decade will appear in retrospect to be a rather peaceful period of adjustment. True, they had to cope with a severe crisis in the downturn of public resources, the quest for external funds and internal economies, the demand for privatization and the divestment of state monopolies, and pressure for improved public sector productivity. In some parts of the world they had acute problems of political instability, civil war, insurrection, economic paralysis, foreign intervention and institutionalized corruption.

Those who look to the 1990s for relief have not had much cause for optimism. The new decade did not begin well. Two specific events stood out. One was the collapse of bureaucratic centralism and the disinte-gration of the East Bloc, presenting an ideological challenge to the Left when the ground was virtually cut from under its feet. The other was yet another Middle East crisis threatening world energy reserves, military confrontation and international intervention that changed the rules of the former world order.

Another ominous trend was the corruption revealed in the transaction of public affairs all around the world, ranging from the stock market scandals in the United States and Japan to illegal international trade in narcotics and armaments, from the collapse of unworthy banking houses to the kleptocracy of dictators. These undermined public confidence in public institu0tions and revealed how government and public admini-stration could not be trusted to protect public interests. Managerialism cannot do much against greed. As Scott and Hart conclude⁽³⁾:

Greed appears to be the hallmark of our times, when corporate raiders loot perfectly sound companies or raid government programs for no other reason than that they are there to be looted and raided. ⁽³⁾

All these problems crowd in on public management and make managing the public's business much more difficult and uncertain.

The 1990s will be volatile and no doubt there are more startling events in store as the world heads into the 21st century. Nothing can be taken for granted any more; there are few givens. Only brave or foolish persons can claim to predict the future, and they are likely to be wrong. Like everyone else, they will be caught off guard by any number of surprising and unexpected happenings, beyond current imagination. The only certainty is that the future will not resemble the present; it will not be a mere continuation of the past. Public sector managers more so than their private sector counterparts will just have to be ready for anything, particularly the hidden twists and turns and cope the best they can in the circumstances. But there is a world of difference between facing the future blind and ignorant or aware and wise (or at least clued-in) and perhaps prepared. If they do not start preparing themselves now, they will certainly be unprepared by the year 2000. One thing is clear -- unless public managers take themselves more seriously, their future will be determined largely by others and that usually means following the business route.     

Conclusion: exploring the heart of civic darkness

This article is a synthesis of Volume II of Public Policy and Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective and an extension of the arguments found herein. And, it is an application of issues of ethics and morality to this volume. The author calls for a return to civility in public discourse and to Plato's conception of virtue, and particularly public virtue. New versions of civic space are important. The American emphasis on individualism must be tempered by a greater concern for the common good and the public interest. To achieve this public administrators must be both examples and representative citizens.

Cyrano: Perhaps I do exaggerate—a little.

Le Bret: You see!

Cyrano: But for the sake of principle.

Also in practice I have often found Exaggeration works extremely well.

—Edmund Rostand

Cyrano de Bergerac

And sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.

—James 1:15

“Civic darkness” and “sin” are offputting words. “Offputting” is also an offputting word, but we must do what we can to follow Cyrano's advice to the Count de Guiche and color our discourse as but we can. Actually, sin is quite a useful word, meaning, as it does, transgression of a moral principle. Those whose sensibilities are offended when words such as sin are introduced, or react in anger at remembrances of the excesses of evangelical piety, would do well to revisit the idea of separation from the moral good and the consequences such separatilon has for persons and for societies. Such is the case with what I will call the sin of incivility, which I believe leads us into a civic heart of darkness, which is the deathtrap of American democracy. I will exaggerate—a little.

The word “moral” is also an attenuated word. It tends to conjure personal identity material and prejudgments about the authority, associations, and intent of the preacher or philosopher using the term. Fresh in my memory after twelve years is the aftermath of the publication of my article, “The Problem of Moral Reasoning in American Public Administration: The Case for a Code of Ethics,” in the Public Administration Review of January/February 1983. Of the nineteen letters I received about the article, five came from academic public administrationists wondering why a person of my background should now be joining the Moral Majority. I sent each of them a copy of my work exposing Jerry Falwell's problems with the Federal Trade Commission.

We have before us thirteen papers and twelve responses, each dealing with an important aspect of public policy. Are there common threads running through them? Do they highlight recurring themes in American public administration? Since they were written just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, was there anything prescient about them, or are they just historical artifacts, interesting enough in themselves but now overtaken by events?

There is a common thread, and that is a continuing commitment to the legacy of Mimowbrook I, understood as a post-positivist concern with social values. The most prophetic and, I believe, relevant statements of Minnowbrook I1 extended that understanding to the societal, organizational, and personal dimensions of communicative ethics, including the problem of the alienation of the self. I will elaborate that interest in my discussion of incivility below.

The old controversies were also there: in Willa Bruce's demand that Cynthia McSwain and Orion White translate their exercise in analytic psychology “into a practical application to real world problems,” for example, and in Gary Wamsley's passionate belief that public administrationists should “unmask the norms economists camouflage as science.” Complementarities were there, too, as when real world public administrator, Ray Pethtel, Virginia Commissioner of Transportation, said hurrah for egghead John J. DeIulio, describing him as “a scholar who recognizes the value of the public manager!” A pernicious theme that continued at Minnowbrook II, despite the efforts of conference organizers to diminish it through representation and structured dialogue, was that those who live more contemplative lives do not live in the real world. The truth is that most academic public administrationists are or have been heavily involved in workaday policy formulation and execution and that most civil servants reflect profoundly on what they do. Why, then, do we continue to use the language of separation?

Although there were arguments at Minnowbrook II, and I well remember the tension in the room after Bruce and Wamsley spoke, as on other occasions, we stayed well within the bounds of civility. That is what democracy does. It roughs and tumbles and postures and threatens and in the end stays within the bounds of civility. It finds a way we can live together. Minnowbrook II did not anticipate the degree to which incivility, manifested as displaced anger, separatist politics, and cultural isolation, would come to characterize public discourse in America in the 1990s and threaten the continued existence of democracy itself. Such a development demands careful analysis.

Plato would not have been surprised at any of this, as Dorothy Robyn pointed out in her paper about using cases for teaching public management. Since cases focus on how a process affected substantive policy questions, it is easy to ignore the inherent merits of the policy. Thus induction from fact replaces deduction from theory and leaves a large potential for casuistry and the justification of moral laxity. When discussion of a case begins with the postulate that at least one of the protagonists was unethical, the opportunities for recognizing moral ambiguity in the situation itself are limited. The temptation to reduce moral reasoning to laws and regulations tends to replace the abstraction of the public manager as a political being deducing his or her strategies from whatever ideal is being served. Deontological ethics become the analytical norm.⁽¹⁾

Plato's impatience with deontological ethics means that he is not a popular theorist among democrats today. Yet his critique of democracy remains the most powerful in philosophic literature, and I believe his analysis is particularly relevant for an American political environment of electronic sound bites and bored ignorance about the processes of government. There is a paradoxical way in which Plato's explication can deliver those of us who care too much.

The rhetoricians have their way in a democracy, Plato says. As they pursue their enthusiasms, trying to persuade the inattentive public here and there, misleading the people when necessary, they devise temporary solutions to fundamental problems. They consume as they encourage others to consume, leaving nothing in store. They live transient lives in mortal bodies. The worst thing about rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Plato believes, is that they misuse words. They often invert their meaning. Words are the vehicle of the dialectic that can lead us to transcendent truth, but in the hands of Gorgias, they produce only chaos and discord. In Plato's terms, the rhetoricians

once they have emptied and purged [the good] from the soul of the man whom they are seizing … they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.⁽²⁾

The deliverance inherent in Plato is the sure knowledge that virtue does not lie finally in what one can achieve in the political world, including the public good served in feeding the poor and bringing social justice to the disinherited. We work to achieve the good, yes; indeed, we may pour out our lives in service to democratic ideals. But virtue is a personal condition of the mind and spirit. In a calculous of inherent worth, prostitutes may be more virtuous than virgins. Virtue may be present in me while I endure any physical or temporal condition, including slavery, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the trivialization of the Christian Church, or the collapse of the American Republic. Authentic freedom, and whatever wisdom has been given to me, exists in my being and only there. I can enslave myself, of course, and that includes slavery to any appetite, including the passion to be or do good.

Such reasoning is a useful antilogistic ingredient in dealing with the cascading series of manifestos in American public life telling us that we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified groups who demand to be recognized only or exclusively as different. I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. If goodness or greatness of soul is a capacity that each man and woman has, as Plato argued, then it is also true that each of us has a similar capacity for evil. The theologians of the Middle Ages called that capacity sin and defined it as separation from God, moral principle, and each other.     

Reconciling public administration and democracy: the role of the responsible administrator

This article considers whether the individual responsibilities of bureaucratic officials provide a useful means for reconciling the tension between democracy and bureaucracy. Three questions central to the proper definition of bureaucratic responsibility are examined: (1) What is the relation of bureaucratic responsibility to the view that proper bureaucratic conduct is essentially a matter of ethics and morality? (2) If the appeal to moral values does not ordinarily offer an acceptable guide to proper bureaucratic conduct, upon what principles does a theory of bureaucratic responsibility rest? (3) What issues arise in putting responsibility into practice within a complex organizational setting? The article concludes that a democratic, process-based conception offers the most useful way of thinking about the responsibilities of bureaucratic officials.

The tension between democracy and bureaucracy has bedeviled public administration. However one defines democracy, its core demand for responsiveness (to higher political authorities, the public, client groups, or whatever the presumed agent of democratic rule) does not neatly square with notions of effective organization of the policy process and efficient delivery of goods and services, which are central to the definition of bureaucracy. Responsiveness need not guarantee efficiency, while bureaucratic effectiveness and efficiency often belie democratic control.

This tension between democracy and bureaucracy persists, but that it is the individual administrator who directly experiences the tension is especially important as a guide toward a resolution of this conflict. Since divergence is central to this tension between democracy and bureaucracy, speculation about the responsibilities of bureaucratic officials—their individual places within the bureaucracy, particularly the administrator's thoughts, choices, and actions—provides fruitful terrain for resolving the question of bureaucracy's place within a democratic system of rule.

Three questions need to be addressed if one accepts the premise that individual responsibility is central to locating the place of bureaucracy in a democratic order. First, what is unique about bureaucratic responsibility, especially in contrast to the view that these are largely ethical problems that can be resolved by appeal to moral values? Second, if dilemmas of bureaucratic conduct are by and large not resolvable through appeal to moral values, upon what other principles does a theory of bureaucratic responsibility rest? Third, what issues arise in putting responsibility into practice, especially within a complex organizational setting? This list of questions is not meant to be exhaustive but only a starting point for discussion.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: A CATALYST FOR THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS

New Public Management (NPM) is one of the most significant reforms in public welfare in recent times. Making individual civil servants more dependent on the directions of the local manager than on common professional standards, previous sociological research argues that NPM results in a ‘deprofessionalization’ of civil servants. Taking a somewhat different approach, recent public administration research indicates that NPM may, at the same time, enhance the professional status of welfare managers. By integrating the literature on the sociology of professions and public administration, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of NPM using the example of a professional project for school principals in Sweden. Taking a process‐oriented methodological approach, the result shows that Swedish school principals gained increased support for their professional project by the introduction of NPM. The article argues that NPM can function as a catalyst for welfare managers' professional projects.     

From intergenerational equity to intergenerational stewardship

This essay borrows from our civic humanist tradition to present an alternative to the more dominant neo-utilitarian approach to evaluating current decisions and their potential burden on future generations. The analysis first focuses on financial debt, and then applies the framework beyond the realm of financial policy. The framework exposes some limitations in the rational-quantitative approach to policy decision, and embraces the art of stewardship as a more encompassing and appropriate role in public life. Stewardship brings intergenerational obligations to bear on decisions that current analytic techniques fail to regard as meaningful. The ways and means of stewardship are matters more of prudent judgment and passionate commitment to ways of life than of rigorous analytic precision.

[A] man owes it to his children, to his neighbors to secure their future and rescue their lives from impediments to holiness and happiness. Therefore he has no right to acquiesce in tyrannical and immoral government.

Lord Acton⁽¹⁾