Guerrilla Statesmanship: Constitutionalizing an Ethic of Dissent

According to judicial precedents, administrators informed by their expertise can speak on issues of public concern under First Amendment protections. In one sense, they could dissent by working against their employers in an attempt to direct issues of public concern through an educational function. The power to act like a statesman in raising such issues allows administrators to lead from behind and in front, as long as certain judicial thresholds are met. However, the U.S. Supreme Court recently moved to tighten the scope of such activity. This article assesses how an ethic of dissent has been translated into a constitutional perspective that at first was moderately constrained and later became very restricted. While the move to limit an ethic of dissent provides necessary constraints, it also may have weakened administrators’ ability to perform necessary statesmanship acts rooted in guerrilla government to achieve the common good.     

Moral Leadership and Administrative Statesmanship: Safeguards of Democracy in a Constitutional Republic

The pursuit of the common good must be understood from the reality that governing is ugly. The ability to grapple with situations that are ambiguous requires administrators to be cognizant of action that might be suspect but necessary to accomplish the public interest. This often requires them to become active players. John Rohr postulates that the U.S. Supreme Court's standards of strict scrutiny is one approach that could be used to justify such action. Building on this line of thinking, the strict scrutiny test can be used as a guide to shape the constitutive character of administrative statesmanship while simultaneously restraining it. The ability to balance formative action and restraint provides a different dimension to an understanding of administrative statesmanship. Even though this process is not easy, it helps administrators refrain from going beyond the mark and enables them to act like statesmen in seemingly unresolvable situations.     

The Job of Government: Interweaving Public Functions and Private Hands

Lively and sometimes raucous debate about the job of government has increasingly engulfed American politics. Much of that debate has swirled around government's size, with conservatives arguing the case for shrinking government and liberals fighting to grow it. In reality, however, neither of these debates engages the critical underlying trend: the increasing interweaving of governmental functions deeply into every fiber of the nongovernmental sectors. Many reforms have sought to rein in government's power, but none has engaged the fundamental interweaving of policy implementation, and, not surprisingly, most have failed. Indeed, many have eroded the public's trust in the governmental institutions on which they depend. This process raises fundamental challenges for defining government's core role, for building the capacity to govern effectively, and for enhancing the accountability of governmental programs. Many of government's administrative tools are a poor match for the governance problems they seek to solve.     

Cheap and Dirty: The Effect of Contracting Out Cleaning on Efficiency and Effectiveness

Contracting out of public services, especially ancillary services, has been a key feature of New Public Management since the 1980s. By 2014, more than £100 billion of U.K. public services were being contracted out annually to the private sector. A number of high‐profile cases have prompted a debate about the value for money that these contracts provide. Value for money comprises both the cost and the quality of the services. This article empirically tests the contestability and quality shading hypotheses of contracting out in the context of cleaning services in the English National Health Service. Additionally, a new hypothesis of coupling is presented and tested: the effect of contracting of ancillary services on patient health outcomes, using the hospital‐acquired infection rate as our measure. Using data from 2010–11 to 2013–14 for 130 National Health Service trusts, the study finds that private providers are cheaper but dirtier than their in‐house counterparts.     

The Spectre of Crime: Photography,Law and Ethics

A grainy series of surveillance photographs was tendered into evidence at the trial of a young Aboriginal man accused of robbing a bank. Two police officers testified that they recognised him from the photographs. On appeal to the High Court of Australia, the judges thought that the hooded bandit in the image looked like the spectre from Hamlet. This article uses the discourse of “spectrality” to explore the consequences for law and ethics when haunted by the transgressive image. It examines the confrontation between the foundational illegality of the Australian nation, and the indigenous man who is accused of a crime against property.     

Shaking Hands with Hitler: The Politics‐Administration Dichotomy and Engagement with Fascism

Researchers have examined the impact of the politics‐administration dichotomy on the practice and theory of public administration within the United States. But the dichotomy also influenced patterns of international engagement by American experts in the 1920s and 1930s. Americans believed that they could set politics aside and collaborate on administrative questions with regimes that did not respect democracy and human rights. This belief was tested after the rise of Adolf Hitler. American experts in public administration engaged with the Nazi regime for three years, ignoring the rising controversy over Nazi policies. The breaking point came in 1936. American experts finally recognized that it was impossible to ignore political questions and became forthright proponents of “democratic administration.” This struggle to define the boundaries of international engagement is relevant today, as specialists in public administration again find themselves in a world in which a shared commitment to democracy and human rights cannot be taken for granted.     

The Two Leviathans: R. G. Collingwood and Thomas Hobbes

In this article I draw upon the published and unpublished works of R. G. Collingwood in order to discern the relation between the Leviathan of Hobbes, and that of Collingwood. First, an attempt is made to explain why Hobbes became important for Collingwood, having had no special status in the writings of the latter prior to the composition of The New Leviathan . Secondly, two misconceptions of the ostensible relation between the two Leviathans will be exposed. Thirdly, the two Leviathans are compared at the level of general intent. It is argued that Collingwood never meant merely to update Leviathan in a piecemeal fashion, but instead formulated an entirely different criterion of conduct from that offered by Hobbes. Finally, some of the arguments of the two Leviathans are compared. Principally, Collingwood found Hobbes deficient in failing to provide an adequate account of the perpetual transition from the state of nature to civil life. One of the aims of Collingwood was to make good this deficiency.     

The Ethics of Immigration

This review essay examines recent work in political theory on the ethics of immigration admissions. It considers arguments put forward by Michael Walzer, Peter Meilaender and David Miller, among others, for state control of borders. Such arguments tend to appeal to the value of political communities and/or the exclusion rights of democratic associations, and I argue that neither of these are successful. Turning to work by Joseph Carens, Phillip Cole, Michael Dummett and others who advocate open or much more open borders, the article considers various arguments that would support this stance, including appeals to freedom of movement, utilitarianism and social justice. I argue that rights to immigration need embedding in global principles of resource redistribution. In the conclusion I sketch a cosmopolitan approach to immigration by which impartial criteria such as population density and gross domestic product would determine how many migrants states have a duty to admit.     

Ethics and Public Sector Management: The Western Australian Experience

This paper considers two specific difficulties in developing a code of ethics for the public sector, the contested nature of the values to be expressed in a code of ethics and the organisational demands of a corporate managerialist framework which uses performance indicators. Using the example of the Western Australian public sector code of ethics, the authors conclude that a good strategy for developing a public sector code of ethics will recognise contestability, demonstrate philosophical integrity in the code, mesh the code with identified performance indicators and provide whistleblower protection. The strategy described provides a sufficient framework for any public sector bureaucracy to develop a justifiable code of ethics for use by public sector employees.