Who Are the Keepers of the Code? Articulating and Upholding Ethical Standards in the Field of Public Administration

Establishing a code of ethics has been a challenge in public administration. Ethics is central to the practice of administration, but the broad field of public administration has had difficulty articulating clear and meaningful standards of behavior and developing a means of upholding a code of ethics. Although a number of specialized professional associations in public service adopted codes, starting with the International City/County Management Association in 1924 and others after 1960, the full range of public administrators did not have an association to represent them until the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) was founded in 1939. Despite early calls for a code of ethics in ASPA, the first code was adopted in 1984, with revisions in 1994, but neither code had a process for enforcement. A new code approved in 2013 builds on the earlier codes and increases the prospects for ASPA to work with other professional associations to broaden awareness of the ethical responsibilities to society of all public administrators.     

Recognition and Social Justice: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Paid Domestic Laborers in the United States

Working in private homes, often isolated from the community and denied the legal rights and protections that most other workers enjoy, paid domestic laborers make up some of the most socially marginalized, vulnerable, and exploited workers in the United States today. This article explores the theoretical possibilities for an account of justice, based on the concept of recognition, to critique their work experiences, legal exclusion, and social status. To do so, it draws on the contrasting accounts of recognition advanced by Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, which focus on the psychological and the socio-structural dimensions of recognition respectively. While both theories generate compelling critiques of the conditions of domestic laborers, it is shown that neither one alone can capture the full range of injustices experienced, and that each can in fact complement the other. The article thus sketches an account of justice based on both the psychological and socio-structural dimensions of recognition.     

The business of bribery: Globalization, economic liberalization, and the “problem” of corruption

This paper is intended as a critical response to the emerging consensus within both academic and policy literatures that we are currently facing an epidemic of corruption which threatens to undermine the stability of economic and political development on both a national and global scale, and which requires both immediate and wide-ranging policy interventions. Based on a review of the publications and policy statements of the leading anti-corruption crusaders — namely the OECD, the IMF, and the World Bank — it will be argued that the recent concern with corruption is attributable, not to any substantive increase incorrupt practices, but rather, to the re-framing of corruption in light of broader shifts and transformations within the global economy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Jekyll or Hyde: what is statebuilding creating? Evidence from the ‘field’

As a response to the dynamics of state formation, statebuilding has not created model states in the last twenty years as was intended. Instead, the states that have emerged around the world are heavily contextually contingent. This is despite international attempts to shape them according to a common pattern, dominated by neoliberal models of statehood. This raises the question of what kind of hybrid states are actually forming as a result of the encounter between international statebuilding and local political dynamics? This article argues that international statebuilding aims to create neoliberal states and treats local political dynamics as dysfunctional. Yet from a local perspective the limitations of the statebuilding model are also apparent, as is the need for any locally legitimate state to be grounded in its context.