Module 3 ExReading Notes
Getha-Taylor (2009)
Abstract and Context
Public service now relies on a network of partners across public, private, and nonprofit sectors to deliver services and define the common good in the face of increasingly complex problems and dwindling resources.
Authors argue that scholars and practitioners should examine how cross-boundary service provision aligns with foundational public service values and obligations.
Core framing: ethics, networks, and values as central to public service in an integrated, collaborative environment.
The Growing Crisis in Public Service
Paul Light (2008) describes government as facing a “can’t do government” reality due to complex problems and shrinking resources.
Government is described as “ill executed,” echoing Hamilton’s warning about governance failures.
Troubling signs include:
Decreasing employee morale
Ethical misconduct
High turnover
Inadequate bureaucratic leadership
Erosion of public trust after performance shortfalls
The crisis necessitates reexamining the foundation of governance, specifically the values inherent to public service.
Public service is historically framed as contributing to the greater good, but today the focus on results, cost savings, and cross-boundary work blurs the definition of the common good.
Leaders are urged to identify what must be done, not only what should be done, in attempting to solve shared problems.
Trends complicating the landscape:
More public servants working with private contractors (often doing the same jobs)
Tight reward systems limiting incentives
Increased collaboration across organizational and sectoral boundaries with potentially divergent priorities
The overall effect: pressure on the foundational values of public service.
Remedy requires collaboration between academia and practice to mend the widening cracks in the foundation.
Quantitative and Structural Change Indicators
Federal retirement projections: almost half of the federal workforce will retire in the next decade (baby boomers entering public service while the pipeline ages).
Private contractor growth: from 2.2\times 10^6 in 1999 to 7.6\times 10^6 about a decade later, with contracting activity rising and competition decreasing.
Accountability concerns: as the contractor workforce grows, it becomes harder to reward performance or hold contractors accountable.
Ingraham (2004) notes that the contractor zone of discretion is expanding rapidly, contributing to an accountability deficit.
Menzel (2007) cautions that ethical implications of entrepreneurialization and privatization in the public sector have received little attention.
Ethical Breaches, Trust, and Organizational Culture
Ethics risk in government: a 2007 survey by the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) indicates high risk of misconduct across levels.
Key ERC findings:
A quarter of respondents report workplaces conducive to misconduct (i.e., high perceived risk).
Top violations include placing self-interest over organizational interests, lying, abusive behavior, safety violations, and Internet abuse.
29% of government workers witness misconduct but do not report it, often due to fear of retaliation.
Only 1% use confidential whistleblower hotlines for reporting misconduct.
Concept of “bureaupathological behavior”: unhealthy organizational cultures reflect a lack of integrity and moral compass (Gordon, 2007).
Repercussions: ethical breaches undermine public trust and reduce organizational effectiveness.
Perceptions of public service: Goodsell (1994) describes civil servants as perceived lazy or snarling, and bureaucracy as overstaffed, inflexible, unresponsive, and dangerous.
Volcker (2002) emphasizes that restoring and maintaining trust in government is crucial, even amid reform challenges.
Collectively, these findings highlight the tension between performance demands and ethical behavior in public governance.
Waldo’s Map of Ethical Obligations and Cross-Sector Considerations
Dwight Waldo’s Map of Ethical Obligations (1988) outlines a spectrum of duties extending beyond self-interest, including:
The Constitution
Law
Nation/Country
Democracy
Organizational/Bureaucratic norms
Profession
Family/Friends
Middle-range Collectives
Public Interest/General Welfare
Humanity/The World
Religion/God
The prioritization of these obligations varies among actors in public, nonprofit, and private sectors.
Gawthrop (1998) comments that generations of public-sector careerists have been trained to separate “good” management methods from ethical-moral values and virtues of democracy, suggesting a need to reintegrate ethics with management practice.
Moving toward a more ethical public service requires attention to the underlying values that support public servants across sectors and to how value congruence or incongruence affects collaboration.
Moving Forward: An Agenda for Restoring Trust and Reclaiming Public Service Values
Central question: What is the common good in an environment of contracting and cross-sector collaboration?
The need for a shared vision of the common good that transcends organizational boundaries, while balancing performance demands, resource constraints, and accountability.
Nadler (2008): ethical organizations (and associations) will be truly ethical only if ethical behavior is a top organizational priority and accompanied by codes of ethics.
Tangible outcomes of ethics codes include reductions in misconduct; ERC (2007) reports that 30% of federal respondents indicated their organizations have ethics programs, with a positive link between ethics programs and reduced misconduct.
Role of public managers in cross-boundary work (Vigoda-Gadot, 2003): managers act as teachers and gatekeepers, leading by example and overseeing ethical standards when working with outside partners.
Academia’s role: public administration curricula should incorporate discussions of democratic and administrative obligations, ethics, and value congruence; public service values should be taught in tandem with management education (Gawthrop, 1998).
The potential of a shared definition of the common good to maximize the positive impact of public servants’ decisions.
Concrete Steps and Strategies for Practice
Develop and implement codes of ethics within organizations to elevate ethical priorities and reduce misconduct (Nadler, ERC findings).
Foster ethical leadership when collaborating with private and nonprofit partners by modeling integrity and enforcing ethical standards (Vigoda-Gadot, 2003).
Integrate ethics and democracy-centered values into professional education to prepare graduates for cross-sector governance (Gawthrop, 1998).
Encourage transparency, accountability, and responsiveness while expanding cross-boundary collaboration, ensuring that core public service values remain intact (DiIulio, Garvey, & Kettl, 1993).
Recognize the moral dimension of governance: decisions should reflect transcendent values and public service ethics, not merely expedience (Gawthrop, 1998).
Monitor and address cultural factors that discourage reporting misconduct, including retaliation fears, and promote safe, confidential reporting channels (ERC findings, 2007).
Conclusion and Implications
The governance landscape is increasingly interconnected and cross-boundary, which places strain on traditional public service values such as transparency, accountability, and responsiveness.
The central challenge is to span multi-sector boundaries and deliver performance while upholding core ethical commitments.
As DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl (1993) argued, the goal is to improve government performance without sacrificing the ethical foundations of democracy.
To prevent drift toward mere pragmatic expediency and narrow self-interest, a renewed emphasis on ethical impulses, transcendent values, and moral vision is required in both practice and education.
The article calls for a reassertion of democratic values and ethical consciousness in managerial decision-making across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors.
Brookings Institution. (2002, February 13). The quiet crisis roars [Press release]. www.brookings.edu/media/NewsReleases/2002/20020213volcker.aspx
DiIulio, J., Jr., Garvey, G., & Kettl, D. (1993). Improving government performance: An owner’s manual. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Ethics Resource Center. (2008). Governments at all levels show high rates of misconduct: “Next Enron” could be in public sector, ERC survey finds [Press release]. www.ethics.org/about-erc/press-releases.asp?aid=1148
Gawthrop, L.C. (1998). Public service and democracy: Ethical imperatives for the 21st century. New York: Chatham House.
Goodsell, C.T. (1994). The case for bureaucracy: A public administration polemic. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.
Gordon, P.D. (2007, March). The ethics map: A values-based approach to defining ethics and integrity in the public service. Paper presented at the Transatlantic Workshop on Ethics and Integrity Conference, Washington, DC.
Ingraham, P.W. (2004). You talking to me? Accountability and the public service. PS: Political Science and Politics, 38(1), 17–21.
Light, P.C. (2008, June 25). Can’t do government. Washington Post, p. A13.
Luke, J.S. (1992). Managing interconnectedness: The new challenge for public administration. In M.T. Bailey & R.T. Mayer (Eds.), Public management in an interconnected world (pp. 13–32). New York: Greenwood Press.
Menzel, D.C. (2007). Ethics management for public administrators: Building organizations of integrity. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Nadler, J. (2008). Creating a culture of ethics in the public sector. Santa Clara, CA: Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/government_ethics/public-sector-ethics.html
O’Leary, R. (2006). The ethics of dissent: Managing guerrilla government. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2003). Managing collaboration in public administration: The promise of alliance among governance, citizens, and business. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Waldo, D. (1988). The enterprise of public administration. Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp.
Heather Getha-Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina and completed her Ph.D. at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University (2007).
Frederickson (1991)
Overview
The article surveys five conceptions of the public in public administration and argues for a general theory of the public tailored to how public administration actually functions.
Five perspectives on the public are identified and briefly evaluated:
The public as interest groups (pluralist perspective)
The public as consumer (public choice perspective)
The public as represented (legislative perspective)
The public as client (service-providing perspective)
The public as citizen (citizenship perspective)
The author then outlines requisites for a general theory of the public for public administration and discusses how these four requisites relate to the five perspectives.
The concluding aim is to ground public administration theory in constitutional principles, virtuous citizenship, responsiveness to all publics, and benevolence, while recognizing the strengths and limits of each perspective.
The Public: five perspectives and their aims
The public as interest groups: the pluralist perspective
Pluralism describes the natural development and interaction of interest groups that represent individuals with similar concerns.
Interest groups organize, interact, and compete in the governmental setting to advance members’ preferences.
Advantages of pluralism in public administration:
Enables definition and description of specific groups, their power, strategies, and effectiveness.
Aligns with individualism, private ownership, and capitalism; the public interest can be seen as the net result of group interactions.
Foundational scholars and period:
Truman (1957) and Dahl (1956) helped establish pluralism as a dominant lens for two decades.
Empirical patterns and mechanisms:
Specialization in public agencies fosters alignment with specific interest groups (e.g., road builders with highway departments; tech firms with data-handling agencies).
Iron triangles: allied interest groups, agencies, and committees in the legislature.
Critiques and tensions:
Burns (1963) argued the checks-and-balances system creates slow, delayed action due to consensus among many groups.
Lowi (1979) warned that a fragmented society with many special interests endangers the whole system.
Barber (1986) criticizes pluralist democracy as unreliably yielding public ends and overemphasizing private bargaining, with mockery of free-market myths.
Yates (1982) contrasts pluralist decentralization with administrative efficiency (centralization), arguing mischaracterizations of public administration persist.
Key empirical tension:
Pluralism can underrepresent economically or socially deprived groups, while better-funded groups appear to represent the public.
General implication for public administration:
Pluralism captures the existence and importance of organized interests but does not guarantee a general public interest beyond private gains.
The public as consumer: the public choice perspective
Core idea: the public is like a consumer in a market; individual self-interest drives public action in a context of rational choice.
Methodological assumption: public action is the outcome of rational calculations by self-interested individuals with differing utilities; government shapes a context for these choices.
Intellectual lineage and key contributors:
Buchanan & Tullock (1962): apply market economics to the political system to explain self-interest in democratic settings.
Downs (1966): extends economic theory to bureaucracies, treating agencies as actors with bureau ideologies.
Bureau ideologies (Downs’ framework): five features that describe an agency’s self-presentation and advocacy:
emphasizes the positive benefits of the bureau's activities and de-emphasizes the costs
indicates that further expansion of the bureau's services would be desirable and any curtailment would be undesirable
emphasizes the benefits the bureau provides for society as a whole rather than its service to a particular "special interest"
stresses the high present level of the bureau's efficiency
emphasizes its achievement and feature capabilities and ignores or minimizes its failures and inabilities
Consequences of the public choice lens:
Bureaucrats and public officials may become self-interested actors pursuing personal gains (income, prestige, power).
Administrative specialization and bureaucratic socialization color public employees’ views of their mission and can lead to a self-serving culture.
Criticisms of the public choice view:
It tends to cynically portray officials as primarily self-interested, which can erode public trust and faith in government.
It tends to be elitist, suggesting that only those with resources can effectively participate in public choice (e.g., vouchers as an escape from public schooling to private options).
It risks endorsing a selective and skewed responsiveness that may neglect the inchoate, less powerful segments of the public.
Ethical and practical implications:
The perspective can normalize self-interest and rationalize reduced accountability.
Public faith and support hinge on perceptions that officials act for the public rather than private interests.
The public as represented: the legislative perspective
Assumption: representative government is the norm in democratic practice; elected bodies (congress, state legislatures, city councils, school boards) represent the public.
Public administrators’ role within this frame:
Admins operate agencies created by legislators and implement laws and policies; they are expected to align with legislative policy directions.
Why representation matters:
Legislators are the clearest formal manifestation of the public perspective.
Representation occurs both through elections and through interest groups’ influence.
Limitations and critiques:
Some scholars (Redford, 1981; Long, 1952; Krislov, 1974; Meier, 1975) argue the public service itself is often more representative of the public than elected officials, due to demographics, expertise, and affirmative action.
Barber (1986) criticizes the representational model for potentially limiting genuine freedom and autonomy, arguing that citizens are not truly free if political will is delegated and alienated from common deliberation.
Problems with representation:
If the public is inactive outside voting, the system risks weak ongoing support and engagement.
Representation can fail to capture minority interests or non-participating segments of society.
The public as client: the service-providing perspective
Definition: clients are individuals and groups served by street-level bureaucrats (e.g., students, crime victims, patients, taxpayers).
Core claim: street-level bureaucrats are expected to advocate for clients, leveraging professional skills to secure the best outcomes.
Key thinkers and ideas:
Lipsky (1981) emphasizes a paradox: service is delivered by people to people (caring, responsibility) yet through a detached, rule-bound bureaucracy constrained by resources.
Reality of street-level administration:
High caseloads, large class sizes, overloaded systems (schools, prisons, probation) prevent qualitative, individualized advocacy.
Organizations impose rules and procedures, with bureaucrats seeking loopholes to meet client needs.
Bureaucrats experience alienation because they can affect only a portion of the outcome and cannot control inputs or pace.
How the client perspective tends to function in practice:
Street-level workers often organize as interest groups (e.g., public service unions) and may press for resources or policy outcomes that do not always align with all clients’ interests.
Overall, the client perspective on the public is weak as a political public; it is often mediated through, or eclipsed by, other perspectives.
Practical implication:
Public administration should strive to empower client advocacy while maintaining systemic constraints and ensuring equity across all clients.
The public as citizen: the citizenship perspective
Historical roots: public administration originated with an emphasis on educated, merit-based public service and an informed citizenry actively participating in public affairs.
Resurgence and contemporary relevance:
The late 1960s saw a return of interest in citizenship within public administration; by the mid-1980s, citizen participation emerged as a major feature in democratic administration.
The citizenship perspective envisions citizen involvement alongside administrators, legislators, and interest groups as essential for governance.
Barber’s strong democracy concept (1986):
Strong democracy requires unmediated self-government by an engaged citizenry, with institutions enabling neighborhood and national level dialogue, decision-making, and action.
Barber acknowledges utopian aspects and suggests more moderate steps to realize stronger, participatory democracy (neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic education, etc.).
Barber’s proposed steps (illustrative list from the text):
neighborhood assemblies
television town meetings and civic communications cooperatives
civic education and information access (postal acts and video services)
supplementary institutions (representative town meetings, lottery-based officeholding, lay justice)
national initiative and referendum processes
electronic balloting
election by lot (sortition), rotation, and pay
vouchers and market approaches to public choice
national citizenship and common action (universal citizen service, volunteering, training, employment)
neighborhood citizenship and common action (extensive volunteerism and sweat equity)
democracy in the workplace
Strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths: potential for a more virtuous, engaged citizenry; alignment with common good; direct participation in policy.
Weaknesses: complexity of public issues; need for expertise; leadership requirements; challenges in motivating voluntary participation.
Realistic potential:
Some of Barber’s ideas have become relatively accepted parts of the citizenship perspective, while others remain utopian or contingent on political feasibility.
Requisites for a general theory of the public for public administration
The goal: outline a theory that is practical, empirically grounded, and oriented toward effective government while advancing the public's interests.
Four core requisites distilled from the five perspectives:
The Constitution
The Virtuous Citizen
Responsiveness to collective and noncollective publics
Benevolence and love
The Constitution
Foundation: public administration must be grounded in constitutional principles (popular sovereignty, representative government, Bill of Rights, due process, separation of powers).
Modern administrative state and constitution:
Rohr (1986) argues the administrative state is compatible with and necessary for realizing constitutional vision; public administrators must be technically competent and morally obligated beyond mere performance.
Legitimacy stems from the original act of accepting the Constitution; government officials are legitimized by the people and are controlled by constitutional order, not merely majority decisions.
Implications for the constitutive role of public administration:
Aligns with the representational and citizenship perspectives; public administrators must operate with fidelity to constitutional values and guard those values for all citizens.
The virtuous citizen
Enhanced notion of citizenship: the virtuous citizen is central to an effective public administration.
Hart (1984) outlines four aspects of the virtuous citizen:
Understands the founding documents and can engage in moral/philosophical judgment about policies that serve both specific and general interests and are consistent with the Constitution.
Belief in regime values: the citizen must believe regime values are true and non-negotiable; otherwise, sacrifice and priority setting lack legitimacy.
Individual moral responsibility: when regime values are at stake (e.g., racism, sexism, invasion of privacy, due process violations), the virtuous citizen opposes wrongs and defends rights.
Civility and forbearance and tolerance: civility requires limits to minimize state intrusion on liberty; ideas should circulate freely, but action to violate regime values must be stopped.
Public servant’s duty: nurture the development of virtuous citizenry; public service should be valued as service to the common good.
Responsiveness to collective and noncollective publics
Third requisite: systemic hearing and responsiveness to both organized interests (collective publics) and the inchoate public.
Mechanisms for organized publics: hearings, deliberations, grievance procedures, ombudspersons, sunshine laws, open processes.
Challenge: accounting for the inchoate public and ensuring equal protection of laws for all citizens.
Guiding principle: responsiveness should be nonselective and protective of minority rights as well as general interests.
Benevolence and love
Fourth requisite: benevolence as the cornerstone attitude toward public service.
Conceptual basis:
Love of country involves respect for regime values and active pursuit of citizens’ welfare.
Public administration should embody benevolence, service, and dedication to the greater good.
Practical implication: fostering a public service ethos that esteems the public and works toward the common good, not merely private or narrow interests.
Integrating the requisites with the five perspectives
The Constitution as a unifying anchor:
It harmonizes with representation and citizenship, while pluralism and public choice must operate within constitutional bounds rather than supplant them.
Public administrators must go beyond viewing government as mere referee of interests to actively making government effective for all.
The Virtuous Citizen as corrective and complement:
A virtuous citizenry helps counteract exclusive self-interest patterns of pluralism and public choice by sustaining a common good orientation and civic engagement.
Responsiveness as equity and inclusion:
A nonselective responsiveness framework counters the potential bias toward organized or economically powerful groups in pluralist and public choice models.
Benevolence as normative compass:
Benevolence pushes public administration toward serving all citizens, aligning governance with the broader public good rather than private gain.
Summary of alignments (via Table 1 in Frederickson):
Constitution: compatible with all perspectives, but essential for grounding in representative and citizenship models; pluralism and public choice must respect constitutional order.
Virtuous Citizen: pluralism alone insufficient; a virtuous citizenry supports generalized public efficacy and public-wide will.
Responsiveness: pluralism and public choice risks selective responsiveness; a constitutional and virtuous-citizen framework seeks inclusive responsiveness and minority protection.
Benevolence: incompatibility with some market-oriented public choice implications; benevolence envisions active extension of founding values to all citizens.
Client: the client perspective is limited in responsiveness and benevolence without broader citizen involvement; direct participation and informed citizenship strengthen democratic governance.
Citizen: embodies the most comprehensive alignment with constitutional, virtuous-citizen, responsive, and benevolent ideals.
Implications for theory and practice
A pluralist view is useful for understanding niche group dynamics but cannot by itself ensure a general public interest or equitable governance.
A pure public choice view risks cynicism about public motives and may generate elitist outcomes unless tempered by constitutional and virtuous-citizen safeguards.
A legislative perspective foregrounds representation but must acknowledge limitations of electoral representation and the need for broader public input.
The client perspective highlights real-world service delivery challenges and the need to address resource constraints and bureaucratic alienation; it benefits from stronger citizen participation and accountability.
The citizenship perspective, especially with Barber’s programmatic proposals, points toward more participatory governance, but requires practical mechanisms, leadership, and expertise to be feasible.
The four requisites provide a practical, constitution-based framework for public administration to guide theory development and day-to-day practice.
Final reflections and synthesis
A theory of the public for public administration should be grounded in constitutional legitimacy, a virtuous citizenry, inclusive responsiveness, and benevolence.
No single perspective suffices; taken together, the five perspectives illuminate different facets of the public and reveal gaps a general theory must address.
The ultimate aim is to enable effective government functioning while advancing both particular and general public interests, with a genuine commitment to democratic values and the common good.
Stewart (1985)
Introduction
Public administration faces a persistent tension between professionalism and democratic accountability, rooted in the Friedrich–Finer debate (Friedrich, 1940; Finer, 1941).
The article argues that neither strict professionalism nor strict democratic accountability alone suffices to guide ethical administrative decision-making.
The central claim: ultimate administrative judgment is personal and moral, even when external criteria (professional standards, institutions) influence choices.
The goal is to propose an integrated approach that combines insights from both traditions within current management thinking to better address ethical quandaries faced by managers.
The Friedrich-Finer Debate
Friedrich’s position (1940): administrative responsibility is broader than just implementing preformulated policies; public policy is a continuous process inseparable from its execution ("Public policy is a continuous process, the formulation of which is inseparable from its execution"). He emphasizes that as administration grows technically, responsibility becomes more than following orders; it includes oversight by the fellowship of science (professional peers).
Finer’s position (1941): responsibility requires an interpersonal, externally sanctioned duty; there is no responsibility unless it involves a relation between a person and a science, or between duty and others. He argues for mechanisms ensuring continuing responsiveness to the public through elected representatives, courts, and agency discipline (external controls).
Core contrast: Friedrich foregrounds professional/technical accountability to peers; Finer foregrounds political accountability to elected representatives and formal external controls.
Historical reception: political scientists have tended to view Friedrich’s approach as more compatible with modern state requirements; broad theories of representative bureaucracy align with Friedrich; however, Finer’s insistence on external accountability continues to echo in debates about curbing discretionary power.
Current synthesis (Stewart’s thesis): neither position alone fully solves accountability; integration is needed, but not a simple balance. The accommodation must be grounded in current management thinking and recognize that personal morality plays a crucial role in judgment.
Important scholarly notes cited: Mosher (representative bureaucracy), Long (Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism), Lowi (demands for accountability), Meier (representative democracy), among others.
Accountability Through Democratic Institutions
Finer’s view of democratic accountability: public administrators should not determine their own course; elected representatives decide, with minimal but robust externally sanctioned controls.
Mechanisms for accountability: courts, internal disciplinary controls, and political oversight by ministries. Finer warns that even well-intentioned public servants can yield undesirable outcomes if unchecked by external direction.
Critical limitation in pluralistic systems: detailed, minute controls to ensure specific courses of action can impede other important goals. Institutionalization of one set of controls to achieve one goal may obstruct others (e.g., civil service merit systems reinforcing neutrality but potentially hindering other aims like affirmative action or equal employment opportunity).
Civil service and merit systems: merit-based selection and promotion aim to ensure competence and continuity in administration, insulating elected officials from patronage; however, these systems can constrain government leaders’ ability to pursue broader policy commitments.
New York State case (example of EEO versus civil service): strong commitment to equal employment opportunity (EEO) in public employment versus a highly institutionalized civil service system.
Four-stage promotion process (as described in the transcript):
1) Establish eligibility criteria to compete for a promotion.
2) Conduct competitive examinations.
3) canvass candidates to determine interest.
4) Select an individual from those who expressed interest.This institutionalized merit process curbs patronage and ensures competent civil servants but can impede advancing women and minorities due to eligibility requirements and the “rule of three.”
Ronnie Steinberg’s study (1981) highlights how these formal steps can act as barriers to equal opportunity in practice.
The broader implication: implementing democratic accountability by spelling out how goals are achieved works in rank-ordered, non-competitive contexts, but in complex organizations with multiple, conflicting goals, parallel institutional requirements proliferate to try to satisfy all ends.
A common risk identified by Stewart: high accountability for processes (not ends) can turn managers into referees of process, leading to goal displacement and reduced attention to substantive public policies.
Conclusion: while process-oriented controls are necessary, they are not sufficient to guarantee democratic accountability in settings with competing demands. Parallel controls can undermine coherent outcomes if not complemented by ends-focused assessment.
Accountability Through Professionalism
Friedrich’s notion of professionalism: a mature profession has articulated standards of conduct, and deviation is subject to scrutiny by peers; professionals apply specialized knowledge in service of a clientele.
Mosher’s taxonomy (as cited):
General professions (law, medicine, engineering) meet traditional professional criteria.
Public service professions (corrections officials, social workers, teachers) also aspire to professional status.
Emergent public management professions (personnel managers, budget officers, purchasing officers) have not yet fully achieved professional status.
Argument focused on established professions: accountability should rest with professional public servants who, under peer scrutiny, apply specialized knowledge for clients.
Two fundamental problems with relying on professionalism alone:
1) Professional norms do not always align with the right response in all situations; behavior appropriate to professionals may not satisfy other political or ethical requirements.
2) Professional ethics may conflict with personal moral judgment, potentially eroding individual moral responsibility in service of professional norms.Two illustrative cases demonstrating the limits of professionalism:
Case 1 (detention center/mental health): Doctors refused admission for a severely disturbed child to avoid compromising current patients’ treatment. While professionally motivated by curing current patients, this response was unethical and harmful to the child’s welfare, illustrating how professional mores can override broader public interest.
Case 2 (prison warden and capital punishment): A warden, accustomed to objectivity and law enforcement, felt deep moral unease about executing a prisoner with whom he formed a personal connection. The professional code offered no guidance for reconciling personal morality with the death penalty, exposing a gap where professional norms fail to resolve ethical conflict.
Two principal criticisms of relying on professionalism as a solution:
The rules and professional judgments lack inherent legitimacy in political determination and in aligning with multiple, competing public goals.
Philosophically, professional ethics can produce insensitivity to moral rights or suppress morally salient concerns, compromising moral agency.
Taken together: unbridled professionalism is vulnerable to organizational pressures and ethical conflicts; it cannot, by itself, ensure accountability in democratic governance.
Moral Analysis and Bureaucratic Accountability
The Friedrich–Finer debate does not yield a straightforward resolution; instead, it suggests that robust accountability requires more than either tradition alone.
Meier (1975) and others acknowledge the value of formal controls and norms, but emphasize that they must be complemented by moral analysis to be effective.
The proposed synthesis: embed moral analysis within administrative practice to address competing value claims and to justify decisions publicly.
Yates (1982) proposes context for values analysis: bureaucrats should provide an open, public accounting of the valuative basis for significant policy decisions.
Example cited: a highway/airport project where the Secretary of Transportation (and other actors) openly articulated the legal, environmental, economic, and social considerations behind a major decision; this explicit accounting clarifies competing claims and legitimizes the decision in the public eye.
The bridging concept: explicit analysis of the values underlying decisions helps connect democratic ends with professional means, reducing the risk of displacing ends with processes.
Stewart’s integrative framework (1984): calls for systematic stakeholder analysis and careful reflection on how policy actions affect different groups; this framework aims to keep public service aligned with the public interest while respecting professional integrity.
Key takeaway: formal controls and professional norms are necessary but not sufficient; a finely honed capacity for moral analysis and judgment is essential to navigate value-rich, contested decisions.
Conclusion of this section: placing moral analysis in the interstitial zone between Finer and Friedrich offers the most promising route to accountability that respects both democratic legitimacy and professional integrity.
Conclusion
Public servants need an ethical framework that represents both the values of their professions and the legitimate demands for democratic accountability.
Stewart (1984) proposes a concrete ethical approach centered on stakeholder analysis and reflection on the harm or benefit to different interests, arguing this can bridge the tensions between professionalism and democracy.
The overarching claim: linking professional judgment with explicit value analysis and democratic oversight can provide a more robust basis for administrative decision-making than either tradition alone.
The author advocates a practical synthesis—a system in which those with operational responsibility for hard choices are also tasked with evaluating the ethical implications of those choices, thereby serving the public interest more effectively.
Notes
The decentralization of the merit system triggered by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 in the federal sector has addressed only the level at which the merit system should be implemented, not the substance of the system itself.