THE RESPONSIBLE ADMINISTRATOR

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3 THE RESPONSIBLE ADMINISTRATOR

4 The Instructor s Guide for the sixth edition of The Responsible Administrator includes a sample syllabus, PowerPoint slides, and other related teaching tools. The Instructor s Guide is available free online. If you would like to download and print out a copy of the guide, please visit: Join Us at Josseybass.com Register at for more information on our publications, authors, and to receive special offers.

5 9 THE RESPONSIBLE ADMINISTRATOR An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role SIXTH EDITION Terry L. Cooper

6 Copyright 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, , fax , or on the Web at Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, , fax , or online at Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at , outside the U.S. at , or fax Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If the version of this book that you purchased references media such as CD or DVD that was not included in your purchase, you may download this material at For more information about Wiley products, visit Cataloging-in-Publication data on file with the Library of Congress. ISBN (hardback); ISBN (ebk); ISBN (ebk); ISBN (ebk) Printed in the United States of America SIXTH EDITION HB Printing

7 CONTENTS Preface to the Sixth Edition Acknowledgments xi The Author xv vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Understanding Ethical Decision Making 13 PART ONE: ETHICS FOR INDIVIDUAL ADMINISTRATORS 41 3 Public Administration in Modern and Postmodern Society: The Context of Administrative Ethics 43 4 Administrative Responsibility: The Key to Administrative Ethics 71 5 Conflicts of Responsibility: The Ethical Dilemma 93 PART TWO: ETHICS IN THE ORGANIZATION Maintaining Responsible Conduct in Public Organizations: Two Approaches 127 v

8 vi Contents 7 Integrating Ethics with Organizational Norms and Structures Safeguarding Ethical Autonomy in Organizations: Dealing with Unethical Superiors and Organizations 197 PART THREE: THE DESIGN APPROACH Applying the Design Approach to Public Administration Ethics Conclusion: Responsible Administration 255 References 271 Index 283

9 PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION By the time this sixth edition is published, The Responsible Administrator will have been in print for thirty years. When the first edition appeared I never dreamed in my wildest fantasies that this book would have so long a life. In 1982, there was very little interest in administrative ethics among either scholars or practitioners of public administration. There was only one other book by a single author available on administrative ethics, John Rohr s Ethics for Bureaucrats, which came out in 1978 and focused on the regime values found in the U.S. constitutional tradition as a foundation for administrative ethics. There was also a volume of essays, edited by Joel Fleishman and others, titled Public Duties: The Moral Obligations of Government Officials, and published in There were just a few courses on this subject in academic programs and only a scattering of panels at the annual conferences of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA). By now many more books and scholarly journal articles have appeared in print, our major professional conferences regularly have a significant cluster of panel sessions on administrative ethics, conferences specifically on ethics are conducted from time to time, and all the NASPAA-accredited MPA degree programs include a treatment of the subject. This sixth edition seeks to acknowledge the changes in the field and the advances in research while remaining true to the basic framework of the first edition. The chapters and the references have been vii

10 viii Preface extensively updated to reflect the recent research in the field. A new section on descriptive ethical decision-making models, which depict the way people tend to make ethical decisions, has been added. This is intended to contrast with the normative prescriptive model advanced in this book, a model developed progressively since the first edition. There is also new material on such topics as whistleblowing, the bystander effect, and the design approach to administrative ethics. The Responsible Administrator was written for students and practitioners of public administration who want to develop their ethical as well as technical competence. It is for men and women in public service, or preparing for it, who sometimes worry about the right thing to do, but who either have not taken the time to read books on ethical theory or suspect that such treatises would not be helpful at the practical level. It is being read by administrators and students of public administration around the world. For example, the fourth and fifth editions have been translated into Chinese, and the book is now one of the required core texts for the more than one hundred MPA programs in China. The education, training, and day-to-day practice of public administrators tend to be dominated by the practical problems of getting the job done. Concerns about what should be done and why it should be done get swept aside by the pressures of schedule and workload. Modern society is preoccupied with action, to the exclusion of reflection about values and principles. Theory is reduced to theories that concern means how to crowds out toward what end? Ethical theory, in particular, tends to suffer under the sway of this mentality. Because ethics involves substantive reasoning about obligations, consequences, and ultimate ends, its immediate utility for a producing and consuming society is suspect. Principles and values, goods and oughts, seem pretty wispy stuff compared to cost-benefit ratios, GNP, tensile strength, organizational structures, assembly lines, budgets, downsizing, deadlines, outsourcing through contracts, interest group lobbying, and political pressures. The payoff for dealing formally with ethics is unclear for individual administrators and for organizations as well. The result is a tendency either to totally ignore the study of ethics or to deal with ethics superficially. Although it seems that the time devoted to the study of ethics in graduate courses in public administration is growing, there is still no clear consensus that every MPA curriculum should include a required, freestanding course on the subject. NASPAA has required only that ethics be treated in the MPA curriculum, and in many MPA programs accredited by NASPAA, ethics is handled as a subtopic within other core areas of the curriculum. This means that ethics generally receives fragmentary attention, with a session here and a module there in various courses. Thus it often lacks the kind of coherent and integrated treatment thought necessary for the core topics of the field, such as

11 Preface ix public finance, public policy, human resource management, and quantitative methods. Administrative ethics is still treated like a stepchild of the field. In 2009, NASPAA adopted new, competency-based accreditation guidelines that refer to public service values rather than ethics. It remains to be seen what effects this may have on the curricular treatment of ethics, if any. I have participated with a group from the ASPA Section on Ethics to explore the meaning of ethical competence, and I am coediting a volume with Donald Menzel on achieving ethical competency. Among those beyond the academy, at an earlier stage there seems to have been an uneasiness with the formal study of ethics, rooted in an assumption that ethics is simply a matter of relativity and subjectivity. In a pluralistic society, where no one religious or cultural tradition is dominant, ethics has been viewed as a private, individual matter, not susceptible to the canons of rational inquiry. To address the study of ethics openly in an academic setting was thought to run the risk of either creating unresolvable conflicts among those who hold differing ethical perspectives or unfairly propagandizing for one particular point of view. However, Americans appear to have become more comfortable with the topic of ethics in public life and with the existence of academic courses on ethics and the treatment of ethics in courses on other topics. So even though administrative ethics as a field of study has not been as fully accepted and supported as I would have liked, it is clear that the number of scholars and practitioners who are working on related topics, both in the academy and in governments at every level, in both the United States and around the world, has increased enormously since the mid 1970s. Furthermore, we have made significant progress toward establishing the importance of administrative ethics as a central concern of public administration.

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13 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thirty years after the first edition of The Responsible Administrator was published, my intellectual honesty and humility still require admitting that writing a book is not a task for which an author ought to take sole credit. The more I write and reflect, the more I interact with students in the classroom, and the more I converse with colleagues around the world, the clearer it becomes that scholarship is truly a collective enterprise. Even books that carry the name of a single author are shaped increasingly over time by those who read them. I am indebted to the many undergraduate students who, for more than twenty years, have taken my course Citizenship and Public Ethics, a required part of the core of the undergraduate program in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California. Their blunt questions and serious challenges have deepened my thinking and forced me to be clearer in expressing my views. Their interest in the subject of public ethics and the intensity of their struggles with their own professional obligations have stimulated lively debates that have caused me to rethink my own perspective. The lack of interest in ethics by some has also led me to find ways of engaging those who view the subject differently from me. I have also learned greatly from teaching my graduate Public Ethics course every summer for the last fifteen years or so. That class has typically included seasoned practitioners, younger graduate students just beginning practice, and a few doctoral students developing the background to teach an ethics course and xi

14 xii Acknowledgments do research on the subject during their academic careers. The major paper for the course involves the analysis of a real case, either from their own experience for those with significant employment backgrounds or from the experience of someone they interview in depth for those who are early in their careers. That course is a treat that I anticipate eagerly every spring. In it I have broadened the scope of my treatment of ethics to include administrative ethics, political ethics, and policy ethics, because the people who occupy roles related to those fields interact with each other in significant ways. However, the center of gravity resides with administrative ethics. I express my deepest appreciation to the women and men at all levels of American public service who have shared their struggles, insights, and creativity with me. Their cases and the ensuing discussions in ethics workshops I have conducted since 1975 are the empirical basis for this book and a major source of any knowledge I may be able to pass along. I have been deeply impressed by their intention to do the right thing in the face of formidable impediments. I hold their contributions to ethics in public administration in respectful trust and pass this knowledge along as their gift to me and the reader. I thank my colleagues around the world who are teaching and engaging in research on administrative ethics. Our numbers have grown substantially since 1982 when The Responsible Administrator first appeared. Through sessions at the annual conferences of ASPA and at other smaller meetings in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, France, China, and Australia, I have observed that a genuine community of scholars and practitioners is emerging worldwide that is committed to the development of public administrative ethics. My thanks also go to the reviewers, who once again carefully examined the previous edition of this book and gave me their constructive advice, and to Allison Brunner and Alison Hankey at Jossey-Bass, whose excellent editorial guidance and patience have been invaluable. I express again my continuing gratitude to my dearest and best colleague, my wife, Megan, whose inspiration, insights, writing skill, knowledge of the field of public administration, and personal support have been freely and warmly given since the first edition and again at every stage of this project. She helped me shape The Responsible Administrator from the very beginning with her advice and suggestions as I began outlining the book in a mountain cabin in Southern California in the late 1970s, and her assistance and support continued throughout the writing process. I must again also acknowledge the moral guide in my life, who has become more collegial since the previous edition, my daughter, Chelsea. Throughout her twenty-six years of life, she has caused me to take my own ethics more seriously. Her honest and direct questions have called me up short and caused me to

15 Acknowledgments xiii reflect. Her Why? questions and her observations about the gap between what I say and what I do have deepened my moral life. This book has made its way through five previous editions as she has grown up and taken her own place in the practice of international maternal and child health. Observing her moral development from infancy to young adulthood has illuminated my understanding of how we humans are most fundamentally valuing creatures. I have watched her expressing her own values and deep commitments in her work in places like Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania, South Africa, Afghanistan, Thailand, and India and been reminded that I still have much to learn from her. Finally, I express my deep appreciation to Bryce Lowery, whose creativity, hard work, research skills, editorial competence, excellent writing, and endless patience have been absolutely essential in getting this sixth edition to the press. Bryce is completing his PhD dissertation and has previously worked with me as a teaching assistant in my undergraduate Citizenship and Public Ethics class. He is on his way to a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher in the field of urban planning for the outstanding university lucky enough to hire him. He will leave us someday soon also fully prepared to teach ethics along with his major field. All of these people and many others have helped to broaden, deepen, and sharpen my thoughts. I deeply appreciate their gifts to me and hope that what I have done with them in these pages is worthy of their respect. Los Angeles, California June 2011 Terry L. Cooper