Value and Virtue in Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective

The aim of this book is to clarify the ground on which public service scholars, practitioners and advisers stand in relation to values and virtues in public administration. It explores assumptions, the unspoken and unexamined things that are taken for granted in the field of serving the public good. Accordingly, Values and Virtues in Public Administration gives an account of the recent developments and progress in public sector management and public service. It describes the progress made in the discipline of public administration, in theories related to public administration and in the practice of public administration in tackling the questions surrounding values and virtues. These trends, descriptions, theories and comparisons make it possible to answer the question of how administrative ethics vary and what this variance depends upon. Featuring contributions from scholars in several different disciplines and in-depth case studies, the book concludes that under New Public Management instrumental values and consequential ethics have become dominant and more fundamental values have been neglected.

A multidisciplinary analysis of the role of values and virtue in public administration, this book calls for a rediscovery of virtue. It explores ways of enabling the public sector to balance the values that are presently dominant with classic values such as accountability, representation, equality, neutrality, transparency and the public interest.

Michiel S. de Vries holds the chair in Public Administration at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research interests include policy evaluation, policy change, and comparative public administration. He is Vice-President of IASIA and is chair of their working group on Local Governance and Development as well as being chair of the NISPACEE working group on Public Administration Reform in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Pan Suk Kim is Underwood Distinguished Professor of Public Administration, College of Government and business, Yonsei University, South Korea. He is also Director of their Institute for Povery Alleviation and International Development (IPAID). He is President of the International institute of Administrative Sciences as well as being Vice-Chairman of the Unuited Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (UN/CEPA).

1. Introduction to Value and Virtue in Public Administration; M.S de Vries and Pan S. Kim
2. Governance and Values in Contemporary Public Service; C.Garofalo
3. Public Virtue Approaches; B.Tholen
4. Ethics and Globalization in Historical Perspective: The Relevance of Socrates in our Days; D.Argyriades
5. The Cultural-Economic Perspective on Values and Virtues; E.de Jong
6. The Social Psychology Perspective on Values and Virtues; I.Sobis and M.S. de Vries
7. The Institutional Perspective on Values and Virtues; E.Ostrom and V.Ostrom
8. Public Administration as a Menetype B: Re-discovering Trichotomies; B.Cutting and A.Kouzmin
9. Contemporary Trends and Dilemmas of Administrative Ethics in the Developing World; M.Shamsul Haque
10. The Value Profile of Civil Servants in New European Democracies through the Lens of Embedded Ethics; J.Palidauskaite
11. The Evil and its Cure: Clientelism, Corruption and their Institutional Remedies in Latin America; C.W.Andrews
12. Perils and Prospects in Four African Countries; M.Sindane
13. Public Sector Value and Virtue and the OECD; C.E.Lynch and T.D.Lynch
14. Values and Virtues in the Japanese Public Sector; H.Kudo
15. Conclusions; M.S de Vries and Pan S. Kim