Donald C. Menzel

Contracting and Franchising County Services in Florida

This study examines the privatization behavior of county governments and treats contracting and franchising as separate decision-making activities. Contracting decisions are influenced primarily by the desire to reduce production costs. Growth pressures and a political culture that favors professional administration over private-regarding politics also are determinants. Franchising decisions are influenced heavily by growth pressures, political impediments to altering the traditional public production arrangements, a political culture that insulates administration from politics, and a desire to keep tax rates down. In other words, franchising decisions are predicated extensively on efforts to limit the scope of government and operate county government according to businesslike principles.

Teaching and Learning Ethical Reasoning with Cases

This article focuses on the use of cases in teaching and learning about ethical reasoning. Case learning in public administration has a long history, but its roots have not penetrated the field as deeply as they have in other professional fields, such as medicine, law, and business. Nonetheless, the times are changing, as evidenced in recent texts on public management ethics. The analysis calls for greater use of cases to teach and learn ethical reasoning.

State of the Art of Empirical Research on Ethics and Integrity in Governance

This paper reviews and assesses the body of empirical research conducted on ethics and integrity in governance with a focus on the United States. The review is structured around five major themes: (1) ethical decision making and moral development, (2) ethics laws and regulatory agencies, (3) organizational performance and ethics, (4) ethics management experiences and strategies, and (5) community, culture, and the ethical environment.

Research on Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration: Moving Forward, Looking Back

This article reviews and assesses research on ethics and integrity in public administration published in two peer reviewed journals—the Public Administration Review and Public Integrity—for the ten...

Ethics Induced Stress in the Local Government Workplace

This paper seeks to contribute to a small but growing body of empirical based knowledge of government ethics. The study objectives are (1) to document the extent to which ethics induced stress exists in public organizations, (2) to examine a set of variables that, separately and collectively, may foster or mitigate ethics induced stress in the public workplace, and (3) to offer suggestions, if not guidance about future research in this largely unchartered area. The study population consists of employees of a medium size city and a large urban county. The findings suggest that ethics induced stress, although not severe, is commonplace. Additionally, the results of this study indicate that there is a strong relationship between the emphasis placed on organizational values such as excellence and teamwork and lower levels of ethics stress in the workplace.

The Morally Mute Manager: Fact or Fiction?

In a recent article in this journal, Dr. Charles E. Mitchell1 delivered a sweeping condemnation of appointed and elected officeholders that neither accept nor act on their ethical and moral obligations. Dr. Mitchell asserts that there is abuse at virtually every level of government by nearly every type of person from the highest ranking official through middle-management to the street-level bureaucrat. Moreover, as he puts it, “many in the field of public administration have questioned how we have arrived at a point where there is so much unethical, immoral, and illegal activity in government.”2 Is American government riddled with unethical, immoral, and illegal activity? Is it worse than in years past? Has there been a morally or ethically degenerative pattern in government? Private sector business behavior? Family? Schooling? And, if America is going south in the proverbial handbasket, what can and should be done about it?

Service Challenges and Governance Issues Confronting American Counties in the 21st Century: An Overview

The American county?long consid ered to be the bedrock of local gov ernment in the United States?has grown in importance since the middle of the 20th century. Between 1962 and 2002, the county government share of county and municipal revenues grew from 39.3 to 47.3 percent, and expenditures grew from 33.7 to 46.5 percent. As a consequence of this substantial growth in county financial activity, there has been a con comitant and stunning increase in the types and level of county government services. Re latedly, the county workforce has increased dramatically, more than tripling in size from around 700,000 full-time equivalent employ ees in 1962 to 2.3 million in 2002. In 2002, county employees accounted for 48.6 per cent of the county and municipal workforce compared with 35.7 percent in 1962. Today, counties employ almost as many people as do municipalities. Coincident with this growth, American counties face a number of challenges as ser vice-delivery agents and instruments of gov ernance in the early 21st century. Viewed from a global perspective, perhaps the most daunting challenge is whether or not coun ties can meet the myriad and far-flung expec tations that accompany the service roles coun ties are expected to play. A growing number of county governments must simultaneously function as traditional, local, and regional governments (see Benton 2002a). As tradi tional governments, counties serve as ad ministrative or political arms of their state governments and thus perform a number of state functions (many of them mandated) and services to all county residents.1 When counties function as local governments, they provide municipal-type services to residents of unincorporated areas.2 In addition, densely populated counties often serve as regional governments when they provide urban-type services to residents of both unincorporated and incorporated areas.3 This enlargement of the service role and prominence of counties and the wholly new approach to daily operations that is required means that county governments must deal with several governance issues. Indeed, these issues are part and parcel of the very essence of counties as they strive to provide tradi tional as well as municipaland urban-type services and meet the heightened expecta tions of democratic governance. As function ing full-service governments, three questions in particular are salient. First, what is the most suitable form of county government in terms of responsiveness to escalating service expectations and ability to negotiate with

Public Administration as a Profession: Where Do Body and Soul Reside?

Abstract This article explores the public service values that define public administration as a professional field of study and practice. The idea and ideal of public service as other-serving rather than self-serving is a time-honored quest. Yet, this quest has often fallen behind the screens of science, careerism, and professionalism. Where might one turn to rediscover the essence of the profession? Do its body and soul reside in professional associations? the workplace? the streets of America?

East-West Values and Ethical Leadership in China

Ethical leadership concerns the way in which leaders promote ethical behavior in their organizations. But what is ethical behavior? It is behavior that reflects the ethical values the organization and its stakeholders aspire to, values that build and sustain relationships based on trust. Values, of course, underpin cultures, guiding individual and group behaviors. Accordingly, they vary across cultures, and they may change over time as cultures are influenced by both external and internal factors, such as interaction with other cultures, new technologies, and economic and social development. Public sector values reflect the particular roles and responsibilities involved in a jurisdiction’s institutional arrangements, and also draw on the values of the society in which the public sphere operates. Ethical leadership is likely, therefore, to vary across nations, reflecting their different cultures and different institutional arrangements. Styles of ethical leadership may also vary according to the ethical challenges facing the country and organization concerned.

Leadership in Public Administration: Creative and/or Ethical?

Is it possible for a leader to be both ethical and creative? Assuming you don’t think the categories are mutually exclusive, have you ever wondered about what creative leadership is and how it might be achieved? There is a substantial literature about creative leadership, and a more modest one on ethical leadership, yet almost no reported research linking the two. In principle, the constructs are not in situ compatible with one another; one can be a creative leader without being an ethical one, or an ethical leader without being especially creative. But, and it’s a big but, can creative leadership and ethical leadership be learned as complementary components of effectiveness? One school of thought asserts the “no” side and views all leadership traits as innate: You’re either born with them, or you’re not. Those on the “yes” side refuse to accept such determinism, but still struggle to understand the process by which one becomes an effective leader, a process that can often seem elusive, even mystical. Nonetheless, it is an axiom of modern management and education that not only can both creative and ethical leadership be learned, but that they should be learned. Indeed, there is no shortage of educational and training programs in the United States that purport to teach leadership and ethical decision-making skills. Nearly every textbook on the subject typically describes the transactional, transformational, entrepreneurial, transcendent, and charismatic styles of leadership. But could these not also have a creative dimension? A transactional leader is, by definition, one who is capable of ensuring that organizational members and processes work with minimum friction, thus producing a product or service that is high on quality and low on cost. Would not Henry Ford’s amazing success in the development of a factory-assembled Model T qualify him as a transactional and creative leader? Or, how about Steve Jobs’s transformational skills and vision that turned Apple into the giant success it is today? Surely he would be regarded as a creative leader as well. Further, consider Bill Gates and Microsoft, or Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook—they