15

Conclusions
Michiel S. de Vries and Pan Suk Kim

15.1 Introduction

If this book intends to argue one thing, it is that it pays off to frame a
problem out of different theoretical angles. The problem addressed in this
book is the supposedly missing virtues and values in public administration.
The theoretical perspectives come from classical and modern Philosophy,
institutional reasoning, Economics, Social Psychology, Political and Orga-
nizational Science. Public Administration as an interdisciplinary subject is
based on these disciplines and we think it can learn a lot from them. At the
same time, it is within the nature of Public Administration that it tries to
combine theory and praxis and for that reason the last chapters in this book
addressed the actual developments going on in the field of public adminis-
tration in Central and East European, Latin American and African countries,
and two case studies on an international organization (Organization for Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development; OECD) and a well-developed country
(Japan).
The question is how to integrate and synthesize the perspectives and to
understand what we can learn from them. That is the aim of this final
chapter.

15.2 The indispensable role of values

The previous chapters in this volume argued that, notwithstanding, the

myth that combining public administration with virtuous behaviour is an
oxymoron, and that supposedly the lacking virtues and values in public
administration all over the world present the most pressing problem for
these organizations. Values are promoted in public administration all over
the world and the actions of public administration as such are increasingly
guided by explicit guidelines, codes of conduct, and norms and regula-
tions. Values and virtues have been shown in this book to be increasingly
important in the public sector. So much so, that they have become the

275

M. S. De Vries et al. (eds.), Value and Virtue in Public Administration

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011
276 Conclusions

central themes for public administration and public policy around the world.
The driving forces behind equitable provision of service to the public are
impartiality, justice, honesty, fairness, probity, continuity, accountability,
transparency, and responsiveness. This distinguishes the public office from
the private sector.
Values are the main pillars for the administration process. It is incon-
ceivable to think of a public administration without it being value-based.
Values act as the standards, principles, or yardsticks for guiding and judg-
ing behaviour and polices. At the basis of the administration process, values
exert considerable influence on the government. Society’s self-prescribed val-
ues can determine, even limit, what the government should and should not
do. Goals and policies set by the government need values to determine how
public institutions conduct their affairs and manage resources as well as how
goals should be achieved. Values decide how a government acts and behaves
towards its citizens, societal groups, and the market. Citizens entrust the
government to uphold these values when providing public services. Trans-
parency is a promise along with being effective, efficient, responsive, and
allowing citizens to take part or participate in the administration process.
In this sense there is no escape. Everything public administration does is
value-bound.
Does this imply there is no problem with regard to values in Public Admin-
istration? That conclusion would be beside the point. For centuries, the
government process has gone through various reforms that have eroded
its public picture, reliability, and performance. In reality, there is a wide
gap between theories and facts when attempting to define values in the
public service. The actual practice is influenced by institutional dualism.
The one-size-fits-all concept of governance along with reforms such as
entrepreneurial management created an inherently contrasting version of
administration.
Three main causes are recognized in this volume.

(1) First, there was the rise of the ideas behind New Public Management (NPM).
In contrast to the original values entrusted to the civil servants to uphold,
the government is a good draw for many power-hungry individuals with
little or no interest in serving the public. Advocates of NPM insist that
governments have to adopt business-like techniques. This inherently cre-
ates a problem in the public sector. The marketization and privatization
of public sectors have marginalized the importance of public values, such
as redistributive justice and social policy. In order to overcome the innate
problems of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the public sector, NPM has
been prescribed to the traditional public administration, which is mainly
based on political inputs, with services monitored by the bureaucracy. The
underlying principle of NPM is to break the bureaucracy or monopoly, using
incentives to induce behavioural change, applying performance targets, and
 Michiel S. de Vries and Pan Suk Kim 277

empowering employees and consumers of public service. In addition, it

includes outsourcing some activities to the private sector. The application
of NPM to the public sector rose concern on the management of values in
the contract state: the concept which is inherently governmental functions;
sovereignty; and state action doctrine. The aim of NPM, or outsourcing, is
to gain greater efficiency, smaller governments, and higher profits. However,
the application of this undermines the ability of the public administration
to achieve constitutional accountability. The prime value in government—
public values—was replaced by an overarching emphasis on the efficiency
and effectiveness of the outsourcing contacts. In the past couple of decades,
market mechanisms have prevailed in the public sector around the world
and business values have been widely introduced to the public sector. For
decades, business values such as economic efficiency have been stressed
more than the publicness. Values such as the public interest and publicness
have been challenged by the shift towards a new way of public management
and economic liberalism.
Basically, NPM despised the public sector, and rejected the classic values
inherent to the public sector, especially its emphasis on checks and bal-
ances that is, balancing between equity and efficiency, balancing between
goal achievement in the short term and sustainable effectiveness in the long
term, between basing policies on the rule of law and the swift and effi-
cient production of services. Checks and balances were seen as inhibitors
of efficiency and a government propagating such a balance was not seen
as the solver of problems, but as the problem itself. As Lynch and Lynch
argued this is also the case within the organization of the OECD. Despite the
decades of efforts by the OECD to promote democracy, ethics, and integrity,
corruption using market-based governance seems to be on the rise. This
has led to a decrease in citizen trust in their government. In their view it
is crucial for the OECD to look beyond the market mechanism to com-
prehend what is important to society in terms of values, character, and
virtue.
For instance, Kudo argued that in Japan’s public sector, value has been
treated as a synonym of ethics (this volume). Like other industrialized
countries, management of public services has been a priority. There is speci-
ficity of values in the public sector despite the many values known to the
various Asian countries. Japan’s public administrative system was moulded
on the Western model; however, the institutional practices and traditional
values were preserved. Their ability to harmonize the “western” way with
Japanese culture and values contributed extremely to the nation’s remark-
able progress. According to Haque the problems with the emergence and
increasing dominance of the NPM idea has especially in the developing
world resulted in ethical formalism, to the erosion of its professional stan-
dards, has diminished the motivation and morale of public employees in
developing countries, especially when such ethical conflicts tarnish the
278 Conclusions

image of the public service, and finally to the erosion of public sector’s
unique identity.
(2) This points to the second factor in the explanation of the problems with
values in the public sector, which is globalization. Globalization does not take
the embeddedness of values in varying cultures seriously, too often resulting
in a misfit between what are called universal values, and national and even
local cultures. The desire to preserve cultural embedded values, norms, social
and political systems, and the pressure of globalization has quashed most
attempts aimed at bringing sanity to the public service, creating a fertile
ground for the unethical behaviour of corruption to thrive. All in all, based
on such a background, a lot of progress has been made in promoting values
and ethics in Africa’s public service and one can only hope for the best.
This is also argued by Hiroko Kudo, who describes the situation in Japan
after the Second World War as the Bureaucracy was forced to adopt western
values with calls to reduce the size of government in terms of both cost
and staff. The bureaucracy has long been perceived as a flare of competency
and integrity, safeguarding the national public interest against the short-
sighted behaviour of politicians who practiced clientelism. This conviction
changed, in the 1990s, due to a number of widely criticized policy failures.
In particular, the then Ministry of Finance was held responsible for the eco-
nomic recession and for a number of high-profile scandals involving public
servants. As a result, her post-war reforms reduced the size of government
making it the smallest amongst all industrialized democracies.
A similar argument is made by Moses Sindane for the situation in Africa,
where the negative side-effects of the process of globalization resulted in
the need for moral regeneration, peer-review mechanisms to bring in a
feeling of sameness and increase the commitment of such states to pro-
mote democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good
governance. Institutions such as the Pan-African Ministers of Civil Service,
normative frameworks such as the African Charter for Public Service, as well
as the African Charter on Democracy have been put in place. Normative
frameworks as principles and objectives include “the promotion of trans-
parency, accountability and the effective participation of citizens in public
affairs”. All African countries pledged to enact charters of their own in
accordance with the Charter of Public Service. He mentions as reasons, a
clash between traditional values and imported norms accompanying mod-
ernization and development, relatively low civil service compensation, and
chronic poverty to mention but a few. Public Administration, being in a
state of transformation in Africa, needs to find a common ground for its
traditional values system of Ubuntu (collectivism and cooperatives).
The problem with the globalization of what are deemed universal values
is that values are not seen as they ought to be seen, that is, as a common
understanding of what is desirable and good and what is not within a specific
 Michiel S. de Vries and Pan Suk Kim 279

culture. Values determine what is right and wrong in a particular society, at

least if we consider Lewis’ (1991: 3) definition. In order to restore or retain
values in public administration, it is essential to examine the topic from,
among others, a sociological and social psychological perspective. Under-
standing a society’s beliefs, values, norms, expectations, customs, and goals
is the cornerstone of defining values and virtues. Values stress the desirabil-
ity of behaviour. Values help us to understand what is good and what is bad
in a specific situation.
The resulting loss of standards and principles has cost public administra-
tions a lot more than just credibility. It has resulted in administrations that
chase conflicting values; that is the values that made public administration
unique and the business sector values through the application of reform pro-
grammes. In addition, the loss of the central theme, “publicness,” leads to
more corruption, unethical acts and conflicting interest. A lack of trust in
public administration among citizens is also a serious issue that calls for
attention. Some so-called universal reform programmes have eroded the
basic values rather than improved systemic problems in the system. The
recent pandemic of public scandals and global corruption after decades of
negligence have undermined the very foundations of public sector ethics,
emasculating institutional frameworks based on accountability and ethics.
Departing from these established values has lowered ethical standards in
public life and in democratic governance.
(3) We also have to look for causes within the discipline of Public Admin-
istration. It seems as if, during the continuous efforts to improve the effec-
tiveness and especially the efficiency of Public Administration visible in the
development of Public Administration as a scholarly discipline, virtues were
lost from sight. Continuously emphasizing efficiency has reached its lim-
its in establishing good governance. Is the discipline just evolving towards
better understanding of how to make the public office more efficient, or
does it also need to take the normative aspects of public office into account?
Does this discipline only investigate the public administration or is there
also interest in the public administrator? If the latter is the case, do we in
Public Administration understand behaviour and are we able to model it in
such a way that it can be altered if it is deemed wrong and kept when it is
judged to be correct? As Elinor and Vincent Ostrom argue in this volume,
value-driven behaviour can be analysed using frameworks, theories, and
models. Models based on the developed framework, make precise assump-
tions about limited sets of parameters and variables that are generated by
theories. This analysis can be helpful in addressing the question of reforms
and to predict the outcomes of reforms in particular settings. An Institu-
tional Analysis and Development (IDA) framework can serve as the general
source on how the rules, physical and material conditions and attributes of
a community affect the structure of the action arena, i.e. this framework
280 Conclusions

can show the interaction between the actors and environment as well as
the impact. In the framework for institutional analysis, the existing mate-
rial conditions, the attributes of community and rules will impact the action
situation and the actors/participants. The choice made by individual actors,
as economists state, could be based on benefit and costs analysis where the
individual perceives and weighs up the various strategies and their likely out-
come. The analysis of the interaction between the surrounding environment
and the action arena will help to predict particular outcomes and the influ-
ence the outcomes have on the environment. In addition to the prediction
of the outcomes, public choice theorists can evaluate achieved outcomes
using different evaluation criteria. In explaining the action arena and the
actors’ choice factors such as the rules that affect all of the elements of an
action situation, the physical possibility of achieving certain outcomes and
availability of materials needs due consideration.

15.3 Toward public value management . . . .

The dominant solutions for the problems developed nowadays are only able
to solve a portion of the problems. This is partly the case, because these
solutions one-sidedly equate values with deontological ethics that are rule-
bound (cf. the introduction to this volume). In order to create and sustain
values in an organization one has to make the rules explicit. But as Charles
Garofalo argues, standards in themselves are not enough and transforming
government without understanding the complexities of the nature and sig-
nificance of good governance might pose a threat to the public values and
moral agency. As the final chapters illustrate, making standards and explicat-
ing standards is nowadays the dominant solution in Africa, Latin America,
the new European democracies, an organization such as the OECD, and
developed countries like Japan. This refers to the reinvention of the constitu-
tion, laws, regulations, codes of conduct and the like. Although explicating
rules and norms and basic values is a necessary condition for bringing values
back in, they are far from sufficient in bringing about a dominance of pub-
lic administrators that act virtuously. The existence of a constitution, when
the rule of law is the basis of governmental decisions, or when there are
codes of conduct, is far from a sufficient condition for public value manage-
ment. Jolanta Palisdaukatis in this volume observes that the constitutions
of most of the new European democracies that were enacted during the
past two decades, just like the ones in Western democracies, lack separate
chapters specifying guidelines for public service. All countries’ constitutions
mention the necessity of the democratic nature of the state, but this is still
very general. Some constitutions simply stress adherence to democratic or
fundamental values, while others have absolutely nothing dealing with this
idea. The issue of social justice, which is important for society and the public
service, is not mentioned in any constitution.
 Michiel S. de Vries and Pan Suk Kim 281

Similarly, codes of conduct reinforce the idea that public office holders
must adhere to higher standards of conduct than others in society. How-
ever, not all countries of the European Union have such documents for
their civil servants. Most of the new European democracies have similar
documents which, in addition to the legislation, reinforce certain standards.
Legality, impartiality, loyalty to state or government, serving public interest,
and honesty/integrity were among the most mentioned values in such docu-
ments. Besides the general principles of conduct, codes emphasize avoidance
of conflict of interest, attitudes towards gifts and other benefits, restraint
from abuse of official position or misuse of state property or official informa-
tion, and bans on political activities. Other issues, such as illegal influence,
outside activity, postemployment requirements, and disciplinary measures
for breaching the documents were less elaborated and received much less
attention. In summary, it is viable to say that in most cases, the Codes restate
and elaborate the values and principles already embodied in legislation.
This is not to say that such regulations are useless. They can be useful,
as Christina Andrews argues for Latin America. After a decade of signing
the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption, the Organization of
American States launched the Inter-American Cooperation Programme to
eradicate corruption and promote technical cooperation and information
exchange among member countries and other international organizations
like the OECD and the United Nations. This programme would help in dis-
seminating good practices throughout the three Americas. In response to the
convention terms, many countries have implemented a lot of programmes
aimed at fighting corruption; bring fairness and sanity in the public service.
Social policies that have shown progress in reducing poverty and inequality
have been implemented and the perception that governments can be effec-
tive has been enhanced by the social policies implemented in the region.
Thus it’s fair to say that government has managed to rebrand its image in
the face of the public as an institution free of clientelism and corruption as
it tries to forge different ways of responding to the need of citizens. With
such a direction, one can only hope that values like honesty, solidarity, and
responsibility will expand to all institutions.

15.4 . . . and public virtue management

This modesty is justified because there is more than explicating the val-
ues, based on deontological ethics, with the dubious assumption that such
rules can always be obediently followed. Often, however, values collide
and sometimes the consequence of strictly following the rules, the domi-
nance of process over outcomes, is detrimental. In such cases teleological
ethics in which a morally right action is seen as one that produces a good
outcome, or consequence, becomes crucial. Virtuous behaviour becomes cru-
cial, which as Demetrios Argyriades argues in the end hinges primarily on
282 Conclusions

the individual’s sense of responsibility for all acts he/she engages in, and
instrumental values created by some kind of managerialism lose their signif-
icance. As Tholen argues in this volume, then it becomes self-evident that
one needs committed and socially embedded individuals, who are able to
think for themselves, have proper judgement, a critical attitude, are reflexive
as well as praxis-oriented and develop themselves. In other words a pub-
lic virtue approach based on building capacity to make a correct choice,
where opposing values are at stake, based on sound arguments and cogni-
tion, which in the end are much more important than one’s instinct and
emotion because they alone may guide volition to right conduct due to the
self-directed initiations. Knowledge is important in order to recognize the
consequences of one’s actions, and reflexivity is needed to weigh the pros
and cons and arrive at a proper judgement. The quest for self-knowledge and
its relationship to virtue is that virtue leads to self-control, enabling individ-
uals to use their knowledge responsibly. Democracy and sound governance,
to be functional, depends on educated citizens acting responsibly and civi-
cally inclined, responsible public officials committed to the service of the
long-term common good, taking in to consideration the values and virtues
of administration that found their ways in the Constitution and elsewhere.
This calls for public virtue management and needs to readdress recruit-
ment criteria and human resource management, and investigate the
determining factors for creating, stimulating, and maintaining virtuous
behaviour among the organizational members. This is not an easy thing to
do and although much has been investigated, there is little research combin-
ing Human Resource Management (HRM) with creating virtuous behaviour.
In the old days monarchs knew—or thought they knew—how to establish
that administrators acted virtuously. They selected them from the highest
echelons of society, be it the nobility, the highest caste, the elite, their own
families and the like. At the same time, it was perceived to be an honour
to serve the public realm. It was something to be valued for its own sake
and resulted in respect, pride, and the internalized knowledge of what to do
when things get rough, when facing a dilemma, and in difficult times, when
to wait, when to back off, and when to show courage and sacrifice.
However, as we all know, personal backgrounds are no guarantee that
the choices made are beneficial beyond the personal interest. Many of
the nobility, the members of the highest caste or far-away nephews were,
notwithstanding their background, neither virtuous nor abiding to the val-
ued rules and regulations. Corruption is not a novel phenomenon; it has
existed for as long as we know (Finer).
Next to these classic recruitment criteria, there are now new systems,
sometimes based on the merit system, emphasizing the possession of diplo-
mas, or on the spoils system, emphasizing political loyalty. We also have
new criteria for recruitment imposed by the profit sector that has increas-
ingly dominated the public sector, namely being productive and efficient.
 Michiel S. de Vries and Pan Suk Kim 283

Hence, the public sector is no longer just making public policies, doing jus-
tice, creating fairness, and acting responsively, but it makes products and
sets production targets in which productivity and efficiency are valued crite-
ria. This is again most clearly seen in the ideas of NPM. NPM firstly replaces
the idea that the “raison d’etre” of government is to solve societal problems
with the idea that the problem lies within government itself; and it secondly
replaces the idea that the problem lies in the way government conducts its
business with a desire to have business conduct the government’s tasks.
The consequence is that the work of public administration, and being
a public administrator as such, is not to be valued. Whereas once it was
an honour to be a public servant and people were proud to become civil
servants, nowadays, jobs in the public sector seem to have become a last
resort. If the profit sector does not employ me, and the non-profit sector
has no job-offerings either, then ultimately I have to take that awful job at
the municipality, police department, become a teacher in a public school,
ward, or whatever else the public sector has to offer. What honour remains
in being a public administrator, when it is argued that everything improves
if the delivery of public goods and services is contracted out, and the esteem
the public service once had is unjustified? It is this esteem of the public office
that has deteriorated. Partly because of myths (e.g. about public administra-
tors being lazy), because of stupid decisions by public servants themselves
(corruption, fraud), partly because of the decisions made by rulers (recruiting
criminals), partly by developments nobody could influence (the growth of
the public sector) and partly by developments which were explicitly opted
for and of which the negative side-effects could have been foreseen (con-
tracting out). If it is not honourable to work for the public sector, why should
one show honourable behaviour within the public sector?

15.5 Final conclusions

Values and virtue in public administration are not easily accomplished.

An alternative to traditional public administration and NPM, is an emer-
gent third paradigm, namely Public Values Management, which is based on
a communitarian or cooperative perspective, in which “the assumption is
that people need to share and come to endorse each other’s viewpoints”.
Public Values Management defines public value as consisting of what gov-
ernmental activities produce, with due attention to creating the public value
when they produce outputs for which citizens express a desire. Public values
encompass public goods as well as remedies for market failures, and also
include the institutional arrangements that enable markets to operate in
order to be established via the rule of law, protection of property rights, and
enforcement of contracts. Achieving this is complex, taking into account
the imperfections of the political process and in defining what is valuable to
the collective. Therefore, it is suggested to have a contingency theory and
284 Conclusions

design culture-embedded rules as opposed to one-size-fits-all solutions. Pub-

lic values management embedded within national, organizational cultures
can serve as the new way of thinking that is based on bringing efficiency,
accountability, and equity while at the same time try to boost public ser-
vants’ motivation without market incentives and taking contingency factors
into account. This Public Values Management should, as Charles Garofalo
argues in this volume, take the specific complexity of the nature of public
administration into account and be modest in its aims.
With the benefit of hindsight in writing the concluding chapter we can
say he is absolutely right, because explicating values alone does not cre-
ate or maintain virtuous behaviour. There is also a need for public virtue
management, which implies a need for better human resource manage-
ment in the public sector. In order to recruit virtuous individuals it is
necessary—although far from sufficient—to adapt the recruitment criteria
and investigate whether applicants just need a job, or are proud to be allowed
to work within the public sector. If working within the public sector does not
regain its esteem, it is unlikely that it will attract honourable individuals and
virtuous behaviour from those working inside. After these individuals are
recruited, proper public virtue management takes care of the newcomers by
socializing them. We can learn from social psychology that when newcomers
are properly socialized in the first year, especially regarding dilemmas, this
can prevent public administrators from abandoning the desired values and
virtuous behaviour. In order to accomplish this, one should not only rely
on management, but especially on colleagues or experienced organizational
members. Third, whereas it might be fruitful to look at the public adminis-
tration and its cultural context as the basis for a fit between that culture and
the dominant values within the public organizations, it is the management
regarding the individual public administrators and their surroundings which
determines whether or not one can expect virtuous behaviour. This calls
for more attention for the individual, the human factor, in public admin-
istration. Only emphasizing operational skills, standards and operational
knowledge which are beneficial for the organization itself and only taking
consequential ethics such as productivity, efficiency, competitiveness, and
performance into account, without paying attention to the need for indi-
viduals in Public Administration to be committed and socially embedded
individuals, is a threat to the quality of public administration.