The Normative Foundations Of Public Service Ethics

That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management movement promotes entrepreneurs over civil servants, performance over process, decentralization link centralization, and flexibility over rules. John Rohr demurs, arguing that the movement goes too far in downplaying the distinctively American challenges arising from the separated powers principle. Consequently, the NPM alienates public management from its natural home—a nation-state established within a constitutional order.

The Normative Foundations Of Public Service Ethics

According to Rohr, "nothing is more fundamental to governance than a constitution; and therefore to stress the constitutional character of administration is to establish the proper role of administration as governance that includes management but transcends it as well. But this new version of his rule-of-law critique directly addresses the NPM's excesses, framed convincingly as a comparative study of cases found in four countries spanning three centuries.

As a result, Rohr establishes that the constitutional-administrative nexus is intimate, stable, pervasive, and enduring. The first half of the book examines the linkages between constitutions and administrations in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, all of them sufficiently similar to the United States to make comparisons meaningful and sufficiently different to provide illuminating perspectives on domestic practices.

The examples extend from the French Revolution through the founding of the Canadian Confederation in the s to such contemporary issues as the influence of administrative directives from Brussels on the British courts. The second half of the book examines American cases in three categories: separation of powers, individual rights, and federalism. In each case Rohr highlights instances of public management "with all its warts and wrinkles tending to the mundane details of translating great constitutional principles into everyday actions.

Constitutional law has helped establish civil servants' freedom of speech and applied the fundamental principles of federalism to the administrative process. He summarizes his findings from the case studies by saying that the constitutional role of American civil servants comes not only from specific American experiences but also from the very nature of civil service. Product Details :.]

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Competence the Theoretical and Practical. Foundation for Public Administration. Graduate Education Curriculum. Stephanie Newbold. American University. It extends his earlier book Ethics for Bureaucrats, a work that celebrates the role of the U.