Public Service Values

Public Service Values

Public service values are too rarely discussed in public administration courses and scholarship, despite recent research demonstrating the importance of these values in the daily decision making processes of public service professionals. A discussion of these very tenets and their relevance to core public functions, as well as which areas might elicit value conflicts for public professionals, is central to any comprehensive understanding of budget and finance, human resource management, and strategic planning in the public sector. Public Service Values is written specifically for graduate and undergraduate courses in public administration, wherever a discussion of public service ideals might enrich the learning experience and offer students a better understanding of daily practice. Exploring the meaning and application of specific values, such as Neutrality, Efficiency, Accountability, Public Service, and Public Interest, provides students and future professionals with a ‘workplace toolkit’ for the ethical delivery of public services. Well-grounded in scholarly literature and with a relentless focus on the public service professional, Public Service Values highlights the importance of values in professional life and encourages a more self-aware and reflective public practice. Case studies to stimulate reflection are interwoven throughout the book and application to practice is cemented in a final section devoted to value themes in professional life as well as a chapter dedicated to holding oneself accountable. The result is a book that challenges us to embrace the necessity of public service values in our public affairs curricula and that asks the important questions current public service professionals should make a habit of routinely applying in their daily decision making.

Changing Public Sector Values

First Published in 1998. The single most important purpose of this book is to create a field of public administration values, a field that currently does not exist in a recognizable form. Surely values are discussed significantly and usefully by the fields of ethics, management, decision making, and organization behavior and theory, to mention only a few. But these discussions are inevitably narrower in scope than is necessary for a true field of values. Such a field is needed to help bridge the seeming chasm about discussions of values among the established fields. A second purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive treatment of values. A third purpose of the text is to provide a balanced treatment, giving all the major schools of thought roughly the same coverage so that their values can be compared as dispassionately as possible. A fourth purpose of the book is to make the subject accessible to and interesting for practitioners and students.

Public Service Values