The Public Service Ethos: Decline and Renewal?

Abstract

This article examines the two principal means by which ethically based standards of conduct can be secured in public administration. The first approach, advocated by Carl Friedrich in the 1940s, places the primary emphasis on the values and self-directed willingness of the public servant to act in the public interest. This reliance on a public service ethos was to some extent the hallmark of the British Civil Service before the post-1979 managerial and organisational changes and was a product of the exemplary leadership of two great heads of the home civil service, Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Edward Bridges. It will be argued that marketization, managerialism and organisational down-sizing in the public services have created a culture whose values (risk-taking, short-term profits and efficiency gains) greatly threaten the existence of the public service ethos. Consequently, the only effective way to secure any semblance of the public interest and to deter impropriety lies in the second approach - that is to place a much greater emphasis on external monitoring and legally based sanctions and safeguards. This alternative approach was advocated by Herman Finer, a contemporary of Karl Friedrich. The legal protection given by the 1998 Public Interest Disclosure Act to ‘whistle blowers’ should be seen as a welcome step in this direction. Greater precision in the wording of the Civil Service Code and a strengthening of its inadequate enforcement mechanism would, it is argued, further help to protect endangered public service values within the Civil Service.