Question

Public administrators often confront the potentially conflicting demands of operating as efficiently as possible while being fully responsive to a variety of stakeholders. What are the ethical issues associated with this conflict? What local examples help illustrate this conflict (I live in Mississippi)?

Answer 1

Public administration is at crossroads. Once dominated by a technical-rational culture, public administration is now traveling three not necessarily compatible paths: technicalrational, entrepreneurial, and citizen participatory. Stivers (2001) has characterized the crossroads as nothing short of a battle for the heart and soul of public administration. Adding to the tension at the crossroads is the evolving context in which administrators are working, which is increasingly one that is networked bureaucratic (O’Toole 1997). The implications of public administration’s current multiplicity include the existence of multiple environments for public administrators, potentially conflicting obligations for performance and behavior, and, as a result, choices regarding responsiveness. To be relevant in these changing environments, represented by the evolution of public administration, and conflicting obligations, represented by the crossroads, writing and research needs to be based on certain relevance criteria. Public administration scholarship ought to be based on past research to be relevant to scholarship (Whetten 1989), while the contribution should be related to ‘‘social and organizational reality’’ (La Porte 1971, 18). More specifically, it is suggested that scholarship should be sensitive, reflexive, historically driven, and future looking. It ought to be aligned with current environmental enactments of administrators as well as desired future enactments, and it should actively acknowledge ethical dilemmas administrators face and are likely to face in the conflicting and evolving demands and environments to which they need to respond. Relevance of responsiveness research and writing to the scholarly and practitioner communities, it is argued, should begin by unpacking the concept of ‘‘bureaucratic responsiveness.’’ A single, unifying conceptual construct fails to meet the requirements of relevant writing, namely, it does not capture the conflicts that arise as bureaucrats are faced with responsiveness in different variations. Unpacking the concept into six variants—dictated, constrained, purposive, entrepreneurial, collaborative, and negotiated—enables the researcher to better understand, inform, and enhance responsiveness in any given context. Ultimately, the purpose of this article is to define emerging research questions and establish a research agenda to better understand and enable a responsive public administration in the context of changing environments with potentially conflicting obligations. By unpacking the concept of responsiveness and tracing its history through a literature review, it becomes clear how responsiveness as a concept was relevant in the past and remains relevant today. Through the explicit association of responsiveness variants to different ethical perspectives, this article builds on a path developed by Maesschalck (2004), who traces periods in administrative reform, such as traditional public administration, new public management, and new public service, in terms of their impact on administrators’ ethics. In so doing it becomes clear how ethical obligations based on assumptions of different administrative reform efforts can conflict if taken together, as is potentially the case in much of today’s public administration. Though Maesschalck’s conceptualization has not been empirically verified, conceptually it is a foundation from which competing obligations’ impact on administrator behavior can be considered.

Examples

1,Discrimination Issues Leading to Conflict

As an example of a discrimination-related conflict, imagine a minority employee in a team setting who feels that he is consistently assigned the most menial work tasks in the group. This employee may begin to harbor resentment against team members and managers, eventually lashing out through decreased productivity or outright verbal conflict. To resolve this issue, a manager could sit down with the whole team and discuss the way in which job tasks are assigned, making changes as necessary to ensure that tasks are divided equitably.

2.Conflicts with Customers

For example, if a car salesman sells a used car without a performance guarantee or warranty and the car breaks down on the buyer, the buyer may return to angrily confront the salesperson and demand a refund. The best first step to solve these conflicts is to involve a manager who has the right to offer refunds, discounts or other conciliatory gestures to the customer unless you are in a situation where employees are empowered to make these kinds of decisions.