Abstract
Recent Wall Street corruption scandals have prompted calls for major reforms in the teaching of ethics in the MBA curriculum (Ghosal, 2005; Pfeffer, 2005; Shareef, 2007). Some prominent business school professors have argued that graduate business school students should come to appreciate that they are stewards of society’s scarce resources and, consequently, that more than profit maximization should be considered when making administrative decisions (Mitroff and Swanson, 2004). This call for stewardship and ethical management reflects the same normative and affective motivations that attract future public managers to serve the public interest through public service (Perry and Wise, 1990). Although stewardship theory is now common in discussions of business ethics pedagogy (Wasserman, 2006), these higher-order motivations are equally grounded in the “uniqueness” of public management theory (Perry and Kraemer, 1983). However, ethical violations continue to occur with regularity in public agencies.
This study considers my search, in teaching public administration graduate courses, for a praxis-based ethical decision-making process that might be useful to public administration practitioners. Involvement in a landmark Virginia eminent domain case has allowed me to synthesize two concepts—the administrative moral hazard/free-riding dynamic and Bozeman’s (2002) public values/public failure construct—into a useful framework for teaching administrative ethics in public management courses.
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