Central Question
Ethics for Bureaucrats was written for current and aspiring career government managers with the aim of examining how to integrate ethics into public administration curricula and training. The author does so by linking several topics such as bureaucracy, law and values with ethics. This book provides ethical questions in the bureaucracy grounded specifically in the discretionary authority bureaucrats have.
Methodology
This book is meant to act as an educational tool for bureaucrats and students aiming to become bureaucrats. It is broken up into three distinct purposes. First, the author begins with providing a history of the rise and fall of the politics-administration dichotomy to set the stage for the rest of the book. Second, he develops an approach for incorporating ethics into public administration and training. Third, he tests his approach with exercises in the form of Supreme Court case studies and questions for discussion.
False Starts
Rohr begins his …show more content…
59). The author attributes “new public administration” with providing a theoretical framework for investigating methods for integrating ethics into public administration education. He also labels Paul Applebee’s Morality and Administration “perhaps the most significant book ever written on this topic by an American author” (p. 60), and applauds his claim that “crude wrong doing” such as that of Watergate should not form the basis for the approach to ethics. It is the “more complicated and elevated” issue of administrative discretion, he argues, that should form the approach. With Applebee’s claim in mind, Rohr reviews several earlier approaches to including ethics in public administration curriculum, and then provides his own idea on how it should be