Good Ethics In Public Policy And Administration 2 Essay Example

Gary R. Orren’s work, “Beyond Self-Interest”, goes on to establish that collectively held values are omnipotent in the determination of individual behavior. These actions are also governed by goals, ideas, values and purposes. In political domain, the values which are broadly shared are the most powerful in nature.
However, neoclassical microeconomics, pluralism and Marxism do not put light on the importance and power of shared purposes. In the case of economic theory, the motivation behind sale of labor is not taken into consideration. Shared values play the very vital role of shaping public policies.
Microeconomics has many restrictive assumptions of which the oblivion to values and ethics is worth mentioning. In politics, pluralism has also shunned the role of shared values and rather takes a group as the prime unit of analysis. The effect of “overlapping memberships” has been discussed by pluralist writers. Both these models are alternative to Marxist class analysis.
However, all three do not pay much attention to the importance of leadership and have a minimalist view of the government. In Marxist theory, true revolutionary consciousness is the ultimate way of emancipation. In Marx’s view, thus, leadership has no omnipotent role to play.
The three theoretical discourses: microeconomics, pluralism and Marxism have a deficiency which is common to all of them alike. Each of the three goes on to underestimate the paramount role of shared ideas in political and economic behavior. Thus, there is the utmost need to delve deep into the realm of theoretical knowledge where one would endeavor to comprehend the role of these factors which play an instrumental role.
Terry Cooper in “Public Administration in Modern and Postmodern Society: The Context of Administrative Ethics” tries to delve deep into understanding the administrative role in relation to the cultural and social contexts in which modernization and post-modernization are key concepts. While modern refers to the economic, social and cultural attributes of urban world, postmodern discredits foundational assumptions.
The socially constructed world has layers of meaning assigned to things which need to be agreed on. Broad participation in governance is an important factor. The clash between postmodern and modern worldviews is prevalent. In modern worldview the traits relevant to administrative ethics include the belief that science could be introduced to more areas of life. Both personal identity and social relationships get complex in modern society where people play more than one role. This problem of roles becomes more complex in the postmodern view as it opines that there is no authoritative place to turn for ascertaining the priorities of roles.
In the modern society, private life and work do not blend with each other unlike traditional societal structure. Thus, the spatial and chronological separation gives rise to ethical identity of employment role. But, in postmodern society, this separation gets blurred and the ethical identities get less distinct.
The homogeneity of the traditional societal structure is no more there with the cultural bonds. In the past century, the government organizations have served to an increasingly pluralized public domain. Socio-cultural diversity gets more conspicuous in the postmodern society.
Modernization separates politics and administration while post-modernization meshes the two. Thus, the roles get overlapped and the dual roles give rise to conflicting obligations. In the postmodern era, public administrators have to be managers of diverse interests. People are not mere voters, but are educated about politics, according to democratic theory.