Public Administration Ethics for the 21st Century

by J. Michael Martinez

This volume establishes a foundation for a uniform code of professional ethics for public administrators in the United States.

Public Administration Ethics for the 21st Century lays the ethical foundations for a uniform professional code of ethics for public administrators, civil servants, and non-profit administrators in the US. Martinez synthesizes five disparate schools of ethical thought as to how public administrators can come to know the good and behave in ways that advance the values of citizenship, equity, and public interest within their respective organizations. Using case studies, he teaches American administrators how to combine the approaches of all five schools to evaluate and resolve complex ethical dilemmas within the constraints of the U.S. democratic values set.

Martinez enunciates the common ethical principles that guide public administrators in their practice within the specific ethical parameters and organizational cultures of a myriad entities at the federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States, as well as in non-profit organizations. Along the way, Martinez addresses a number of crucial issues, including personal gain, conflict of interest, transparency, democratic impartiality, hiring, hierarchical discipline, media relations, partisan pressure, appointments by elected officials, and whistle-blowing. The striking, high-profile case studies―Nathan Bedford Forrest, Adolph Eichmann, Lieutenant William Calley, and Mary Ann Wright―illustrate ethical dilemmas where, for better or worse, the individual was at odds with the organization.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2009

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

J. Michael Martinez began his career in the private practice of law. He later earned a Ph.D. in political science and a second Ph.D. in public administration. Martinez’s scholarly work has appeared in numerous academic publications, including Administration & Society; The American Review of Public Administration; The Georgia Historical Quarterly; The Journal of Environment & Development; The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy; The Journal of Policy History; Nonprofit Management & Leadership; Politics & Policy; and The South Dakota Law Review, among others. He also has co-edited and contributed chapters to three academic texts: Ethics and Character: The Pursuit of Democratic Virtues (Carolina Academic Press, 1998); Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (University Press of Florida, 2000); and The Leviathan’s Choice: Capital Punishment in the Twenty-first Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He has written three books on Southern history: Life and Death in Civil War Prisons (Rutledge Hill Press, 2004), a selection of the History Book Club; Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction ( Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). His other books include Administrative Ethics in the Twenty-first Century (with William D. Richardson; Peter Lang Publishers, 2008), Public Administration Ethics for the Twenty-first Century (Praeger, 2009), and Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

Since 1992, Martinez has worked in the Government Affairs & Environment Department at Dart Container Corporation, a leading manufacturer of disposable foodservice products. During the 1990s, he taught political science at Georgia State University and environmental law at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School. He now teaches political science, criminal justice, and public administration courses as a part-time faculty member at Kennesaw State University, the University of South Dakota, and the University of Georgia, respectively. From 1988 until 1992, he was on the staff of the Southern States Energy Board, a non-profit interstate compact organization that researches energy and environmental laws and regulations.