This book recovers Aristotle's understanding of the roles of rhetoric and prudence in public leadership, comparing it to the other major political theories of leadership: utilitarianism, as advocated by J.S. Mill, and duty-ethics, as advocated by Immanuel Kant.
Most leadership literature stems from and focuses on the private sector, emphasizing personal qualities that bind leaders and followers to a shared purpose. As the authors of New Public Leadership argue, if these shared purposes do not build trust and legitimacy in public institutions, such traditional leadership tropes fall short of the standard demanded by contemporary public servants. For twenty years the authors have been developing a leadership education and training framework specifically designed to encourage public service professionals to ‘lead from where they sit.’ This book presents that comprehensive, integrated, and practical leadership framework, grounded in the uniqueness of public legal missions, culture, history and values. The authors explore three key elements of leadership success: 1) an understanding of our public service context, including the history, the values and the institutions that comprise our leadership setting, 2) a set of tools designed to help leaders initiate collective action in wicked challenge settings, and 3) tools to support sound judgment, enabling leaders to do the right thing in the right circumstances for the right reasons. The authors further provide readers with a basic understanding of democratic institutions, encouraging them to work within and across multiple vertical and horizontal systems of authority. The book is organized into four sections, each of which is accompanied by a Master Case that provides the reader with an opportunity to apply the principles and leadership tools discussed in the text to practice. To further reinforce the practice-centered approach to leadership knowledge and skills, the authors have developed an accompanying EMERGE Leadership Handbook, complete with exercises, available online. Written specifically with the practicing public manager in mind, this book arms public servants with a large repertoire of leadership skills, designed to accommodate changing public values and conflicting priorities at all levels of our public organizations.
Designed to help midlevel and senior managers in organizations dedicated to public purposes, this book provides trained self-awareness to deploy values to guide decisions and build the culture of their organizations. The book explores how all managing involves leading and identifies the levels of ethical responsibility for managerial leaders. Highlighting the fundamental role that ethics plays in organizational life, J. Patrick Dobel uses insights from cognitive and social psychology to discuss how to anticipate and address threats to integrity and value informed decision making. Building on traditional ethical theory and modern research, the book begins with the fundamental assumption that individuals possess responsibility when they act for ethical purposes and results in taking a position within a public or nonprofit organization. This assumption of responsibility recognizes the inherent discretion in all positions and claims that effective ethical management requires self-awareness, self-mastery, integrity and a working frame of one’s values and character. The book pays special attention to the challenges of integrating diverse people and perspectives in public organizations as well as attending to the slippages to integrity in organizational life and how managers and leaders can foresee and address ethical slippage and corruption. The book provides checklists and decision frameworks that individuals can adopt and deploy to guide decisions. Public Leadership Ethics: A Management Approach will help create strong value informed cultures supported by communication, transparency, incentives and strong management cadres to achieve high quality service and integrity based actions. It will be of special interest to managerial leaders in public service and teaching in public administration and policy programs or executive training.
This Handbook provides definitive reference work on political executives and their key role in political systems. It records the current theoretical and methodological debates and sets the agenda for future research in this prominent and extremely wide-ranging field of research.
As first responders to public problems, administrators must survey situations, identify solutions, and occasionally make executive decisions that are binding upon the government as a whole. The ability for administrators to assert claims that orient the government in a particular direction is not only powerful, but it can also be problematic and even dangerous. For administrators, the tension between moving in a spirited way, and remaining sensible, is a problem of how to exercise one’s discretion, especially in the U.S. context, which demands that both be considered and actualized. In dealing with these competing expectations, Chad B. Newswander analyzes how administrators can incorporate executive, legislative, and judicial tendencies to help them handle the problem of discretion. Expanding the thinking of the constitutional school of public administration thought, Administrative Ethics and Executive Decisions is a theoretically grounded and empirically rich study of how administrators incorporate a constitutional ethos to handle the problem of discretion.
This volume provides a fresh perspective on current democratic theory and practice by recovering the rich evaluations of democracy in the history of political thought. Each author addresses a single thinker’s reflections on the virtues and defects of democracy and the relationship between democracy and other regimes. Together, these essays explore the tensions within the democratic way of life that arise from an attachment to equality, liberty, citizenship, law, and the divine. Above all, this work aims at recovering a more complex understanding of democracy, connecting the perennial questions of political philosophy to the perplexities and crises of modern democracy.
Dozens of books are published each year on leadership, but as pundits, scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals note, what is written is too often shallow and facile, oriented toward quick fixes for performance enhancement or internal organizational and personnel development. Drawing from a diverse range of literature, including history, philosophy, public administration, leadership, religion, and spirituality, this book fills an important gap, exploring what it means to be an ethical and moral leader. It takes a deep dive into the many challenges of leadership, examining the continuing contrast between bureaucracy and democracy, the unique ethical and moral characteristics of nonprofit and faith-based organizations, and the globalization of organizations and institutions. Throughout the book, author Stephen M. King develops a more holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of ethical and moral leadership, required for more thoughtful theoretical and empirical research. He points students of leadership to the time-honored values of ethics and morality, reestablishes the ethical balance between bureaucracy and democracy, and helps reorient the values' purpose of public, nonprofit, and global institutions, providing hope of a better future for leadership. Ethical Public Leadership is required reading for students of public administration and nonprofit management, as well as for practicing public servants and nonprofit sector employees at all levels.
Drawn from the results of five seminars this unique book looks at the four areas of: public sector reform; essential features for public leaders; public leadership in action; and the outline of a public leadership approach for the future. It seeks to give public leadership a firm foothold within the study of leadership in general.
After official policy advice to governments is publicly released, governments are often accused of ignoring or rejecting their experts. Commonly represented as politicisation, this depiction is superficial. Digging deeper, is there something about the official advice itself that makes it easy to ignore? Instead of lamenting a demise of expertise, Christiane Gerblinger asks: does the expert advice of policy officials feature characteristics that invite its government audience to overlook or misread it? To answer this question, Gerblinger critically examines official policy advice and finds the language of the rebuffed: government experts reluctant to disclose what they know so as to accommodate political circumstances. She argues that this language evades stable meaning and diminishes the democratic right of citizens to scrutinise the work of government.
This book examines the performative role of influential thinkers in the history of modern Western political thought. The case studies examine influential political philosophers who saw their writing role ‘performatively’, as an exercise in pedagogy designed to generate a new type of political following among their readers. Machiavelli, Mill and Nietzsche wrote classic works in political theory (The Prince, On Liberty, Genealogy of Morals) to reform and reshape their readers’ ability to think and act politically. Thinkers become performative through what they write in their public performance; and contemporary academic teachers can use this to great pedagogical effect in helping students ‘get the point’ of political theorising. This book examines how a small sample of classic theoretical performers wrote their remarkable public works. John Uhr draws on neglected or forgotten lessons on performative writing from past masters of literary criticism like Lord Shaftesbury, R G Collingwood and John Dewey, all of whom can help those now teaching the history of modern political thought to enable students to learn the performance of politics acted out by modernising thinkers capable of writing in ways similar to Machiavelli, Mill and Nietzsche.