Book Reviews

Edward T. Hall's classic book, Beyond Culture (Anchor Books, 1976), is not a government ethics book. But a lot of the wisdom in this brilliant book can be applied to our field.

In ethics, there are two basic approaches: (1) an ends-based approach, also referred to as utilitarian or consequentialist; and (2) a means-based approach, also referred to as rules-based or deontological. Government officials, and most people when speaking about government, generally use the former, while government ethics uses the latter. This causes a lot of problems.

After reading my recent blog post about bridging the gulf between administrative and government ethics, one of the great scholars of public administration, George Frederickson, sent me a copy of a 2009 lecture of his, which appeared in 2010 in the journal Public Integrity.

There is a great deal of thought-provoking material in Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010). Change has proved hard in every single city and county in the United States. Those seeking government ethics reform can learn a lot from this book.

I don't talk much in this blog or in my book Local Government Ethics Programs about character. However, there is another approach to government ethics that is sometimes referred to as "the character approach." For example, the Josephson Institute trains local officials on the six pillars of character. There are ethics codes, too, that take a character approach to government ethics.