The Kingdom of Individuals I: Three Duties and the Organizational Contract

In The Kingdom of Individuals (Cornell University Press, 1993), F. G. Bailey's principal concern is what he calls svejks (pronounced "shvikes"), that is, individuals in organizations who put their personal, but not usually financial interests ahead of the organization, and yet act as if they are loyal to the organization, using its proclaimed values to defend their actions. This is not the sort of conflict of interest that is ordinarily dealt with in government ethics. But what the author says about the conflicts of interest in organizations, including governments, is valuable, and often fascinating.

So in the next few blog posts, I will riff on ideas raised in this book.

Svejkism, as Bailey presented it, involves a conflict of moralities, an “argument about where duty lies." But government organizations differ in an important way from other organizations. They add a third level of duty to duties to oneself (and one's family) and to one's organization.

Duty to the organization's best interests, not to mention to one's supervisor's, is not necessarily the same as duty to the public interest. In a poor ethical environment, a government employee is caught between her own interests, her superior's interests, her organization's interests (usually the leaders' interests), and the public interest. This puts an enormous pressure on such an employee. In fact, this pressure is one of the worst consequences of a poor ethical environment, and one that is too often ignored (see my recent blog post on intimidation).

Bailey wrote that, in formal organizations, “the pattern of ethics that is imposed, emphasizing duty, puts the organization in a privileged position.  The employees are no longer employees; they've become an integral part of the organization, morally involved, and what is good for it is by definition good for them.”

In other words, whereas government ethics takes the position that what is ethical for government employees is to act in the public interest, the organization they work in, when it is led by individuals who do not emphasize the obligation to act first and foremost in the public interest, presents to its employees a different ethics, where it is the organization rather than the public interest to which the employees owe their principal obligation.

Bailey took this a step further. “Duty becomes a disguised form of self-interest,” he wrote, because it is effectively an obligation not to violate a tacit contract between the organization and its leaders on the one hand, and the official or employee on the other hand. Fulfilling obligations under this tacit contract brings the official or employee income, advancement, financial security in retirement, fellowship, and power.

One advantage that local government leaders have in the contest for employees' loyalty is that they have been elected by the people or, in the case of city and county managers, selected by the principal elected officials. Bailey wrote, "The city manifests itself to us powerfully as city hall — the bureaucracies themselves appear to be a kind of public good, something to which selfish and narrow interests must be subordinated in the interest of us all.  The organization can then claim to be no more than altruism translated into action."

In other words, if you are an employee considering being disloyal to the local government, for example by whistleblowing, you think twice about it, not only to protect your personal interests in the tacit contract you have, but also because your loyalty to the people of your community is loyalty to those they elected. It is the elected officials' job to interpret what the public interest is, not other officials and employees. But what do you do when the public interest isn't even being considered?

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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