Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-29T10:25:55.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward a Theory of the Ethics of Bureaucratic Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Allen Buchanan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay articulates a crucial and neglected element of a general theory of the ethics of bureaucratic organizations, both private and public. The key to the approach developed here is the thesis that the distinctive ethical principles applicable to bureaucratic organizations are responses to the distinctive agency-risks that arise from the nature of bureaucratic organizations as complex webs of principal/agent relationships. It is argued that the most important and distinctive ethical principles for bureaucratic organizations express commitments on the part of bureaucrats that function to reduce the agency risks that are inherent in such organizations. This approach to the ethics of bureaucratic organizations is shown to be more illuminating than those that concentrate exclusively or primarily on determining the conditions for corporate responsibility or on the idea that the ethical obligations distinctive of bureaucracies are role-derived.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 419 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Interim Report. 1995. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office).Google Scholar
Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics, Terence, Irwin, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett).Google Scholar
Bowie, Norman (ed.). 1992. Agency Theory, Rational-Choice Theory, and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Bendix, Reinhard. 1968. “Bureaucracy,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Volume II), David, Sills, ed. (New York: MacMillan, pp. 206–19.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Allen (forthcoming). “The Ethics of Managed Care: Medical Ethics or Business Ethics?”, The Milbank Quarterly.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Allen. 1978. “Medical Paternalism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 370–87.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Allen (forthcoming). “Creating Moral Obligations: The Role of Collective Action in Business Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Allen. 1988. “Principal/Agent Theory and Health Care Decision-Making,” Bioethics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 317–33.Google Scholar
Cooper, D.E. Cooper. 1968. “Collective Responsibility.” Philosophy, No. 43, pp. 258–68.Google Scholar
Curtler, Hugh (ed.). 1986. Shame, Responsibility, and the Corporation (New York: Haven Publications).Google Scholar
Copp, David. 1984. “What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism, and Legal Theory,” Dialogue, Vol. 23, pp. 249–69.Google Scholar
Donaldson, Thomas. 1982. Corporations and Morality (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).Google Scholar
Frank, Robert. 1988. Passions Within Reason (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).Google Scholar
French, Peter. 1984. Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
French, Peter. 1995. “Ethics and Agency Theory (Review Article), Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 621–27.Google Scholar
Hampshire, Stewart (ed.). 1978. Public and Private Morality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Jensen, Michael C. and Meckling, William H. 1976. “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 3, p. 308–22.Google Scholar
Koehn, Daryl. 1995. “A Role For Virtue Ethics in the Analysis of Business,” Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 533–39.Google Scholar
Mansbridge, Jane (ed.). 1990. Beyond Self-interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
May, Larry. 1992. Sharing Responsibility. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Solomon, Robert C. 1993. Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Thompson, Dennis. 1988. Political Ethics and Public Office. Cambridge: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1977. Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books).Google Scholar
Wasserstrom, Richard (ed.). 1970. War and Morality (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.).Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1946. “Bureaucracy,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Gerth, H.H. and Wright Mills, C. (tran. and ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Werhane, Patricia. 1985. Persons, Rights, and Corporations (Engle Wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).Google Scholar