The focus of this paper is to study how governments develop and use ethics management to uphold integrity and countervail ethics violations in the public sector, and how these strategies are adapted to a good governance setting, i.e. a setting with prosperous democratic governance and effective public administration. Even these settings have to deal with the continuing occurrence of ethics violations and there is also a perception among citizens that corrupt influence and other forms of ethics violations play an important (and sometimes increasing) role in public governance. We explore the role of ethics management and how it is promoted in practice in public sector organisations in Sweden, an example of a country characterised by the above. The purpose is to study two organisations with important roles for disseminating, promoting and coordinating ethics management in Swedish public administration, and what type of ethics practices/ instruments they promote. In state public administration, we study the Swedish Agency for Public Management (SAPM), which has a specific assignment from government to contribute to and coordinate state authorities’ work towards a sound administrative culture. In local government administration, we study the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR), a member organisation for all local and regional authorities with a similar role as SAPM as it comes to providing information, advise and education. These two cases enable the study of ethics management both in relation to state agencies and local government, which in Sweden have been more associated with ethics violations and scandal and is also more at arms-length from the central government concerning these issues. We ask what type of ethics management strategies they promote for state agencies and local government respectively. When doing so we look at how their strategies align on the compliance – values spectrum, to what extent strategies promoted include ethics practices that involve sub-management level employees, and to what extent and how the impact on ethics management of stakeholders outside organisations is considered.
Ej belagd 20220608