Discussing “common sense”: how ethics management shapes individual views towards ethics

This chapter seeks to determine the mechanisms by which the organizational ethics system of the European Commission infl uences its employees’ views towards ethics. In order to do this, it is fi rst necessary to determine whether the infl uence actually exists – in other words, whether Commission’s ethics management framework feeds employees’ learning about the ethics of their organizational roles. This so-called socialization outcome was defi ned, in Chapter 1 , by two aspects – fi rst, that offi cials think about ethics in similar ways, and, secondly, that there is an overlap between offi cial messages regarding ethics and the comments and positions expressed by employees on the subject.