Introduction

Published in 1993, Ethics and Administration included works adapted from papers presented at the Conference for the Study of Government Ethics in Park City, Utah, during the summer of 1991. The timing of the Park City conference coincided with an emergent interest in administrative ethics research that has since greatly expanded. Reliable evidence indicates that the number of published articles more than doubled between 1989 and 1991, and that number increased threefold before the beginning of the new century (Cooper 2001, p. 16). Many of the introductory questions that H. George Frederickson posed as editor of that volume focused on the status of ethics research as a systematic body of empirical knowledge. In chapter 2 of Ethics in Public Management (discussed in depth below), Donald C. Menzel revisits many of the same issues in reviewing research on ethics and integrity in governance within the U.S. experience. Yet these persisting research issues derive from an even more fundamental concern raised by Frederickson in 1993: “Does the ethics movement have staying power” or would attentiveness toward ethics and morality in government in the mid-1990s fade away?