ABSTRACT
During an earlier period the academic students of government were often skeptical of the usefulness of any deliberate effort to set out standards of administrative ethics. This paper addresses the differences between a situation in which any standards that develop arise out of the unguided adjustment of individuals to each other, and to the environment in which the agency works. If there are differences, then an ethical code may function as a control device and not simply as a pious declaration. The departure of decisions from the formal standards set out in agency regulations is not easily controlled through supplementary means of exercising authority. There will be a division of labor, a system of authority, standard procedures, and the orderly presentation of grounds of decision, both factual and nonfactual—and implicit in the nonfactual, which we may call agency policy, the values to be maximized in the decisions taken.
