Prior scholarship on stewardship as a principle of administration largely portrays stewardship as too idealistic and dependent upon situational factors to be institutionalized in large-scale organizations. Through a case study of the Edmonton Public Schools, this study explores the extent to which stewardship can be institutionalized as a central organizing principle, thereby ensuring performance and checking corruption in ways that are consistent with the primacy of intrinsic motivation. The study deepens our understanding of the challenges that managers face in reconciling stewardship with a bureaucratic context, documents practices that have been used to deal with these challenges, and more broadly discusses how it might be possible for islands of stewardship to emerge in a world governed by assumptions of human opportunism. To this end the paper develops a model of the choice that organization members face in deciding to elect a principal-agent or a stewardship posture within large-scale organizations. This model draws on assumptions of human ambivalence in choosing between self-serving and altruistic modes of conduct.
Objectives. To compare and explain differences in the ethical attitudes of criminal justice (CJ) and business students, and explore their ethical malleability. Methods. Students rated the ethical acceptability of 25 scenarios using a self-administered survey. A cross-sectional comparison of the ethical responses of sophomores and seniors measured their ethical malleability. Results. Business students were less willing to condemn unethical conduct than were criminal justice students, but were more receptive to corporate charity. Business students were also moderately receptive to the inculcation of ethical principles. Conclusions. Self-selection and socialization are important factors explaining, respectively, ethical differences between CJ and business students and the latter's ethical malleability. However, the assumption underlying many studies that business attracts morally compromised individuals because it is immoral cannot easily accommodate conflicting findings such as that businesspeople can be charitable and ethically malleable. A more nuanced understanding of how self-selection works in business is proposed.Most studies comparing the ethical attitudes of people in different fields offer little, if any, theory to explain these differences. To the extent that studies discuss theory, there is little agreement on whether ethical differences can be explained by socialization, the mechanism whereby people in a certain field learn its values and mores by being exposed to them, or self-selection, the mechanism whereby people with certain values and predispositions gravitate toward one field or another.Further, as will be discussed, studies that advance self-selection as the mechanism to explain differences between the values of business and nonbusiness students assume a model of businesspeople as so Machiavellian as to virtually preclude the possibility of their being receptive to inculcation of ethical values through social channels. Yet, as will be discussed, there is empirical research that shows that the moral inculcation of business students is possible.
Reformers have traditionally assumed that agencies can combat corruption through controls such as tighter oversight, increased regulation, internal audits, reorganizations, and performance accountability mechanisms. But this case study of the New York City school custodial system shows how a corrupt agency can derail these devices. New York City's $500,000,000 custodial system, responsible for maintaining its 1,200 schools, has been unleashing scandals since the 1920s despite decades of regulations, multiple reorganizations, and layers of oversight. Its history shows that a deviant culture—a management “captured” by special interests—and an infrastructure enmeshed in abusive policies will resist controls, no matter how well‐crafted. True reform requires tackling institutionalized corruption through strategies like overhauling management, eradicating special interests, and aggressively punishing misconduct.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.