Menzel, Donald C.

Through the ethical looking glass darkly - Thousand Oaks : SAGE, November 1995

This article seeks to contribute to a growing. body of empirical research on ethics issues in the public sector. More specifically, this article reports findings that describe and analyze the ethical perceptions and outlooks of three sets of actors-citizens who file ethics complaints against public officials, the officeholders who are accused of ethical lapses, and local government managers. The research addresses two questions: (a) How do these actors view their ethical environs? (b) Are their ethical outlooks similar or dissimilar, congruent or incongruent? A third question is also addressed, one that follows from the effort to answer the first two questions: What are the implications for governance if ethical outlooks, especially those held by public officials and public managers, are incongruent?