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Sees to argues that administrative evil is inherent in the administrative hierarchies currently governing work organizations, and to explore the means by which instrumentally rational processes morph into administrative evil.

A critical theory methodology for identifying and describing administrative evil is outlined.

Administrative evil refers to the use of technology, professionals, and hierarchical organizational structures in ways that divorce collective actions from their moral context. The role of technical accounting expertise, manifested as various devices, facilitates “ordinary” human beings' “rational” participation in “administrative evil” through a series of technically competent and instrumentally rational decisions, facilitated by information technology.

Divorcing actions from their moral context removes a sense of personal responsibility and accountability on the part of the organizational participants and renders public interest considerations captive to prevailing ideology and social structures.

By better understanding the facilitating processes of administrative evil, possibly one can begin to develop alternative criteria that empower individuals to circumvent the negative consequences of instrumental rationality and enable them to act more responsibly in the public interest.

Critical theory is used in better understanding administrative evil and in developing strategies for change.

In contemporary, complex organizations, “open secrets” may be just as common as intentionally concealed secrets, and are often associated with ethical failures and administrative evil. This chapter explores the ethical implications of open secrets in contemporary organizations and the dynamics by which they can become masked. Both the space shuttle Challenger disaster and Enron's corporate collapse, as well as other similar ethical debacles, show how organizational actors at all levels can promote the public interest and recognize ethical issues, only if they require of themselves a broader scope of ethical standards and vigilance that addresses not just individual behavior but also, and even primarily, the organizational and cultural context of values and ethics. The evolution of a moral vacuum within a culture of technical rationality and the resulting ethically deficient organizational dynamics produced the inability to recognize the open secrets that masked the pathway to disaster.

The philosophical roots of existentialism can be found in the writings of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Sartre used existentialism to frame the social and political issues of the day after World War II and Camus helped popularize the philosophyʼns focus on individualism and personal freedom. Existentialism provided justification for challenging public officials and regimes and was embraced again by public administrators and citizens frustrated by the failures of foreign and domestic policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Today existentialism and transcendentalist phenomenology remain strong alternatives to empiricism as a methodology in the study of human behavior. They provide a philosophical basis for determining and applying ethical standards, as well as a basis for encouraging public administrators to address major societal problems rather than being overly focused on management technique and administrative process.

Metaphors are used a great deal in theory but are not always fully explained. This paper expands on the carnival metaphor used by Boje (2001) by clarifying the type of carnival the metaphor describes, in this case the sideshow carnival. The sideshow carnival metaphor helps to explain how emotional labor can be used to avoid situations of administrative evil that have been partially caused by the separation of mind/body of public servants operating in public space. The authors of this article illustrate the application of the sideshow carnival metaphor by showing how emergency professionals in the area of natural disaster management have become more professionalized over the last several decades. This professionalization has led to a focus on the rational mind over the emotional body. By engaging in emotional labor, emergency professionals are engaging in carnivalesque behavior that helps to repair the mind/body connection. If the connection is not repaired, the rational mind will take over and the public space wherein the emergency professional exists can co-opt the professional leading them to be unable to see the potential evil acts they might commit.

Although marketer-generated brand anthropomorphism impacts on positive company returns is studied broadly, consumer-generated brand anthropomorphisms that focus on demonizing and hitlerizing brands is not extensively studied. This study aims to examine these consumer interpretations of the evil, its symbols and personifications of brands as evil, with a new concept: “reverse brand anthropomorphism.”

This paper provides a literature review of brand anthropomorphism and the application of the concept of evil. This paper also uses a qualitative analysis with consumer interviews to explore the proposed reverse brand anthropomorphism concept.

This study’s findings reveal that consumers see corporations as consciously evil, loosely as an embodiment of Adolf Hitler. Consumer interviews points out that corporate brand power aimed at controlling consumer value systems is associated with “evil,” an evil that secretly aims at possessing consumers and controlling their consumption practices. The findings of this study indicate that consumers also develop their own alternative moral market value systems, ones parallel to religious morality. Although “evil” imagery is often found distractive and disrespectful by consumers, the younger generation accept it as a new and alternative form of market speech.

This is the first study to introduces and conceptualize a “reverse brand anthropomorphism” concept with examples of consumer brand hitlerization semiotics. Further, this study is also the first study to discuss evil in a consumption context.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the significant role of accounting in the expropriation of Jewish real estate after the enforcement of race laws under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy.

Hannah Arendt’s understanding of government bureaucracy in the twentieth century totalitarian regimes informs the research which draws upon a wide range of primary sources.

Implementation of the program of expropriation was the responsibility of a government body, EGELI, which was created specifically for this purpose. The language of accounting provided the means to disguise the nature and brutality of the process and allow bureaucrats to be removed from the consequences of their actions. Accounting reports from EGELI to the Ministry of Finance confirmed each year that those who worked in EGELI were devoted to its mission as an agency of the Fascist State.

The findings of this study recognize the need for further research on the role played by servicemen, bureaucrats and accounting as a technology of government in the deportation of Italian Jews to Germany. The study also provides impetus to examine how other countries managed the properties confiscated or expropriated from the Jews in the earlier stages of the Final Solution.

The study is the first to identify the significant role played by accounting and accountants in the persecution of Italian Jews under the Fascism.

A central question of public administration is how political principals secure the cooperation of administrators within organisational frames and contexts; increasingly, rational influences are being considered alongside bounded rationality and non-rational influences. This paper aims to explore the intent of New Zealand’s Public Service Act 2020 in managing administrative behaviour.

The methodology is primarily ethnographic, combining emic and etic perspectives. A mixed-methods approach comprises participant observer field notes and meeting documentation, substantiated by official documents; documents were analysed thematically and triangulated with other data sources.

The Public Service Act introduces new bounds on administrative behaviour. The stated rationale for these changes reveals an attempt to set limits on the principal–agent relationship between politicians and administrators and causes predictable deviations from rational behaviour by cultivating public service motivation and a unified public service identity.

As the legislation in question was only passed in 2020, it is too early to definitively assess the ultimate impact of legislation on administrative behaviour. This case study demonstrates that behavioural approaches to public administration are being applied intentionally by governments. The choice architecture created in the case study blends rational, bounded, and non-rational influences. Together, this produces a bricolage of semi-relevant theories from other disciplines, especially psychology, to explain administrative behaviour. Further refinement is needed to develop a cohesive and comprehensive theory of administrative behaviour that can account for contemporary practice.

Administrators act as agents of political principals, within ethical and rules-based limitations and influenced by public service motivation and social identity. Shifting from implicit to explicit choice architecture does not negate possible tensions between bounds and can signal them more explicitly. Shared symbols are sometimes intended to influence identity and therefore adherence to behavioural norms.

This paper explores the manipulation of choice architecture as a viable strategy for altering behaviour for the better and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first known instance of choice architecture being “legislated in” rather than merely “showing through”. This study illustrates the blending of rational, boundedly rational and non-rational factors into a choice architecture for public administrators that help mediate the biases and challenges of principal–agent relationships (which form a cascade in New Zealand’s public administration system).

The purpose of this paper is to find underlying causes of leadership failure in NPM-based reforms in the public service, and propose leadership principles to guard against such failure as leaders meet the demands of a changing, complex public service environment.

An analysis of the managerial philosophy of Dr Berwick and its effects on CMS overall performance and employee morale.

NPM-based reforms create an environment in which administrative wrongdoing can occur. The principles of leadership found in NPLT, which advocates values-based, relationship-based distributed leadership provide a template for effective leadership that can reverse and possibly prevent leadership failure due to NPM-based reforms.

The authors used a single case to demonstrate NPLT leadership principles can reverse leadership failure in a Federal Agency. No quantitative analysis is attempted in this paper. The authors choice of papers to use in the literature review was subjective.

This paper identifies NPM-based reforms as a partial explanation for leadership failure in the public service, and also identifies the leadership principles needed to address and prevent such failures. It provides support for the use of NPLT as a template for effective public service leadership.

This qualitative interview study compares public value prioritizations of ministers, members of parliament and senior public managers in the Netherlands. This article aims to answer the following central research question: how do Dutch political elites and administrative elites differ in their interpretation and prioritization of public values?

Based on coding and categorization of 65 interviews this article shows how government elites in advanced western democracies interpret and assess four crucial public values: responsiveness, expertise, lawfulness and transparency.

Political elites and administrative elites in the Netherlands are more similar than different in their prioritization and perceptions of public values. Differences are strongly related to role conceptions and institutional responsibilities, which are more traditional than most recent literature on politico-administrative dynamics would suggest.

Our qualitative findings are hard to generalize to larger populations of politicians and public managers in the Netherlands, let alone beyond the Netherlands. However, the testable research hypotheses we derive from our explorative study merit future testing among larger populations of respondents in different countries through survey research.

Experienced values differences between both groups are smaller than their mutual perceptions would suggest.

Most research on public values is quantitative in nature and focuses exclusively on public managers. By adding the politician to the equation we improve our understanding of how public values are enacted in real life and set the tone for a more inclusive research agenda on public values.