First Published in 1998

The single most important purpose of this book is to create a field of public administration values, a field that currently does not exist in a recognizable form. Surely values are discussed significantly and usefully by the fields of ethics, management, decision making, and organization behavior and theory, to mention only a few. But these discussions are inevitably narrower in scope than is necessary for a true field of values. Such a field is needed to help bridge the seeming chasm about discussions of values among the established fields.

A second purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive treatment of values.

A third purpose of the text is to provide a balanced treatment, giving all the major schools of thought roughly the same coverage so that their values can be compared as dispassionately as possible.

A fourth purpose of the book is to make the subject accessible to and interesting for practitioners and students.