Abstract
The media as well as academia abounds with debates concerning the present-day ‘crisis of institutions’ and the prospects of improving the quality and reputation of institutions. The growing erosion of trust in public sector institutions has been perceived by many social scientists as an impulse for rethinking the role, meaning, design and management of public institutions in our societies and polities. This chapter aims to contribute to this rethinking from the perspective of a moral and political theory of care. It first traces the debates about social and political institutions in the care ethics literature and argues that a theory of institutions is an inherent part of any full-blown moral and political theory of care. The chapter then provides a bird-eye view of the existing proposals for a care-oriented public administration, with a focus on a recent discussion about the possibility of merging the values of care and bureaucracy in state and public sector institutions. Finally, the chapter suggests an empirically grounded care-oriented approach to governmental institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
Burnier’s call for further work on the everyday care discourse in public administration resonates in Stensöta’s (2010) empirical research on the presence of a care discourse and care values in the Swedish public sector—yet Stensöta never refers to Burnier’s work. Stensöta conducted an extensive empirical study within the administration of sick leave benefits in the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and found out that “a public ethics of care … is a prominent part of the empirical reality of employee public ethics within social insurance administration” (Stensöta 2010, 300).
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Bourgault’s defense of bureaucratic values in the context of large institutions resonates with several attempts to rethink the importance of the values of bureaucracy in the aftermath of New Public Management reforms (cf. du Gay 2005).
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Acknowledgments
My warmest thanks for thoughtful comments on the manuscript of this chapter go to Sophie Bourgault and Lizzie Ward. I am indebted for great discussions over the previous versions of this chapter to Fiona Robinson, Mirko Alagna, Brunella Casalini, Elena Pulcini, Alice Koubová, Martin Nitsche and my wonderful audiences at the University of Florence (November 2018), the University of Ottawa (April 2019) and the 2018 Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) Biennial Conference at the Portland State University (September 2018). This chapter is an outcome of the research project ‘Measures for Developing an Ethical Culture in the Czech State Administration’ (No. TL01000430, Technology Agency of the Czech Republic) realized at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.
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Urban, P. (2020). Organizing the Caring Society: Toward a Care Ethical Perspective on Institutions. In: Urban, P., Ward, L. (eds) Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41437-5_14
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