- 26 Mar, 2021
- 0 Comments
- 1 Min Read
Writer’s Choice
In 2-3 paragraphs for each, please answer the following 2 questions.
1. Obedience Weber and Thompson disagree about whether members of bureaucracies
should resist unethical orders given by their superiors. What do you think? Who has the
better argument here? Why?
For example: let’s imagine a police officer who was overseeing a peaceful, legal
protest was given orders by their sergeant to use force to disperse that protest.
Should that office resist or disobey this unethical order (the right to peacefully
protest is given in the First Amendment)? Or are you nervous about police officers
disobeying orders?
2. Professionals Nass argues that professionals represent independent bureaucracies within
bureaucracies. What are the implications of that for the principal-agent relationship
between residents of an area and those professionals serving them in the public sector?
Lots of public agencies rely on professionals to accomplish goals: they have a
general counsel or have accountants or engineers. Nass argues that those
professionals are best understood as being their own little independent
bureaucracies. But public agencies AREN’T independent – they are agents of the
public and have a kind of responsibility to them. How can we square the
dependency of public agencies with the independence of professionals within
them?