Sammendrag:

In this article we define and analyze ethics in public organizations taking a broad approach, based on ethical theory and organization theory. The empirical focus is on ethical guidelines in the central civil service in Norway, using data from a large survey of ministries and central agencies in Norway conducted in 2006. We show that the use of ethical guidelines is rather widespread, is a mixture of different basic ethical positions, primarily belonging to post-NPM reform tools, and that there are significant variation among the civil servants regarding their assessment of the importance of ethical guidelines, mainly affected by structural features (position, tasks) and cultural features (efficiency and renewal orientation).