Communication Ethics and Ethical Culture: A Study of the Ethics Initiative in Denver City Government

Abstract

This article examines the work of the ethics initiative in the City of Denver to see how talk about ethics contributes to an ethical culture. By paying particular attention to the communication in the city's Code of Ethics, ethics training discussion, employee interviews, and formal documents relaying the Board of Ethics’ views, we show how ethics emerges within communication. We argue that the emergent quality of ethics is dialogically refined in communication. For practitioners and officials interested in advancing organization-wide ethics training, we urge pursuing dialogical means so that people can negotiate among competing interests to shape future policy and action reflective of their ethical concerns.

Keywords:

• Ethics
• Dialogue

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventh Annual National Communication Association's Ethics Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventh Annual National Communication Association's Ethics Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Acknowledgments

We thank Chris Poulos, Karen Zediker, Lisbeth Lipari, Michael Henry, and our colleagues in the NCA Ethics Division for their invaluable feedback and support. We also appreciate the thoughtful comments offered by the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventh Annual National Communication Association's Ethics Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

1. The City of Denver has had a Board of Ethics comprised of volunteer citizens since at least 1965. Prior to 2001, the Board of Ethics had no designated staff person, independent budget, independent office space or telephone number, method of tracking or publicizing its opinions, centralized ethics training program, or printed materials to inform employees, elected officials, and citizens about Denver's Code of Ethics. By giving these resources to the Board of Ethics in 2001, Denver elevated the significance and visibility of ethics in city government.

2. We are grateful to the Carl M. Williams Institute for Ethics and Values at the University of Denver for a grant awarded through the Center for Civic Ethics to fund three years of research, writing, and community action with the Denver Board of Ethics. We further recognize the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for providing faculty grants to launch our investigative efforts.

3. On the advice of the city attorney, the Board of Ethics members have protected the sanctity of executive sessions during which they deliberate candidly with one another. Still, all records, testimony, questions of petitioners, and opinions were available to us. The Board of Ethics and its staff director were also quite open to being interviewed following the executive sessions. All names of city employees used in this document have been changed to ensure confidentiality.

4. Doctoral students at the University Denver, equipped with course work and experience on other research projects, attended meetings, recorded observations including conversation episodes, and typed up full reports for the principal research investigators. The notes were discussed with the co-authors of this article and used as a basis for planning future interview questions and discussions with Board of Ethics members.

5. The field notes on this project include more than 500 typed pages. Most of the interviews and focus group sessions were audiotaped and then transcribed. When tape recording was not possible, we wrote extensive field notes, including quotations from city employees, which were then later typed up for distribution to our research team. In total, we spent in excess of 500 hours observing and participating in discussions with city officials, preparing research reports to benefit the city, collating archives, and providing one-on-one consultation to ethics planning efforts. Data collection methods were approved through the Institutional Review Boards at both the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Denver.

6. We relied on a combination of handwritten field notes and audiotape recordings to assess ethics talk (for more detail, see Note 5). Full disclosure of our research aims was made, and IRB consent forms were secured from interview participants.

7. Some states require local governments to follow state guidelines in designing and implementing ethics standards. Many cities, including Denver, have more strict ethics codes than required by the state. Most recently, the Web site http://www.citygov.org was launched to collate the codes and practices of cities and to share other useful information.

8. The National Business Ethics Survey measures views of organizational ethics from the employee's perspective. In 2003, 1500 participants from 48 states cited two reasons for not reporting infractions. Employees believed no corrective action would be taken and they feared their reports would not be kept confidential.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spoma Jovanovic

Spoma Jovanovic (Ph.D., University of Denver) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and Fellow with the University of Denver Center for Civic Ethics

Roy V. Wood

Roy V. Wood (Ph.D., University of Denver) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver and Director of the University of Denver Center for Civic Ethics