Ethics of care as a public ethos? : A phenomenological conversational study of how public ethos is expressed and articulated among public employees.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how public ethos is expressed and articulated by public employees. Lennart Lundqvist’s theory of Public ethos and Max Weber’s theory of Bureaucracy was chosen as a theoretical starting point, based on the purpose of this study. The analysis is based on 8 qualitative interviews with public employees reasoning about public values. The overall data that was collected focused on what type of public values become expressed and articulated by public employees. The result shows that parts of a public ethos are expressed through a stance on what is right and wrong in everyday stories about work situations, and that it is not part of everyday life for public employees to talk in their workplace about the values that govern their practical work. Furthermore, the result points at a third public value; ethics of care, and the authors suggest that it might be equally included alongside the democratic and economic values in a contemporary public ethos