While critics of the federal civil service under the Trump Administration were quick to decry it a “deep state” thwarting the President’s agenda, most research instead describes the career corps as loyal to mission, risk averse, and serially partisan or nonpartisan. How did civil servants make sense of and respond to the Trump administration? I find that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, most civil servants largely sought to comply at work, circumscribed by what they defined as appropriately within the scope of their mandates. Acts of resistance and moral courage were possible, but seemed to occur under particular local work conditions and largely in forms that cohered with institutional and professional imperatives. My research suggests the need to complicate the conceptual difference between “resistance” and “complicity” under repressive political leadership by underscoring the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in their immediate work environments, while negotiating multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms and obligations, organizational cultures and their own circumscribed efficacy in complex organizations.

For more than 16 years after leaving office, a former president of a French local authority regularly lunched free of charge and in full view of everyone at his former canteen, where he was served by the council's staff, who also prepared his meals for the evening and weekends, storing them in a dedicated fridge. Although the first attempts to reveal these facts go back to 2016, it was only in April 2023 that the former president as well as the current one who had allowed these practices were tried and convicted respectively for misappropriation and concealment of misappropriation of public property.

How can we explain the impossibility, over such a long period of time, of having the undue nature of these practices recognized? How the progressive consciousness among certain stakeholders that unacceptable limits had been crossed finally led to a judicial conviction and, through the judgment, to an official recognition of the reprehensible nature of the said transgressions?

In the field of diplomacy and international relations, the metaphor of red lines is used with the aim to prevent an event or occurrence that is deemed unacceptable. Through the empirical analysis of the above-mentioned case study, and with regards to the question “How to make ethics and integrity work?”, this paper proposal aims to highlight the heuristic interest of this concept to uncover different forms of norms transgression in public organizations and their consequences, and to show how they relate to each other.

With regards to social norms, feelings of indignation and outrage generally arises from the discrepancy between the existence of fraud and abuse - sometimes even repeated - and the absence or weakness of sanctions. It is the paradoxical character of red lines, that when the existence of a contradiction between normative ideals and existing practices is publicly revealed, it is also the moment when the meaning and usefulness of the violated principles, norms or values becomes obvious.

For public organisations, the gap between actual practices of power and the standards that are supposed to guide them does not only concern forms of illegalism. More broadly, they can occur equally in black zones (zones of secrecy), grey zones (zones of opacity) and white zones (zones of legal vacuums). All these are unprecedented and equivocal situations, or interstitial spaces characterized by uncertainty, where the boundary between licit and illicit orders of practice, considered appropriate or not, is sometimes uncertain and mobile. For the actors involved, the differentiation between behaviours that fall into one or the other category evolves over time, in line with legal categorizations, prevailing conceptions of public probity, and social and political mobilizations in favour of the moralization of political life. As a matter of fact, we will argue that in the field of public ethics and integrity, red lines do not only exist and matter in form of official interdictions, but equally become apparent through the mobilisation of impacted actors who denounce such transgressions and claim for sanctions.

Depending on their normative point of reference (juridical, ethical, deontological, moral), we will describe which kind of red lines in the said case have been crossed and which factors (clientelism and a well-functioning "organizational silence") explain why raising voice was so difficult for the moral entrepreneurs who have fought for recognition of the violation of different red lines and the necessity to respect the rules, principles and values to which they refer.

What kind of accountability emerges when state actors offer their 'good offices' to mediate in disputes over conduct elsewhere? This paper investigates National Contact Points (NCPs): mediative bodies that were designed to promote and resolve issues raised around the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. OECD member states set up NCPs as forums whereby complainants -- often enterprising NGOs -- raise 'Specific Instances' regarding corporate actors' conduct in other states. The NCP receives the complaint, asks for a response and offers to facilitate both parties reaching agreement on a resolution.

We investigate the UK and other National Contact Points, analysing all Specific Instances filed NCP since 2001 classified by date, complainant, firm and campaign and consider impacts, failings and outcomes. In doing so we argue that NCPs reflect and contribute to transfiguring of human rights. The NCP's work often reconfigures human rights challenges to past corporate conduct into accounts of promised procedural regularity in future. Much of the potential for human rights to challenge and constrain is punctured, replaced by a focus on reporting; process; communication and transparency.

In this sense the NCPs act as part of a governance and accountability framing of problems that actively works against responsibility and blame for past conduct. Being accountable often rests on the promise to _become_ accountable, rather than focusing on acknowledging, redressing and remedying harms. The work of ethics in this context promotes process as an alternative to blame.

This article investigates rankings of 25 values by relative importance according to 1261 Chinese junior civil servants and collecting data through questionnaires, as well as their perceptions on the meaning and prioritization by conducting interviews. The quantitative data analysis results show six values ranked significantly different in ideal and practical situations. The qualitative data interprets these disparities. Our findings demonstrate that differences can be attributed to the gaps between values expected from organization or citizens and civil servants themselves, and desired values change by situations. Therefore, this study maps values from two-fold dimensions: values in words versus values in use, and values preferred by civil servants versus preferred by organization or citizens. Accordingly, four types of values are categorized: the espoused values claimed or promoted as ethos, the demanded values from situational or external factors, ideal values believed should be important, and the perceived important in practice for being a good civil servant. We theorize on our results and we provide suggestions for future research on public servant ethics and public values.