An analysis of codes of ethics of nonprofit, tax-exempt membership associations: Does principal constituency make a difference

Traditional public administration has considered the word "public" to mean governmental, and this term is now understood to include those organizations and institutions that contract with the government to do the work of government, and that are essentially public-serving. This dissertation focuses on the nonprofit sector in general, and nonprofit trade and professional associations in particular. It provides extensive material about the definition, scope, history, and theory of the nonprofit sector, as well as its role in the field of public administration.; Ethical lapses in government, nonprofit, and business organizations have increased public attention and that of the field of public administration on ethics issues. The publication of ethical codes is one strategy organizations can use to affect the behavior of organization members. Ethics codes serve many different functions, including protecting economic interests, and are often seen as a mark of a profession. Most past studies of the content of ethics codes have focused on analyzing a limited number of codes, with the content broken down into very few categories.; This dissertation provides an empirical study analyzing the content of the ethics codes of 150 national and international, tax-exempt, professional and trade associations based in Washington, DC; Virginia; or Maryland. Each association was categorized as having a constituency that is primarily consisting of government, nonprofit, or for-profit memberships, based on Standardized Industrial Codes and descriptive information provided in two major databases of associations. The content of the codes was analyzed and Chi-Square analyses were performed to determine if there were statistically significant differences among these three types of associations with respect to 34 generic ethics code provisions.; The findings are that the content of codes of ethics of these three types of associations do indeed differ with respect to many of the types of generic code provisions.; Provisions addressing issues such as confidentiality, fairness, treating like cases alike, conflicts of interest, and objectivity are important to government association ethics codes. Protecting the interests of clients, confidentiality, anti-discrimination, respect for client dignity, respect for pluralism, and rebates and relationships to other professionals relating to referrals are important to nonprofit association codes. Integrity and upgrading professional knowledge are important to for-profit association codes.; The study uncovered significant differences among the three types of organizations with respect to the appearance or absence of sixteen of these 34 generic code provisions, including protection of the client's interest, fairness, anti-discrimination, giving appropriate credit to others, sexual misconduct, equality, rebates and referrals, personal life, courtesy, misrepresenting credentials, objectivity, exposing ethics violations of others, conflicts of interest, improper gifts, respect for client dignity, and respect for pluralism.