Today, the legitimacy of politicians and public confidence in public decision-making and administration are increasingly dependent on the way in which their ethics are appraised (Kolthoff et al., 2013). The ‘moral pluralism and cultural diversity’ of contemporary society (Boisvert, 2008) make public ethics a new theoretical framework to be explored from the point of view of the compromises it makes between various, often conflicting, values. Yet, in practice, this compromise seems to limit the values of public ethics to principles of good governance formalised around codes of conduct or managerial procedures (Rochet, 2011). Our research question sets out to question the variety of these values; the research objective being to develop a categorisation of the values of public ethics by supplementing the conceptual framework of New Public Value (Moore, 1995; Nabatchi, 2011), in particular, by characterising the values of the ethics of interaction not yet illustrated in the literature.

Points for practitioners

In practical terms, the aim of this article is to identify and characterise more precisely the variety of ethical values mobilised by public managers. To do so, we conducted a survey in two stages among public managers in Guangxi province in China, a country where the expression of personal or cultural ethics in the workplace is described in the literature as relatively natural. Our first results suggest a fairly clear distinction between the ethical values governing the performance of public action, which are relatively well formalised, and the ethical values governing public interaction, which are more informal and closer to cultural and social rituals.