That got me thinking that that’s what my new Accountable Strategies blogsite is about–the restoration of honesty, integrity, and ethics in the governmental, business, and nonprofit sectors. We do live in an age in which public confidence in our institutions and leaders appears to have reached an all-time low and yet still seems capable of continuing to drop.
We’ve all been taught in school that the American system of government, in particular, is fully accountable to us and that we should therefore have confidence in the fairness and ingegrity of the system. Accountability, after all, implies the answerability of institutions and leaders to the public for all of their public actions. And yet, polls show that most people don’t feel as though those institutions or leaders really are accountable to them.
What is it that has gone wrong with our system, with the evolution of the social contract among government, the citizens, and business, as Allen White describes it, and with the checks and balances that the founding fathers inserted so carefully in the Constitution?
It seems to me that any attempt to deal with those issues has to take into account all three of those basic sectors of society–government, business, and nonprofit–and the relationship of each to the citizenry. I’ve noticed a growing number of blogs and websites devoted to accountability issues in individual sectors–the corporate sector in particular. But not many blogsites appear to tie all of these issues together into an integrated whole. That’s why I started this blog, because I suspect the problems among all three sectors are related. Individual entries may concentrate on one or more sectors at a time, but I hope to continue to write about articles, events, and issues involving all three.
Your comments and contributed essays would be appreciated. You can contribute entries via the “about” button on the site, and all acceptable contributions will be published with whatever username or byline you’d like to use. I’ll periodically post synopses of the best comments and contributions (provided I get a few).
I’m not looking for essays that wade directly into politics, but more general discussions about how to restore honesty and integrity to any or all of these three sectors of society.
