Public sector ethics in Sweden: a 4P-model of internal and external determinants in codes of ethics Go È ran Svensson and Greg Wood Go È ran Svensson is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Engineering, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden. Tel: +46 35 16 71 00, E-mail: goran.svensson@set.hh.se Greg Wood is at the Bowater School of Management and Marketing, Deakin University, Warrnambool, Australia. Tel: 61) 03 55 633 538, Fax: 61) 03 55 633 320, E-mail: gwood@deakin.edu.au Abstract This article summarizes and aggregates the results of a study conducted of the largest 100 public sector organizations derived from three categories in Sweden. These categories of organizations comprise 40 entities of government, 40 municipalities, and 20 county councils. The objective was to describe the determinants of codes of ethics in Swedish public sector organizations. This research reports on the responses of 27 organizations that possessed a code of ethics. The principal contribution is a 4P-model of seven internal and external deter- minants in public sector codes of ethics. The identi®ed determinants relate to four principal sectors of a society, namely: public community sector, private corporate sector, private citizen sector, and political/policy conduct sector. Keywords Ethics, Public sector organizations, Sweden Introduction and research objective When a company makes its code of ethics available to the marketplace, it does more than just present a document. Encased in this document, it presents its business ethos. It lays bare to all stakeholders the philosophies and values that it contends underpin the organization. Upon a more in-depth examination of codes of ethics, one can often glean the underlying motives for the establishment of the code. A systematic examination of these documents across a number of companies or organizations operating in a de®ned private or public sector can shed light upon items of commonality and frequency of performance and expectation in relation to business ethics across whole sectors of business. An extensive body of research literature exists on codes of ethics, but most of this work is centered upon North America and the USA in particular. This research is also private sector- centric e.g. Cressey and Moore, 1983; Mathews, 1987; Benson, 1989; Dean, 1992; Lefebvre and Singh, 1992; Wood, 2000). There appears not to be any substantial body of literature that is focused upon an examination of the contents of codes of ethics and the related organizational ethics documents in public sector organizations. This paper looks to attempt, in some small way, to redress these imbalances by examining the content of the codes of ethics in public sector organizations in Sweden. Sweden is a rather unique society in that the public sector is large and still dominates in many areas of the society. The welfare system is to a large extent built upon the public sector. Recently, however there have been a number of instances of deregulation in the public sector, such as within the telecommunications, railway transportation and electricity industries. PAGE 54 | CORPORATE GOVERNANCE | VOL. 4 NO. 3 2004, pp. 54-64, ã Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1472-0701 DOI 10.1108/14720700410547503