Legal norms, profesional values, and practical ethics in local government: elderly care in Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway

ENThis article reports findings from a comparative study of the influence of values and norms on the delivery of administrative and professional services in the public sector at the local government level in three selected countries in the Baltic Sea Region, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway. The research concerns the criteria that professional welfare and health professionals apply in individual cases whenever they are expected to make high-quality judgments regarding the care of older people. The research question seeks to explore whether there are significant differences with regard to the effect of formal rules and norms on the effort to arrive at good solutions in providing public services in three democracies, one long-established and two recent. The results of this study show that in making their decisions, professionals in all countries emphasize the necessity of considering a broad range of legal and professional norms. For all respondents these considerations – in varying degrees of intensity – rank ahead of economic and administrative concerns.