Moral Values and Responsible Administration: Live Organs Transplant Systems in the United States and Germany

This article explores the unexpected ways in which recently introduced accountability mechanisms shape hospital administrators’ and physicians’ actions in Germany and in the United States. Though the reforms were designed to provide governments with more control over hospitals by increasing doctors’ and managers’ direct answerability to clients, this research finds that they fail to achieve these objectives by overlooking and clashing with existing behavioral settings within the medical sector. This analysis employs a newly synthesized theoretical framework at the nexus of ethics and accountability, as well as a comparative empirical exploration of the organ transplant systems in Germany and the U.S.