Hester Paanakker

practice of questioning the genuine intentions of superiors omnipresent. The larger the hierarchical gap, the more suspicion proliferates. 4.8 Discussion Our findings indicate that, in theory, different staff levels have a relatively shared ideological notion of the values that matter in street-level craftsmanship: respondents throughout the prison hierarchy identify the same set of very specific and profession-bound core values to be important. It also shows a considerable match between the values that express the policy and the street-level values deemed important for good public service delivery. This substantive convergence on value identification and value understanding seems to result from a specific type of professional socialization: through institutional measures, employees adjust to and are actively integrated by organizations. Institutionalized socialization is discernable in the convergent identification, understanding, and in the actual views also for a large share in the prioritization of humanity, security and reintegration, indicating that prison sector staff are strongly professionally socialized into the prime policy values of penal craftsmanship. In addition to the extensive in-house training penal staff receive, the overwhelming flow of information stemming from the Modernization Program reforms may very well have played a role too. Prison employees at all levels received training, information charts, policy reports, and dealt with plentiful new tools and instruments geared towards further institutionalization of these values in the organization. This confirms theories of organizational value management (Paarlberg & Perry, 2007) and organizational socialization (L. B. Andersen & Pedersen, 2012; Moyson et al., 2018; Teodoro, 2014): these logics remedy professional socialization between different staff levels and optimize value convergence on street-level craftsmanship throughout the institutional hierarchy. Importantly however, the normative impact of the socialization effect should not be blindly attributed to formal institutionalization only. As this study shows, normative isomorphism on value identification and interpretation is likely to stem to a large extent also from non- institutionalized socialization through close interaction in informal professional practices and behaviors. For instance, street-level task effectiveness – not an official policy value and not found in any formal institutional document or steering mechanism – was identified as an important shared value of practice. Moreover, the research shows that all observed values very 114 Chapter 4