Hester Paanakker

accurately describe the concrete street-level skills, knowledge, and practices prison officers deal with on a daily basis, and have dealt with throughout their careers. The core values de facto translate existing practices of street-level craftsmanship into the abstract principles these practices embody, and as such are also developed and advanced from the bottom up just as much as they are enforced top-down. Clearly, street-level professionals leave a strong mark on the normative consideration of good work in their domain. As “conservers of institutional norms and practices” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2012, p. S16), street-level professionals are seen as craftsmen who make, repair and actively craft policy through specific, profession-bound sets of values that have a strong homogenizing effect – not only among themselves, but also higher up the hierarchy. There is notably less collaborative notion of how to practically attain the abstract values of the penal craft – that is, less agreement in terms of managers’ value prioritization and enactment in practice. Articulating good work at street level reveals tensions between aspirational ideals and organizational practice, between the lifeworld of intrinsic motivations and the systemic world of instrumental measurement, with divergent ideas on how to put sufficient emphasis on and how to transform the ideological foundations of values to practice (Paanakker, 2019). Values that serve the inmates are lost in values that serve the organization. In terms of causes, role differences start to play a part. A strong stereotyping of role differences is observed that leads to stronger perceived than actual value divergence throughout the institutional hierarchy, specifically with respect to value prioritization and enactment, but in the case of task effectiveness also with respect to value understanding, and in the case of efficiency also with respect to value identification. The dominant agenda of reform measures (perceptions of overcomplicated and performance measurement-induced policy changes) and austerity (perceptions of uncaring cutbacks and financial and personnel management) was found to exacerbate role and value differences between different staff levels, and, consequently, mutual misperceptions on how to foster good work at the frontline. In the perception of all levels of the executive branch, this agenda leads to the unjustifiable glorification of quantifiable managerialism by their superiors. It creates a dynamic of personal survival in the job that is best served by plainly and numerically meeting the performance targets set by the echelons of higher management. This externalizes content and makes it inferior and subordinate to measurable 115 Comparing Perceptions of the Frontline Craft