Hester Paanakker

idiosyncratically emphasized humanity, security, reintegration and task effectiveness as key values (Paanakker, 2019, 2020). Although these values may be transferable to street-level professions who also have to balance care tasks with maintaining order and/or safety, such as police officers and ground military personnel, or perhaps even paramedics, the concrete practices and skills associated with the enactment of such values are likely to be very different. Craftsmanship values are argued as being unique to the professional logics, realities and beneficiaries of the street-level context in question – as is the interpretation of the associated necessary skills (Paanakker, 2019). This shows how the street-level context determines the identification of highly contextual values of what it means to deliver good work, but also how, within professions, this goes hand in hand with a remarkably high commonality in value understanding and interpretation -informally among street-level professionals themselves. Second, the comparison of how different staff levels understand craftsmanship values portrays a further refutation of value universality. Interestingly, policy makers, prison directors, prison middle managers and street-level prison officers qualify good work at street level rather convergently. However, research among 55 respondents of different penal staff levels indicates that, regardless of the hierarchical layer they occupy, public officials “are consistently biased to believe that management above them prioritizes targets over content” (Paanakker, forthcoming , p. 1). Managers were perceived to impose a craftsmanship framework that interprets values solely in terms of the performance culture of unwavering neoliberal and numeric managerial rhetoric. This toxic stereotyping between staff levels was even shown to overshadow positive value convergence on account of socialization processes (Paanakker, forthcoming ). Here, the mutual perceptions staff levels have of each other paint a rather grim picture that underlines the complexity of value interpretation – and perhaps the impossibility of conceiving values at street level as fixed qualities with a common meaning and understanding. Finally, the study into craftsmanship shows how value alignment is very much dependant on a range of practical constraints at organizational level. Administrative realities can be thorny and counterproductive to the realization of public values. In the prison context, austerity and reform measures were shown to severely hamper the potential of craftsmanship values at street level. They create a gap between the lifeworld of intrinsic moral values of good craftsmanship and the systemic world of instrumental values, administrative constraints and numerical control (Paanakker, 2019). Implementation problems include time constraints, lack of personnel, the inaptitude of policy paradigms, and of the concrete policy tools and instruments they are translated in to do justice to values of good craftsmanship. Problems of implementation also 125 Value Contextuality in Public Service Delivery