Hester Paanakker

into the way public professionals (frontline or street-level workers with a shared occupation and expertise, see Lipsky, 1980; Tummers et al., 2015) such as police officers, nursing personnel and teachers manage and realize values and deal with value conflicts. Current studies connect the parameters of good work at street-level first and foremost to the settlement of conflicts between different co-existing values in public service delivery. We know less about the effects of value divergence in the public sector. Rather than how street- level workers cope with multiple conflicting values, the focus here is how public service delivery at implementation level is affected by convergent or divergent interpretation and enactment of values at different levels: the levels of policy making, organizational management, and street-level implementation. Value divergence is conceptualized as the degree to which throughout the professional domain, public values are similarly or differently identified, understood, and prioritized or enacted in practice. This explicitly includes both espoused and enacted values (Schein, 2004; Van der Wal, 2008). From the scale of divergence implied in this definition, it follows that value convergence refers to the perceived similarity of value approaches held by policy advisors, organizational managers, and street-level professionals in the sector, whereas value divergence refers to the perceived misfit or incongruence between the value approaches of policy advisors, organizational mangers, and street-level professionals in the sector. Numerous empirical studies provide evidence for the importance of context for value divergence, showing how public values correspond to the type of organization the official works in (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012; Van Steden et al., 2015; Van Thiel & van Der Wal, 2010), the type of position held (De Graaf & Paanakker, 2015; Reynaers & Paanakker, 2016) or even the type of work situation encountered (Witesman & Walters, 2015). The urgent question is if and how such indication of value divergence, rather than convergence, influences public service delivery at street level. Approaching values as the “key qualities that public officials deem relevant in the context of their work and its objective (in this case, the concrete public service they deliver)” (see also Paanakker, 2020, p. 184), we examine the impact on frontline public service delivery if values do not converge within the professional hierarchy of positions. To address this unexplored field of research, we present a case study of the Dutch prison sector, in which, regardless of their 134 Chapter 6