Hester Paanakker

pressure of cutbacks and the consequent uncertainty. As one respondent put it: “ You know, as long as you enjoy your work, that flexibility remains present, but if you are hit in the face over and over again, yes, at a certain point you will start biting. Then it is over.” (Prison officer 1, facility 1) 6.5 Discussion Discussing our findings in the light of relevant literatures, we find they have implications for a range of different theoretical fields. From our case study on the Dutch prison, we conclude that value divergence gives rise to practical implementation problems, and practical implementation problems get in the way of value realization at street-level. Prison workers are supposed to realize the four intrinsic values of penal service delivery, but in practice spend most time on mitigating the negative effects of the institutional focus on output measurement and far- reaching efficiency measures. This is at the expense of the values of humanity, security, reintegration and task effectiveness: they are not optimally realized. This leads us to our first two propositions: Proposition 1: Value divergence leads to ineffective governance in frontline public service delivery, i.e. it undermines the realization of core values. Proposition 2: The graver the value divergence between intrinsic values of public service delivery and instrumental values of organizational profitability, the graver the implementation problems on the frontline due to a mismatch between policy ideals, and practical policy tools and instruments. Our findings provide strong evidence that the negative effects of value divergence should not be underestimated (Vogel et al., 2016) and endorse how good public service delivery avails itself of value convergence in public policy domains (Jensen et al., 2018). When detailing the types of implementation problems that results from divergence on output measurement and efficiency, we derive the following propositions: Proposition 3 : An overemphasis on effectiveness in the instrumental interpretation of output measurement undermines the realization of intrinsic values at the frontline and shifts the focus of value attainment from addressing content to superficial box ticking in public service delivery. 154 Chapter 6