Hester Paanakker

Proposition 4 : An overemphasis on efficiency at the expense of intrinsic values of public service delivery, causes mutually reinforcing, vicious, cycles of implementation problems (understaffing, lack of time, and lack of workforce stability) and the undermining of the willingness and ability of street-level managers and workers to realize intrinsic values. This confirms an earlier study concluding that a perceived manager-led and manager-created clash between the “lifeworld of intrinsic values” of good work and the “systemic environment of numerical control” acts to “create negativity in staff and thwarts policy implementation” (Paanakker, 2019, p. 894). Despite the growing claim in the field of public administration that the era of new public management has now passed (De Vries & Nemec, 2013; Dunleavy et al., 2005), our study shows how policy practice may be lagging behind and still relies heavily on the performance logic of managerial and numerical control, with policies designed to foster economic values at the expense of other types of crucial values (Hood 1991, Tummers 2012, Overeem & Tholen 2011, Fernandez-Guttierez & Van de Walle 2018; Emery and Giauque 2003; Noordegraaf & De Wit 2012). Our findings confirm that number obsession leads to perverse effects (Pidd, 2005) and strategic behaviors (De Bruijn, 2002; Moynihan et al., 2011), also, and specifically, in terms of value realization at the frontline. Our findings also support theory that pinpoints how public officials may feel bound by a “bureaucratic ethos, which constrain[s] them to focusing on achieving administrative efficiency through the application of utilitarian, market-based tools” (Nabatchi, Goerdel, & Peffer, 2011, p. i38). Although recent empirical work indicates that elite civil servants at policy level apply a variety of values in their decision making on cutback management – not just efficiency, but also values such as robustness and fairness (Schmidt, 2019) – our study shows this is not the case from the subjective viewpoint of the executive branch. Furthermore, our findings carry important implications for theory on change management (Jensen et al., 2019; Tummers, 2013; Wynen et al., 2019) and suggest that value divergence may be an important explanatory variable of change resistance. Finally, our study underscores how, despite the contextuality and subjectivity of public values and value divergence, value divergence is perceived on a large scale and, even if open to dispute 155 The Effect of Value Divergence