Hester Paanakker

The two main contributions that the thesis makes are the examination of value convergence, and the examination of values in terms of (street-level) craft. I start with the latter. Recent studies on street-level craftsmanship (Paanakker, 2019, 2020; Van Putten, 2020; Van Steden, 2020) show how craftsmanship offers a new narrative for bringing to the surface the values that matter to frontline officials in street-level practice. Alluding to “the principles and ethics of ‘good work’, a virtuous way of fabricating or doing things” (Van Steden, 2020, p. 6), street- level craft constitutes the concrete skills, knowledge, and practices that professionals exercise in their everyday public service delivery (Paanakker, 2019, 2020). Unlike the often generic nature of public values that are presumed to be applicable to all public professionals in the public sector, a values approach to frontline craft is descriptive of the hands-on work delivered at street level. In unraveling how values relate to and are descriptive of the application of concrete skills, knowledge, and practices in specific street-level work contexts, they are seen to comprise the aspirational principles that direct “good” work. This thesis thus defines values as the key qualities that are esteemed in the context of, and toward the object of, public professionals’ street-level work. As such, viewing values from the perspective of “craft” responds to the call to study values contextually, as values only acquire meaning in relation to the specific context they are found in (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012; Rutgers, 2008; West & Davis, 2011) and because “on an aggregate level, [values work] along the lines of the confined and decisive professional logics of bounded policy domains” (Paanakker & Reynaers, 2020, p. 8). Because values attain their actual significance through the way they are interpreted and negotiated “on the ground,” a bottom-up approach to how they apply to the skills, knowledge, and practices of craftsmanship moves public values research forward. It is an approach that is particularly well suited to examining how actors from policy level down to implementation level see the salience and centrality of public values in the work at street-level. The second main contribution of the thesis lies in putting value convergence center stage. As the interviewee quote in the beginning of this introduction suggests, pinpointing the values that define craftsmanship is not straightforward and can be subject to negotiation. Value approaches may differ between policy level and implementation level, between organizational managers and street-level professionals, or even within more homogeneous groups, between public officials of the same position. As of yet, value convergence is quite a blind spot in public values research. 16 Chapter 1