Hester Paanakker

commitment and harnessing of the discretionary authority of street-level professionals, for the sake of controlling the delivery of good work themselves. It is mostly perceived to be absent in other groups, particularly in those higher up the hierarchy, who are seen to restrict their value focus to efficiency in its connotation of severe and directly undermining cutbacks, and to effectiveness in its connotation of rigid performance measurement and superficial output control. Irrespective of the exact position they hold, public officials were found to be entangled in a deeply toxic organizational stereotyping and to be consistently biased to believe that management above them prioritizes targets over content. Clearly, value contextuality is key not only to the specific types of values that play a role in the sector at large, but also to the internal value dynamics between different sectoral levels, which includes the fronts on which values are perceived to clash and how. Section 2 postulated that such perceived value divergence is deeply problematic to respondents working at implementation level (street-level workers and managers alike) and is felt to severely undermine their (influence on good) public service delivery at street-level. The question remains whether the analyzed mutual stereotyping is truly a misconception of the views of other groups, or is it simply a discrepancy between what respondents preach and what they practice? Do managers’ ideal values of craftsmanship differ from what they, willingly or unwillingly, act out in practice? And, even if misperceptions are partially imaginary, how does the resulting divergence affect actual street level service delivery, and what potential problems does this render? These remaining questions are addressed in the third section of the thesis. 7.1.3 Part 3: The Effects of Value Divergence Finally, in part three, the thesis explored the effects of the established value divergence on policy practice, specifically on implementation problems and the experience of moral dilemmas in frontline public service delivery. This addressed research question three: How and to what degree does value convergence between prison officers and their superiors at middle, senior, and policy management level affect public service delivery at the frontline? In this section, the notion of divergence was yet further developed and seen as a spectrum on which lie two opposing sets of values that each tier within the sector relates differently to. This section took 165 Conclusions and Discussion