Hester Paanakker

from policy and management levels. In addition, it would be interesting to incorporate the perspectives of inmates in future research on penal craftsmanship, to adopt a clientele lens to the topic, and to counterbalance possible tunnel vision on account of employees. Furthermore, the prison qualifies as a total institution (Goffman, 1968) with its very own dynamics of staff–inmate interaction and relationships (Liebling et al., 2010). Such interdependency is likely to be found in prisons around the globe, which likely makes the specific interpretation and meaning of penal craft transferable to other countries. This goes particularly for the Western context, and notably mostly so in countries such as Norway, Denmark, or Austria that share the strong emphasis of the Dutch penal climate on humane treatment and rehabilitation of the detainee. The interpretation and meaning of craft is also likely to be transferable to other types of imprisonment than adult male detention, such as detention of immigrants, youth, or women. Countries whose penal systems, in comparison, have a stronger focus on repressiveness, punitiveness, and retaliation, or include privately run facilities, may produce different value patterns. Future studies on other types of detention, and in other countries, are needed to assess whether this expected generalizability to the wider context of imprisonment holds. Beyond the prison sector, the nature of the penal service delivery is not likely to be directly comparable to the interplay between street-level bureaucrats and clients or citizens in other frontline organizations. The alternative case of public–private partnerships adopted in this thesis illustrates that very different values, and value dynamics, are likely to be at stake in different cases and sectors. This could produce potential threats to the external validity of the research’s applicability to other sectors. Nevertheless, value dynamics of humanity and security may be comparable to other frontline professions with a similar public service type, such as field military personnel, street-level police officers, or paramedics, although the concrete skills, knowledge and practices to enact these values will differ significantly to the reality and logic of the penal system. This underlines the call of this thesis to examine value approaches to frontline craft in context. Future qualitative studies are encouraged to use this bottom-up, contextual approach to provide similar in-depth accounts of frontline craftsmanship in other public sectors and to test the propositions of this study. The underlying dynamics of value convergence and divergence across sectors, and the types of 170 Chapter 7