Hester Paanakker

173 arising from that, can be categorized and explained in terms of the aspirational qualities that constitute values and help make sense of the hands-on work that is street-level public service delivery. This way, the thesis merges literature on public values with literature on street-level bureaucracy. As such, it provides more in-depth understanding of how abstract public values apply to concrete work situations in street-level public service delivery, and how various actors see the salience and centrality of values to the meaning of the work at the frontline. Advancing knowledge on the complexity of public value convergence . Second, this thesis shows how, in terms of ideals , public officials from different levels have surprisingly convergent value approaches to good craftsmanship on the frontline and to good public service delivery in general. This is an interesting refutation of the commonly held notion that managers are an inherently different “species” from street-level workers (Freidson, 2001; Hanson, 1996). In line with the main findings of this thesis, it may be argued that policy advisors, managers, and professionals actually have, more than is often thought, a shared basis of beliefs and ideals of what “good” work is, but are pushed in different directions when it comes to execution. This also explains why, for instance, middle managers are very unhappy with the values they (are forced to) enact. It also provides further nuance to recent strands of street-level bureaucracy research on the supposed alignment of street-level workers and street-level managers (Keulemans & Groeneveld, 2020) using a lens of policy clientele in the way they exercise their function (Gassner & Gofen, 2018). The remarkably high convergence on the importance of four confined core ideals, and on the skills, knowledge, and practices through which, ideally, they shape street-level behaviors, also stresses how the value approaches of frontline craft are unique to the professional logics, realities, and beneficiaries of the street-level service delivery in question. This thesis confirms the presence of strong formal – but specifically also informal – socialization tactics in public domains (Moyson et al., 2018; Van Kleef, Steen, & Schott, 2019), not only within discrete organizations or subgroups, but, as in the case of this thesis, even throughout an entire public sector. On a related point, the convergence around ideals of public service delivery shows how the street-level context pinpoints highly contextual values when it comes to what it means to deliver good work. These are values that are not necessarily in line with the predetermined and predefined sets of general public sector values that public values studies often tend to use in their research designs (Beck Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007; Reynaers, 2014b; Van der Wal & Huberts, 2008; Yang & Van der Wal, 2014; Zhang & Chen, 2015). This strongly underlines the 173 Conclusions and Discussion