Hester Paanakker

importance of not overestimating the applicability of general public values frames (Nabatchi, 2018) and the importance of taking the specific type and nature of the frontline service delivery into account in approaching and understanding value dynamics at the frontline. The rationale of contextuality supports the usefulness of case based public values research, at least as a starting point of further (and where fitting, quantitative) empirical examination, as “[s]tandardization encourages researchers to ignore the unique aspects of each site”, including the influence of its historical, institutional and social context (Herriott & Firestone, 1983, p. 16). It would be interesting to see if other public service domains also have such a high degree of convergence on ideal values, and if the identification and interpretation of values (as well as the associated skills, knowledge and practices) are just as strongly influenced by the specific street-level nature of the public service delivery, i.e. just as profession-bound, as the prison values in this study. Or do some street-level professions share craft characteristics across sectors, for instance police officers and prison officers on security, or prison officers and nursing personnel within a public service ethos of care? This poses interesting questions to the benefit of the advancement of street-level bureaucracy theory. Future research on inter-sectoral comparison of street-level craft and value divergence is encouraged to address these questions. The observation that the (experienced) value divergence represents a much more dominant reality to respondents furthers our knowledge on the complexity of value (dis)similarity. It reveals how divergence can manifest itself at different levels that are not necessarily aligned. A shared identity of value identification and understanding does not mean a shared enactment of value in practice. Evidently, divergence on which values to prioritize in practice and how to enact them is both more visible and is perceived to have the most perverse effects. Moreover, the thesis makes an important contribution in revealing how mutual perceptions can substantially shape, and even distort, the role of value approaches in the public sector. This means that examining public officials’ own value approaches tells only part of the story of how values play out in practice. Indeed, managers at policy and organization level often practice different values from those they preach, but the mutual perceptions of divergence are still much graver and much more negative than the actual divergence. This points at the complexity of real-life value interpretation between different levels of public sector actors, particularly in 174 Chapter 7