Hester Paanakker

175 demanding administrative contexts. As such, the findings reaffirm that “there are no inherently prime values, or no indisputable self-evident truths” (Beck Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007, p. 373), also not at the intersections of policy-implementation, policy-management, and management-implementation. As obvious as this observation may sound, it is still only taken into account in debates on public value scope and solidity in a limited way. The thesis clearly shows that, even for public officials within the same sectoral setting, determining how values do, can, and should actually shape the frontline craft in public service delivery is a complex area of contestation and dispute. Public values research should seek to take this better into account. Advancing knowledge on the importance of value convergence to public service delivery. Finally, this thesis is a first step in stimulating scholarly debate on the actual role and effects of public value divergence, in the context of the frontline craft in public service delivery and beyond. From studies in the field of for-profit organizations we know that convergence between personal and organizational values is key to a range of positive effects in employee behavior and organizational performance (Cable & Parsons, 2001; Edwards & Cable, 2009; Kristof, 1996; Lee et al., 2017), whereas divergence produces the adverse effects of employee stress, discomfort, lower engagement and job satisfaction, and lower productivity (Vogel et al., 2016). For public values research however, a category of values with a distinctly different nature and a different object (Bozeman, 2007), the premise of convergence remains a rather unexplored phenomenom, whose desirability lingers as an implicit underlying assumption in value debates. For instance, Van der Wal appealed for public values studies to undertake more empirical research on value differences and their potential problems (2008, p. 186). The findings in this thesis answer this call and show evidence of a range of profound implementation problems that come to the detriment of public value realization at the frontline. In addition, the findings demonstrate that, in the eyes of penal offials from policy level down to shop floor, value divergence is a critical source of organizational conflict and dysfunctionality, of street-level frustration and, to a lesser extent, of moral stress. As a final point, this thesis contributes insight to the exploration of frontline coping mechanisms and identifies specific coping strategies that are additional to existing lists of strategies (Tummers et al., 2015; Vink et al., 2015). This is indicative of how other mechanisms than value conflict or divergence may be found to explain what causes some street-level workers, 175 Conclusions and Discussion