Hester Paanakker

aim to advance scholarly as well as practitioner knowledge in the field of public values in the frontline craft. The research deconstructs abstract notions of “good public service delivery” and “co-existing and competing public governance values” into real life phenomena and seeks to provide insight into the practical value and workings of these notions. With the prison sector in the Netherlands as its case study, the following central question guides the research: How convergent are public officials’ value approaches toward street-level craft in the Dutch prison sector, and in what way does value convergence or divergence affect administrative practice? The three aims reflected in the main research question are represented by three sub-questions, that each cover a specific subset of the data and comprise the three parts the thesis consists of. - Research question 1 : What do values of public craftsmanship constitute, both in terms of ideals and in terms of their institutional facilitation, in the administrative practice of the frontline, and to what degree are those views convergent among prison officers? - Research question 2 : To what degree are prison officers’ views on street-level craftsmanship convergent with the views on street-level craftsmanship of prison middle management, prison management, and penal policy officials, and what explains their mutual perception? - Research question 3: 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? The three research questions structure the data collection and data analysis and correspond to different sections of the thesis that together cover a full examination of the central question. Part 1 addresses the first research question and covers Chapters 2 and 3. It examines which values of the street-level craft can be identified among street-level workers in the prison sector, and contrasts street-level ideals of craftsmanship (by means of prison officers’ ideal-type values) with the institutional facilitation of those values (by means of the prison officers’ perception of there being room for craftsmanship in practice). Using a value lens, this first part aims to establish what street-level craftsmanship, and its impairment in practice, means to prison officers, and is about value convergence within the street-level layer of prison officers. Part 2 compares prison officers’ value approaches to the value approaches of the staff levels above them. This addresses the second research question, and is covered by Chapters 4 and 5. 20 Chapter 1