Hester Paanakker

Chapter 3. Values of Public Craftsmanship: The Mismatch Between Street-Level Ideals and Institutional Facilitation in the Prison Sector Chapters 2 and 3 comprise the first part of the thesis. Specifically, Chapter 3 covers the second half of the first research question. Rather than exploring the ideal-type values that prison officers attach to the frontline craft, examined in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 focuses on (the convergence of) prison officers’ views on the institutional facilitation of craftsmanship. This allows for the ideal-type characterization of craft (perceptions of ideal values and practices) to be contrasted with the actual room for craftsmanship in, or its compatibility with, street-level practice (perceptions of institutional facilitation): to understand how abstract values acquire practical meaning in specific professional settings, we also need to understand how they are practically facilitated on the shop floor. Now using the data from prison officers from two correctional facilities ( N =32), the chapter explains how the institutional context of the prison substantially restrains rather than supports the ideals that professionals attach to good street- level craftsmanship. The chapters’ theoretical contribution is to show craftsmanship as uniquely localizing the normative underpinnings of good work. Empirically, the findings show how prison officers feel that in prison sector policy and management, protecting and promoting craftsmanship values in street-level policy execution and service delivery comes at the bottom of the list. Prison officers convergently identify an unyielding neoliberalist administrative practice that impedes the potential of frontline craftsmanship. Chapter 2 theorizes how this is likely to have negative impact on staff commitment and successful public service delivery, and thereby lays the foundation for the next three chapters. Finally, this chapter includes an in-depth reflection on the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. It ends with the formulation of propositions to advance future research of public craftsmanship in public administration theory, and to advance the further development of public craftsmanship in public administration practice. The chapters to come explicitly build on and explore several of these propositions. Chapter 3 has been previously published as an article in The American Review of Public Administration . Chapter 4. Perceptions of the Frontline Craft: Assessing Value Convergence between Policy Makers, Managers and Street-Level Professionals in the Prison Sector Chapter 4 is the next step in the research and forms, together with Chapter 5, the second part of the thesis that centers on the question of value convergence between different levels of penal officials (research question 2). From the perspective of perceptions of the frontline craft, 27 Introduction