Hester Paanakker

governance values, for instance stating good governance is to be understood as competence to handle a set of complementary values (Bovens, ‘t Hart, & van Twist, 2007, 2012; De Graaf, Van Doeveren, Reynaers, & Van der Wal, 2011) or the management of several simultaneously present competing and conflicting values (Bozeman, 2007; De Graaf & Van Der Wal, 2010; Michael W Spicer, 2009). What many studies specifically omit to address is what these values mean to the officials who must put them into practice. Clearly, the value orientations of public professionals towards what public craftsmanship is about bear substantially on policy implementation and, ultimately, on public service delivery. Research shows extensively that public professionals’ individual orientations towards the values embedded in policy visions and programs have an important effect on the final implementation of public policies (Kelly, 1994; Lipsky, 1980, 2010; Tummers et al., 2015). Value orientations at operational level shape bureaucratic reality and the way officials handle their work (cf Stewart, 2006). It is often thought that dealing with conflicting values is at the center of what public officials do or ought to do: it represents the daily reality of on-the-ground decision making (De Graaf & Van Der Wal, 2010; Oldenhof et al., 2014; Steenhuisen & van Eeten, 2008). Understanding how public officials themselves express such values to start with (similarly or differently), seems to be a fundamental exercise that would advance future research. We argue that views on what it means to be good at one’s job constitute the core of public performance (and, ultimately, quality of governance). The key to understanding the role of values in the eyes of street level public professionals lies in unraveling concrete value orientations in concrete work contexts. Rather than using a fixed and predetermined list of values considered to cover the public sector at large, we seek to explore the (widest possible) range of concrete value orientations as brought forward by public professionals themselves. We narrow this down further by looking at values of public craftsmanship: key values of a context- specific and professional nature that public officials deem relevant to their specific work context. The purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, we explore and map the value orientations that characterize public craftsmanship according to professionals in the public sector prison service. Second, we analyze the principal value categories of public craftsmanship to which these value orientations can be assigned and what patterns of prioritization can be detected within such a homogenous professional group. Third, we assess whether this analysis indicates a more – or 36 Chapter 2