Hester Paanakker

39 a bottom-up approach to values and explores at street level how professionals, in their own words, express the key qualities connected with their work. The way individual public professionals make sense of the values they bring to their work is the focus of the study. After all, as ‘the room for interpretation of values is usually considerable […]. Surveys are generally poorly suited for capturing differences in interpretations, and […] uncover[ing] the multi- faceted interpretations in the time and space of public values’ (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012, p. 725). 2.3 From Value Sets of a General Public Nature to the Specific Work Context Studies that examine the normative role of public values in administrative reality can be grouped under the umbrella of what Beck Jørgensen and Rutgers (2015) call Public Values Perspective (PVP) research. Here, diverse approaches are connected by the generic view that processes of, and in, public administration are ‘guided or restricted by public values and are public value creating: public management and public policy-making are both concerned with establishing, following and realizing public values’ (Beck Jørgensen & Rutgers, 2015, p. 3). We would like to add that many public professionals at operational level are just as involved in creating public value. They willingly act as craftsmen: they possess the skill, motivation and commitment to pursue quality-driven work in a sociable way – that is, by focusing on mentoring, knowledge transfer and setting standards in such a way that they are comprehensible to the lay person as much as to expert colleagues (Sennett, 2008, pp. 248-249). They ‘equally make and repair’ and ‘in turning outward, they hold themselves to account and can also see what the work means to others’ (Sennett, 2008, pp. 248-249). In doing so, they are the ultimate agency for handling, shaping, and transmitting values in practice. Different bodies of literature prompt us to focus on values in specific work contexts and these inform our framework of public craftsmanship. Street-level bureaucracy and policy implementation literature place a strong emphasis on the role of public employees in policy execution and on what practices they develop to translate policy or professional principles (Lipsky, 1980; Tummers, 2013; Tummers & Bekkers, 2014), but they generally fail to address the more normative question of whether public employees feel this constitutes good performance or not, and whether appreciative views differ among them. It seems fair to state that this category of literature is independent of public values literature (Tummers et al., 2015). Studies on public service motivation focus on what motivates public employee personally, pinpointing the set of values that drives the behavior of public sector employees (Perry, 2000; 39 Craftsmanship at Street Level