Hester Paanakker

Witesman & Walters, 2013), but they neglect broader considerations of what those employees believe their public performance should look like in its optima forma. Lastly, and most closely related, much PVP research tends to use quite broad and generalized sets of values that are presumed to be applicable to all public professionals across the whole of the public sector. Commonly cited values are loyalty, accountability, transparency, democratic legitimacy, lawfulness and integrity, to name but a few (Paanakker et al., 2020). In 2009, Van der Wal and Van Hout noted that ‘almost all authors (ideologically) assume that there is a distinct and consistent set of public values’ (Van der Wal & Van Hout, 2009, p. 222). Of course much work has been done since, but the predisposition that ‘one set of values with undisputed meanings’ (Van der Wal & Van Hout, 2009, p. 227) exists, and can be used to characterize public sector conduct in general when conducting public values research across different governance settings and groups, still leads in many studies. Examples include Reynaers’ (Reynaers, 2014a) set of five predefined values in four different case studies on public—private partnerships or Van der Wal and Yang’s (2015) list of 25 predefined values in a questionnaire among Dutch and Chinese public administrators from different occupational fields. We are curious to see if restricting the focus to bounded professions produces values of a different or more differentiated nature. Therefore, in contrast, the approach of public craftsmanship explores the values that public employees deem relevant in the specific context of their professional lives. Of course, the call for context-driven analysis of values in governance (and even from a professional angle) is not new. According to Rutgers (Rutgers, 2008, p. 109), public administration values only acquire their meaning in relation to the specific context they are found in, that is ‘their very purpose in time and place’. Conventional wisdom holds that it is undesirable to use, impose or prescribe particular governance values as blueprints in very different national and cultural contexts when discussing quality of governance (Huberts, 2014; Van der Wal, 2016). Likewise, other authors state ‘[w]e know that public values are ultimately context-dependent and that classifications can only be exclusive and comprehensive in a given context (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012, p. 716) and ‘there are no inherently prime values, or no indisputable self-evident truths’ (Beck Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007, p. 373). However, relatively few studies however start from this notion as their main analytical focus. 40 Chapter 2