Hester Paanakker

Whether to expect high or low value convergence within professions is unclear. There is no doubt that professional groups make up a large—and therefore not to be overlooked—part of public sector employees, and often share a common mode of operation and work ethos: In Western Europe, the relevant group is often a profession; that is, an occupation with intra-occupational norms and specialized, theoretical knowledge in the given area. The professions enforce the professional standards (norms within the profession) via peer review, and the desirable is compliance with intraoccupational norms, making professional commitment very important (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012, p. 717). In this definition, norm diffusion and homogenization are key characteristics of a professional group. Whether a similar collective logic also extends to value orientations is less well understood. A few studies indicate that, in the public sphere, different actors may have different understandings of values (cf. De Graaf & Paanakker, 2015; Reynaers & Paanakker, 2016; Yang, 2016). For example, Yang (2016, pp. 78-79) found that Chinese and Dutch civil servants attached six different meanings to the value ‘loyalty’, including ‘loyalty to the organization and colleagues’ and ‘loyalty to the country, to the political party, or to the laws and regulations’. Some clear patterns of divergence emerged with the majority of Dutch officials endorsing the first interpretation and Chinese ones the latter. Furthermore, interpretations also diverged within sub categories. Dutch officials interpreted ‘loyalty to the superior’ in terms of being loyal to ‘the bigger picture of the vision and mission of the organization’ , whereas Chinese officials understood ‘superior’ in terms of obedience and subordination to their manager (Yang, 2016, pp. 78-79). Finally, also within each of the two groups responses were scattered across the different meanings (Yang, 2016, pp. 78-79). Likewise, views on what public craftsmanship values precisely entail, or to put it differently, what it means to be a good civil servant, may differ from professional to professional. Alternatively, theories of social learning and organizational socialization theory suggest that public officials, especially in smaller sub groups, are socialized into group norms and values (Bandura, 1977, 1986; Kohlberg, 1969), and this would suggest high value convergence (Chao et al., 1994; Feldman, 1981). Through enculturation processes, shared organizational values create internal integration but also guide external adaptation and are strong catalyzers of behavior in the work context (Paarlberg & Perry, 2007; Schein, 1985). Interestingly, Andersen et al. (2012) establish empirically that core value differences between public sector 43 Craftsmanship at Street Level