Hester Paanakker

Lastly, far more divergence was found in the sub levels of value orientations. When mapping the concrete specifications of ideal qualities, a relatively large variation was seen. Interpretations of how security is to be safeguarded differed most substantially, followed by differences in emphasis on the humane treatment of prisoners and the achievement of reintegration. It is on these specific qualities that prison officers concretely base their behavior. They are highly contextualized and detailed accounts of good craftsmanship and demonstrate the uniqueness of individual prison officers, or at least of different types of prison officers, possibly impacted by factors such as age, character, or years of service. Prison officers differed in the emphases they put on specific qualities, in the way they combined qualities within each category and in the way they combined qualities from different categories. This may produce very different behaviors. This variance suggests that the one-dimensional use of overarching value labels, often prominent in scholarly debates and policies, does poor justice to the complex professional (in this case penal) reality and those navigating it. It represents a call to move away from currently dominant sets of values that focus on macro level governance to apprehension of the meaning of values in the specific work context, and from broad, predefined and prearranged value sets to concrete articulations of values and recognition of the disparate nature of their actual application. The perspective of public craftsmanship might offer some interesting leads. It sets out to address and absorb the crucial values in a given public profession – values that may not be generalizable to the public sector at large but are essentially shaping the public job at hand and determine how the public employee thinks, acts and performs. Future research into the scope of craftsmanship values is needed, both with respect to a larger and more diverse sample of prison workers and in comparison with other types of professions. Is the prison officer unique in the limited scope of values that are put center stage and the disparate nature of the specific qualities attached to those values? Or is this dynamic endemic to the bounded spaces of all professions? Does it go for all professions that there are dozens of different approaches in practice to the implementation of these values? Another interesting locus for future research is how values might converge within the hierarchy of positions, how the values of street level workers compare with their immediate superiors and senior managers. As professional colleagues, do they adhere to the same types of values and hold similar ideas on corresponding qualities of craftsmanship? Finally, more empirical work needs to be done on the effect on professional practice of the views on public craftsmanship that are held. How do 61 Craftsmanship at Street Level