Hester Paanakker

contemporary knowledge societies are “full of barriers” to strong professionalism and professional autonomies, but stresses that the neo-liberal climates that are often blamed for this, are just one factor among many (2007, p. 763). Professionals may experience this institutional complexity impairing craftsmanship values in practice. The important question arises as to how conducive to expressing their craftsmanship values – or how restraining of it - the institutional context of the organization appears to be to these professionals, but also of what public craftsmanship means to professionals in specific public settings in the first place? Are these understandings convergent in terms of the values they describe, or are they rather very diffuse? The main research question for this study is: What ideal conception do street level professionals have of good craftsmanship on the shop floor and how do they perceive the institutional context of the organization to accommodate or restrict their ideals? We address this question by contrasting perceptions of ideals (analyzing the underlying values that attach to professionals’ subjective perception of good working practice) with perceptions of institutional facilitation (comparing these ideals with the values they see expressed daily in their organizations by means of the institutional paradigms, policies, tools, instruments, and management behavior they encounter). Other than theory on person-organization fit (Moynihan & Pandey, 2007), we do not focus on how organizations attempt to align newcomers with their goals, and how this functions as a possible outcome of the organizational socialization process (Moyson et al., 2018; Peng, Pandey, & Pandey, 2015). Rather, we look at value congruence the other way around: the extent to which public professionals perceive their professional context to correspond to their ideal, rather than how they match or can align themselves with the ideals of the organization and its institutional context. To gain more insight on this topic we use an exploratory case study among professionals in the Dutch prison sector that exemplifies the dynamic of complex craftsmanship development in an equally complex context of institutional pressures. In the Netherlands, prison officers perform a variety of complex practical and psychological tasks on rehabilitation, detainee care and support, and (social) safety control, and must balance inherently conflicting values in their daily 67 Mismatch Between Ideals and Institutional Facilitation