Hester Paanakker

work with detainees. This requires unique hard and soft skills, acquired through training but also largely on the job, that they exercise with a high degree of discretionary authority in a rather contrarian institutional structure of hierarchical decision making and a powerful chain of command. Furthermore, it is a sector in which craftsmanship may be under more and more pressure because of large scale cut backs and reforms that arguably lead to a hollowing out of the profession (Inspectorate Justice and Security, 2017) and cause prison officers to strike (OmroepWest, 2016; Roerdink, 2017). 3.2 Ideals of Public Craftsmanship: Values and Skills We lay the foundation for public craftsmanship in a reconciliation of the literature on professionalism with that on public values, arguing they have some clear but unexplored intersections on what the nature of such “good work” is. From scholarly debates on professionalism we borrow the focus on skills and practices, and we take the focus on values from public values research. We examine public craftsmanship ideals as the underlying values that attach to professionals’ subjective perception of good working skills and practices. If we regard professionalism from the perspective of craftsmanship, classic professionalism focuses a-normatively more on the skill (what professionals do) than on the related values of good work (the more abstract end goals professionals want to achieve). The literature on professionalism in the public sector is rich and continues to expand (Freidson, 2001; Noordegraaf, 2016). The idea is that processes of “controlled content,” for instance by means of formally organized selection, monitoring, education, and training, “structure and regulate occupational practices” (Noordegraaf, 2007, p. 762) in a way that strengthens the quality of the profession and of its service delivery. Such classic conceptions of professionalism “as the occupational level of specialized, theoretical knowledge combined with the existence of firm intra-occupational norms” (L. B. Andersen & Pedersen, 2012, p. 46) may create an external locus of control for professional skill development. It may reinforce instrumental conceptions of professionals as a homogenizing force of technical-rational intra-occupational socialization, where the development of skills is seen as part of an isomorphic process that leads to the institutionalization of perhaps internalized (Teodoro, 2014), but by any means enforced professional norms and behaviors. As Rhodes states: “Indeed, existing lists of skills are about which skills the public servant ought to have in the era of NPM, not descriptions of the skills that public servants deploy in their everyday lives” (2015, p. 642). Hence, much of the work on 68 Chapter 3