Hester Paanakker

Proposition 4: In the context of public craftsmanship, value attainment at street level is put most at risk by a restraining institutional environment of target-oriented and performance- induced managerial control and reform. Proposition 4a: These institutional impediments prevent street-level professionals from putting into practice their own conception of craftsmanship: they raise practical implementation problems that impede street-level craftsmanship and result in mounting frustration, exit behavior and the experience of moral dilemmas among street-level professionals. Proposition 4b: Synchronizing institutional profiles to facilitate the leading values in craftsmanship among street-level professionals will enhance their willingness to implement policy tools and instruments and will increase positive workplace perceptions. Of course, doubts can be raised about the tenability, veracity or even righteousness of relying on street-level perceptions and how accurately they describe street level reality. For instance, public professionals may exaggerate the presence and impact of the neo-liberalist focus and can be blind to rival explanations of the forces that may be reconfiguring professional work (Noordegraaf, 2016). Furthermore, public professionals can develop negative and self-serving craftsmanship conceptions whose pursuit may harm the public good or professional ethic altogether (Adams & Balfour, 2009; Noordegraaf, 2007). However, even if public professionals’ subjectivization of “good work”, and the environment conducive to it, contradicts political or societal expectations, or constitutes a perceived administrative reality only, it nonetheless directly and drastically informs how they think and how they deliver their public function. As such, it is a reality to be taken seriously into account. 3.10 Conclusion This study provides valuable insights about a potentially high commonality in the conception of craftsmanship at street level and about how street-level professionals are likely to suffer from a discrepancy between ideal craftsmanship and real-life institutional conditions. In this case study on prison officers, it was shown that their ideal craftsmanship aims at fostering humanity, security, reintegration, and to a lesser extent task effectiveness, and has very little to do with the shop floor environment as they perceive it, where rigid performance management, excessive efficiency measures, and practical impediments predominate. The findings show how this 88 Chapter 3