Hester Paanakker

To address this gap, we examine how values relate to and can be seen from the perspective of frontline “craft”. That is, we examine perceptions of craftsmanship to see which values they describe, with craftsmanship referring to the application of the concrete skills, knowledge and practices that, according to public officials, are needed to deliver good work in street-level public service delivery. As such, we inductively derive value patterns from the key qualities that public officials deem relevant in the context of frontline work and its objective (in this case, the concrete public service delivered) (Paanakker, 2019, 2020), and we conduct explorative research into if and how public officials that operate at different hierarchical levels, but in the same public sector domain, have a shared notion of frontline craft and the values that attach to it. To examine convergence or divergence in the values that describe such street-level craftsmanship this article selects the Dutch prison sector as a case study and discusses the central research question: How convergent are value perceptions of street-level craftsmanship between policy makers, managers and street-level professionals in the Dutch prison sector, and what explains mutual perceptions between them? In doing so, this article aims to advance public values research in two ways. First, it aims to scrutinize the level of value convergence from the perspective of professional sectors. The observation that values are likely to be perceived very differently in different cultural and organizational settings, situations, or periods over time, is widely shared (Haque, 2011; Rutgers, 2015; West & Davis, 2011). Recent studies also provide empirical substantiation of such differences in value interpretation (L. B. Andersen et al., 2012; Reynaers & Paanakker, 2016), but focus primarily on value differences between organizations or between individuals (Van Steden et al., 2015; Van Thiel & van Der Wal, 2010; Yang, 2016). As of yet, studying how values work “along the lines of the confined and decisive professional logics of bounded policy domains” (Paanakker & Reynaers, 2020, p. 252) is less prominent in public value scholarship. The question of value divergence between policy makers, managers and professionals working in the same policy domain remains underresearched. For that purpose, the degree of value convergence or divergence is conceptualized, in this study, as the degree to which values are similarly or differently identified , understood and/or expressed from policy level down to shop floor. This includes three specific dimensions: value identification (which values are seen to matter to craft), value understanding (the perception of 94 Chapter 4