Hester Paanakker

how values ought to be expressed in concrete craftsmanship behaviors), and value prioritization or enactment in practice (which values are actually (seen to be) emphasized in practice, and how). From the sliding scale implied in its definition, it follows that strong value convergence refers to the perceived similarity of value approaches to frontline craftsmanship, held by the policy advisors, organizational managers, and street-level professionals in the sector. Strong value divergence refers to the misfit or incongruence between such values approaches of policy advisors, organizational managers, and street-level professionals . The second contribution of this article is to sharpen the focus on the role of public values in the concrete work context of frontline public service delivery. It situates the public values debate in street-level discourse by examining the values that describe each level’s perception of what frontline craftsmanship is about. We explicitly do not aim to build a conclusive theory of what street-level craftsmanship is or ought to be. Our aim lies more modest in offering an explorative examination of how various actors themselves, whether at policy-making, management, or street-level, hold similar or different value perceptions to craftsmanship in frontline public service delivery, and why (not). In so doing, this article builds on recent scholarly work that revives the study of craftsmanship in the public domain. Implicated in this perspective is that many of the values realized in street- level professions are not solely dictated by formal education and standardization, theoretical specialization, and top-down norm enforcement (Paanakker, 2019), like literature on professionalism tends to suggest (Freidson, 2001; Noordegraaf, 2007). Rather, adopting a craft perspective to street-level values is about acknowledgement that good work is versatile rather than fixed, and builds strongly not only on theoretical but also on practical, experiential knowledge that is learned on the job (Paanakker, 2019; Rhodes, 2015; Van Steden, 2020). Regarding the public office as a craft honors the skilled intuition, continuous reflection and often implicit, unarticulated and action-oriented knowledge that quality of work in public service delivery alludes to (Polanyi, 2009; Sennett, 2008; Van Steden, 2020). This is why, through respondents’ concrete descriptions of the skills, knowledge and practices associated with good work, we consider values from the bottom-up as constructed and expressed by respondents themselves. 95 Comparing Perceptions of the Frontline Craft