Introduction

Hupe & Van der Krogt discerned three different modes of dealing with pressures available to professionals: coping, networking and activism. In the preceding chapter Tummers, Steijn & Bekkers showed that certain types of professionals differed in their coping strategies, backed by their professional orientation.

In this chapter we will elaborate on this. We will describe how public sector professionals – street-level professionals, to be more precise, who possess ample discretionary powers – deal with clashes and tensions between values, interests, and loyalties. They face multiple work influences, which cannot be respected all at once. For public sector professionals, such tensions are part of their daily lives. On a daily basis, they have to relate to various objects of loyalty, often contradictory. Besides the clients they interact with daily, they can be loyal to their own moral conscience, their organization, managers, political masters, society, private life, and so on (e.g. Bovens 1998; 't Hart & Wille 2002, 2006). Somehow tensions between the interests of all these possible objects of loyalties must be tractable (De Graaf 2005). But if the interests conflict, whose are considered more or most important?

Arguably, public professionals experience more difficulties when prioritizing objects of loyalty than a few decades ago. The literature on political-administrative relations and public management shows that the ways in which street-level professionals interact with their political and external environments are subject to ever changing dynamics (see Noordegraaf 2008; 't Hart & Wille 2006). Among these are shifts in citizen expectations towards public services (Noordegraaf 2008), the politicization of civil service positions and appointments (Lee & Raadschelders 2008) and increasing attention to integrity and accountability of the public service (Dobel 2005). These dynamics have been fuelled by governance developments such as increasing policy co-production across organizations and sectors, and the rise of networks (see also Newman’s contribution) in addition to a variety of public sector management reforms including npm. They make it more complex for public administrators to relate to one single stakeholder and may result in increasing tensions between different objects of their loyalties.

The situation used to be clear, at least in terms of functional and structural separation between tasks, roles and values expected from public professionals and their various ‘masters’, predominantly the politicians they were supposed to serve.