Tinkering with care values in public and private organizations This special issue develops from discussions and papers presented at the Annual Ethnography Symposium in 2017 and aims to gather ethnographies on how care values intersect with service organizations, welfare policy and varying views of good professional practice in private and welfare institutions. It zooms in on the growing cross-disciplinary interest in the values of care for the ill, unwell and unhealthy or disabled in industrialized societies. The issue takes up the well-known but far from trivial debates about how bureaucrats, professionals, students, users and families often represent and face competing requirements and approaches to care in organizations informed by different values and ideologies. Yet, the ideological or value-laden underpinnings of care in organizations often remain less clear in organizational studies, nursing research and in social studies in medicine and social work. Questions of value lie at the heart of debates about the organization of current welfare systems, provision of care services and the architecture of future societies. This transpires, for example, in recent contributions to Journal of Organizational Ethnography on meaning making in acute nursing care practices (Lake et al., 2015), in studies of health care reform and patient and public involvement (PPI) (Glasdam and Oute, 2019) and in studies of volunteering and ethnographic conduct (Garthwaite, 2016). Values are embedded in the contemporary calculus of health and social care provision in many different forms (Rose, 1999, 2007): the financial value of contracts for health or social care services; consumerist values and the commercialization of help seekers (Mol, 2008; Mol et al., 2010), ethical values located in standards and guidelines which regulate clinical practice (Huniche, 2011), and moral values, through which dilemmas and discrepancies are experienced by professionals (Mattingly, 2014, 1998). Albeit invisible and/or taken-forgranted these kinds of different orders of worth are not only deeply rooted in the political requirements that underpin care in organizations, such orders also shape reform and the very organization of welfare services. Moreover, the entanglement of different sets of values also form a background for professional-user relations, recruitment of staff, care education and professionals' feelings and at times limit users' access to services at street level. In response, we need ethnographic work that disentangles what care values "do" in care organizations and bring to light how they are made to work, negotiated and resisted by actors in everyday practice. The issue thus aims to elucidate such themes that are often hidden in the intersections between ethnographic, organizational and health care journals. The issue focuses on the taken-for-granted values, ideals and ideologies located in the practical realities of care giving and receiving across a range of contexts. Organizational ethnographies on care values This issue features six in...