Negotiating teacher professionalism : on the symbolic politics of Sweden's teacher unions

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MALMÖ S TUDIES IN EDUC A TION AL SCIEN CES N O 72 DOCT OR AL DISSERT A TION IN EDUC A TION PETER LILJA MALMÖ UNIVERSIT Y 20 1 4 MALMÖ HÖGSKOLA 205 06 MALMÖ, SWEDEN WWW.MAH.SE

PETER LILJA

NEGOTIATING TEACHER

PROFESSIONALISM

On the Symbolic Politics of Sweden’s Teacher Unions

The aim of this thesis is to critically investigate and problematize the Swedish Teacher Unions’ use of the concept of professionalism and how this is negotiated and given meaning within contemporary Swedish educational debates. This concept is not easily defined, resulting in political struggles over the meaning ascribed to it in different contexts.

This study is based on two recent educational reforms: the certification of teachers and the reformation of teacher education. Using theories from the sociology of professions coupled with an institutional approach to the study of organizations it focuses on how the Teacher Unions construct professional projects in relation to each other as well as in relation to the reforms of the current Ministry of Education.

Viewing professionalism as an institutional logic, it investigates the different strategies employed by the two Unions and considers their effects on the overall professional ambitions of Sweden’s Teacher Unions in general. By doing so it highlights the complexities facing occupational organizations as they engage in political negotiations over how the meaning ascribed to concepts like professionalism is decided.

Isbn 978-91-86295-40-0 (print) Isbn 978-91-86295-41-7 (pdf) Issn 1651-4513 NEGO TIA TIN G TEA C HER PR OFESSION ALISM

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Malmö Studies in Educational Sciences No. 72

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PETER LILJA

NEGOTIATING

TEACHER PROFESSIONALISM

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This publication is also available at: www.mah.se/muep

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What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a strange feeling, typing these last sentences of a text that has been part of ones life for so long. However, the circumstances un-der which I do so – more or less two minutes before the absolute deadline – is all to familiar. During the last months of intensive writing, this moment has mostly seemed like a distant and often unreachable mirage. Yet, somehow, I managed to arrive here in the end, and with at least a couple of minutes left to express my grati-tude towards the people without whom this book would never have been completed.

Ingegerd Tallberg Broman, thank you for planting the idea of applying for a PhD-position in the head of a second term teacher student all those years ago. Who could have guessed that you would be my first head supervisor? Thank you for encouraging me, from the beginning, to stay on the ‘policy track’, and for your con-tinued support and encouragement throughout this process.

Ola Fransson, thank you for agreeing to step in as supervisor in the middle of the project. Thank you for long, if not always that focused, discussions on educational policies, teacher education and the Unions. You always made me leave those meetings with a feel-ing that I actually knew somethfeel-ing about the thfeel-ings I was writfeel-ing and thinking about. This project would not have been what it is without your help!

Gitte Malm, you have been with me from the very start, first as supervisor and, during the latter part of the project, as head super-visor. Thank you for letting me choose my own ways, and for

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en-couraging me to reach for an international audience. Thank you also for careful readings of my texts and for not losing patience with my unfortunate inability to learn when to use ‘has’ and ‘have’! The process of writing this thesis has had its ups and downs, thank you for sticking it out with me!

Thank you also to all my colleagues at the department of Chil-dren, Youth, Society at the Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University. Thanks for interesting, fun and useful discus-sions, around conference tables, coffee tables or at the Green Lion, on all matters of life and work and everything in between.

I would also like to thank Sven Persson, head of the Centre for Profession Studies at Malmö University, for allowing me to be part of the research group at CPS. Thanks for letting med take part in your seminars, and for financing my participation at the confer-ences of the Swedish (and now Nordic) network for research on the professions. It has been invaluable for my project. Here I would also like to extend my gratitude to all colleagues at CPS for wel-coming me in your group, it has been equally fun and instructive!

Thank you Jonas Aspelin for reading and commenting on my text for my first (25%) seminar.

Likewise, thank you Sverker Lindblad for your helpful com-ments at my final (90%) seminar, they were very useful for my fi-nal revisions of this text. I hope that it is now clear what the study is a case of!

Thank you Karin Dahlberg and Catarina Chritiansson for your help with all things administrative. For very practical reasons, there would have been no dissertation without your assistance!

And Johan Dahlbeck, what can I say? Thank you for everything, for sharing all the joys and disappointments of being a PhD-student and a human being. No one has meant so much for the completion of this book as you; your name should almost be on the cover! Let’s keep the coffee machine turned on, shall we?

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Mom and dad, friends and family, thank you for always being there with support and a reminder that life is bigger than a PhD-thesis.

Maria, almost fourteen years – thank you for everything!

Finally, Selma, my miracle girl, thank you for being you, for proving, with your very existence, that absolutely anything is pos-sible. So, even if your dramatic entry into this world did not help the process of finishing this book very much, and without any real hope that you will ever find its content even remotely interesting, I dedicate it to you.

And with that, I am done. The last two minutes have passed and it is time to put an end to this process once and for all. I do so, however, with the firm belief that finishing this book is not actual-ly a definitive end of anything, just the end of a beginning… Lund in April 2014

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STUDIES INCLUDED IN THE

DISSERTATION

Study I

Lärarlegitimation – professionalisering med förhinder? Published: 2011, Arbetsliv & arbetsmarknad 17(4), 29-42.

Study II

The Politics of Teacher Professionalism: Intraprofessional Boundary Work in Swedish Teacher Union Policy.

Forthcoming: Policy Futures in Education, 12(4), 2014.

Study III

A Quest for Legitimacy: On the Professionalization Policies of Sweden’s Teacher Unions.

Published: 2014, Journal of Education Policy 29(1), 86-104. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.790080

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1. INTRODUCTION

In Sweden, increasing the social status of teaching and making it an attractive career choice for the most talented Swedish students has become a highly prioritized education policy objective. This is of-ten discussed in terms of a need for the professionalization of teachers. If successful, such processes are believed to result in in-creased professionalism among Swedish teachers, that is, an in-crease in the quality of work performed in Swedish classrooms (cf. Lindblad 1997). In this thesis, focus is given to the policy strategies of the two Swedish Teacher Unions in relation to such demands for teacher professionalization.

However, the concept of professionalism, and consequently the desired outcomes of processes of professionalization, is not easily defined, opening up for political struggles over the meaning as-cribed to them in different contexts.

The use of professional terminology in relation to Swedish teachers was introduced within debates and discussions on Swedish education policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Lindblad 1997; Sjöberg 2011). As such, it was an integral part of the political pro-cess of educational decentralization and deregulation. The trans-formation of the Swedish educational system should be regarded as part of a wider trend of educational restructuring starting in the 1980s and spreading across the western world with the rising in-fluence of neo-liberalism (Apple 2006; Ball 2003), resulting in a reevaluation of the role of education in society at large. The most

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obvious result of this development was the alignment of education with the ‘economic success’ of individual nation states, making it into a factor of production vital for the competitiveness of states within a logic of a global ‘knowledge economy’ (Seddon, Ozga and Levin 2013; Ball 2008). As a result of these changes in the framing of education in general, the professional development of teachers has become a central political ambition of many states, not least since the importance of effective teachers for raising student achievements in international tests and comparisons has been em-phasized by influential organizations such as McKinsey & Co. (2007) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and De-velopment (OECD 2009).

However, what Foss Lindblad and Lindblad (2009) have termed ‘the professionalizing talk on teachers’ is, within this context, charged with values such as effectiveness, competition and individ-ual accountability. These are central values of the neo-liberal edu-cational project (cf. Seddon et al. 2013) but far removed from the traditional understanding of professional work as comprising val-ues such as autonomy, discretion, collegiality, adherence to ethical principles and being based on a high level of trust (Freidson 2001; Svensson 2010). Consequently, ‘processes of [neo-liberal] globali-zation have disturbed both practical and theoretical boundaries that once anchored understandings of teacher professionalism’ (Seddon et al. 2013, 7).

Without denying the influence of the neo-liberal educational pro-ject on national education systems in most states, there is, however, a strong emphasis within contemporary research on education pol-icy developments that this ‘globalization of educational polpol-icy’ has not erased the influence of local contexts (Seddon et al. 2013; Ozga 2011; Spring 2009; Green 2006; Dale 1999). Rather, the historical legacies of individual educational systems continue to exert a strong influence on how education policies are framed and given meaning in different contexts. Likewise, the ideals of a traditional understanding of professionalism remain appealing, not least for occupational groups previously considered as ‘semi-professions’ (e.g. teachers, nurses, social workers) within deregulated systems of public service provision (Evetts 2003).

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Consequently, the meaning ascribed to the idea of teacher pro-fessionalism is constructed in complex situations where the influ-ence of global trends of (neo-liberal) educational reform is mixed with historical legacies of specific national/local contexts. Within these localities, there are a number of different actors, at different levels of society, pursuing different political agendas, resulting in, what Hardy & Maguire (2008) call, an ‘interpretative struggle’ over the meaning of what is to constitute a professional teacher. As a result:

[…] the trajectory of teacher professionalism depends, in turn, on the ways educators engage in spatial, temporal, relational and knowledge boundary work in order to create a platform for their professionalizing projects and the necessary symbolic poli-tics of claiming professionalism and, therefore, space for educa-tional work (Seddon et al 2013, 4).

At a general level, it is the intention of this thesis to critically exam-ine such political negotiations over the definition of and meaning ascribed to the idea of teacher professionalism in the context of contemporary Swedish educational policymaking.

In doing so, focus will be placed on the policies of the two Swe-dish Teacher Unions – The Swedish Teacher Union (Lärarförbundet) (STU) and The National Union of Teachers (Lärarnas Riksförbund) (NUT) –, as they are the primary vehicles for the occupational organization of teachers in Sweden. As was stated above, the introduction of professional terminology in rela-tion to Swedish teachers was a part of the political process of edu-cational decentralization and was, thus, imposed on teachers by education policymakers, external to the profession (Lindblad 1997).

Even so, as is argued by Lundström (2007) and Persson (2008), both Swedish Teacher Unions quickly adopted a discourse of pro-fessionalism, used in order to argue for better salaries and working conditions on behalf of their members.

Over a decade later, the professional discourse is still a defining feature of the Unions’ policies, despite a situation where teachers’

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work is described as increasingly unappealing, not least made ob-vious by the decreasing attractiveness of teacher education as a ca-reer choice among the most talented students. Furthermore, a dec-ade into the new millennium, Swedish teachers continue to express uncertainty about the purpose of their work, feelings of intensifica-tion – not least in relaintensifica-tion to a growing administrative burden fol-lowing upon increasing accountability – and lack of public recogni-tion, despite the increase in the ‘professionalizing talk on teachers’ (Foss Lindblad & Lindblad 2009) that has been naturalized in edu-cation debates, teacher eduedu-cation and the general public discourse. In the sociological literature on professionalism it has been argued that the concept of professionalism, within deregulated systems of public service provision, has been transformed into a disciplinary mechanism (Fournier 1999) used by managers to control the behav-ior of employees and to facilitate processes of organizational change. In relation to the Swedish educational context, the use of profession-al rhetoric in politicprofession-al reforms aimed to transform the work of teachers in line with the logic of organizational effectiveness – asso-ciated with the neo-liberal educational project – has been analyzed by, for example, Beach (2008, 2011) and Sjöberg (2011). Further-more, there are studies of how such reforms are experienced by indi-vidual teachers within the context of their everyday work (e.g. Parding 2007; Lundström 2007). There is, however, a lack of studies focusing the level of occupational organization, that is, the collective politics of Swedish teachers. Consequently, it is the ambition of this work to analyze the way the Swedish Teacher Unions participate in the political negotiation of the meaning and content of the work of Swedish teachers. Particularly, it will focus on how the symbolic re-sources of professionalism are used by the Unions, within this inter-pretative struggle or negotiation, in order to construct professional projects (Larson 1977/2013) aimed to increase the social status and attractiveness of teaching in society.

1.1 Aim and Scope

Against the background of two educational reforms directed to-wards the professionalization of teachers – the introduction of a teacher certificate and the reformation of teacher education – the

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aim of this thesis is to critically investigate and problematize the Swedish Teacher Unions’ use of the concept of professionalism within the political negotiation of the meaning and content of teacher professionalism. In doing so, the thesis will address the fol-lowing questions:

1. In which ways are the professional projects of each respec-tive Teacher Union constructed, and how are they inter-related?

2. How can the Teacher Unions’ use of the concept of profes-sionalism as a political strategy be interpreted and under-stood within the context of contemporary Swedish educa-tional policymaking?

In order to provide answers to these questions, the thesis is empiri-cally focused on the Unions’ reactions to two Swedish educational reforms, aimed at contributing to the professionalization of Swe-dish teachers. Following their election victory in 2006, ending 12 years of continuous social democratic rule, the center-right gov-ernment of Sweden initiated an extensive program of educational reform. In 2008, two Public Commission Reports were presented, outlining reforms later implemented during 2011, the realization of a system of teacher certification (SOU 2008:52 prop. 2010/11:20) and a reformation of Swedish teacher education (SOU 2008:109 prop. 2009/10:89).

These reforms are interesting to use as points of departure for at least two reasons. First, they are reforms very clearly directed to-wards the work of teachers, presented in order to achieve higher societal status for teachers by leading to processes of professionali-zation. Second, they mark a decisive shift in Swedish educational policy, away from a very long tradition, starting in the 1960s, of unifying the educational system itself and the conditions of the teachers working within it (see e.g. Stenlås 2009; Lindensjö & Lundgren 2000). Thereby, the reforms constitute a context for analysis comprising the mixture of international policy trends and national historical legacies within which the content and meaning of teacher professionalism is negotiated. Both reforms are aimed at

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the professionalization of teachers, but not for the sake of the pro-fession, but as a central strategy of increasing the declining results of Swedish pupils in international performance evaluations. As such, they are easily interpreted as reforms inspired by the interna-tional trends of educainterna-tional effectiveness framed by the idea of a knowledge-economy. However, both reforms are simultaneously constructed in a way that ends a long tradition of educational uni-fication within Swedish educational policy by contributing to a separation of different teacher categories within the educational system. By doing so, the reforms strike at the heart of the historical divide characterizing the relationship between Sweden’s two Teacher Unions, further emphasizing the two reforms as an inter-esting analytical context for the present work.

The focus of this thesis, however, is not on these reforms per se, but on the Swedish Teacher Unions’ reactions towards them. The reason for choosing the Teacher Unions as the objects of study has to do with their position as the only basis for occupational organi-zation of any political significance in Sweden. As is argued by Oftedal Telhaug, Mediås and Aasen (2006) unions have occupied a central position within the construction and workings of the classi-cal Nordic welfare model. Being the voice of labor in this politiclassi-cal- political-economic settlement, their role as partners, and not adversaries, of the political establishment was cemented, resulting in continuing high levels of organization and, thus, to making the Unions the primary objects for investigating the collective politics of contem-porary Swedish teachers.

Furthermore, the fact that Swedish teachers are still organized in two separate Unions, belonging to different Union confederations, makes for an interesting point of departure for the analysis of this work. The different historical origins of the organizations may have consequences for how they act politically in order to increase the social standings of their members by trying to develop an occu-pational identity as a full-fledged profession from rather different perspectives.

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1.2 Disposition

This thesis consists of three major parts. The first part comprises the introductory chapter and two consecutive theoretical chapters dealing with institutional and professional theory respectively. Af-ter the presentations of the theoretical perspectives guiding the analyses of this thesis, chapter four elaborates on the methodologi-cal foundations of the three studies.

Part two is concerned with sketching a background against which the present work can be understood and put into context. In order to do so, chapter five is devoted to describing the historical and contemporary context of Swedish education and previous re-search on the Swedish Teacher Unions. In chapter six, the interna-tional context influencing Swedish educainterna-tional policymaking is de-scribed, as is research on Teacher Unions, primarily within Anglo-American societies. The final chapter of part two deals with the question of how to understand the complex concept of teacher pro-fessionalism and how it is discussed in international as well as Swedish research.

The third and final part of the thesis comprises summaries of the three different studies comprising the analytical parts of this work, as well as a concluding discussion where answers to the questions posed in the introductory chapter are provided and elaborated on.

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2. AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH

In this chapter, the first of two theoretical perspectives guiding the analyses of this work will be presented. In this thesis, the policies of the two Teacher Unions are viewed from an overall approach drawn from the field of institutional theory. The discussion below presents an overall approach to the study of the Teacher Unions in order to highlight the framework within which their use of the concept of professionalism is understood. In doing so, it will also underline the importance of the social context in order to provide an understanding of why the Unions act the way they do.

2.1 Institutions and Institutional Logics

The focus of this thesis is on the policymaking of Sweden’s Teacher Unions. This policymaking, however, does not take place in an iso-lated vacuum but is part of, and thereby affected by, larger social structures. There are several ways of making sense of such social structures and how they affect the actors within them. In this the-sis, institutional theory is used as a perspective and lens through which the policymaking of the Teacher Unions is interpreted and understood.

Institutional theory, however, is an extensive theoretical field used in different ways across the social sciences. This work draws on what has become known as ‘the new institutionalism’ (DiMag-gio & Powell 1991a; Peters 2012; Scott 2008a) that, despite inter-nal differences, is constituted by a reaction against the ratiointer-nal- rational-choice theories dominant within the social sciences in the 1960s-70s. Even, so, how institutions are defined and understood

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contin-ues to vary between different social science disciplines. For exam-ple, within political science, and parts of the economic sciences, in-stitutions are primarily understood as ‘the rules of the game’ or ‘the standard operating procedures’ of a certain society (Rothstein 1996). Such definitions tie the idea of institutions to formal rules (written or not) or constitutional orders, often excluding the influ-ence of more informal norms or cultural traditions in any wider sense.

Against this narrower conceptualization of institutions Friedland & Alford (1991) warn that the social sciences are retreating from society as a locus of explanation of social phenomena beacuse fo-cus is increasingly shifted towards utilitarian individuals or power oriented organizations (the State being the primary example) as central to social explanations. Drawing on sociological theory they contend that ‘state policies are not only technical solutions to ma-terial problems of control or resource extraction; they are rooted in changing conceptions of what the state is, what it can and should do’ (Friedland & Alford 1991, 237), underlining the importance of wider social structures for explaining social processes. Following this argument they define institutions as:

[…] simultaneously material and ideal, systems of signs and symbols, rational and transrational. Institutions are supraorganizational patterns of human activity by which indi-viduals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence and organize time and space. They are also symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality, and thereby rendering experi-ence of time and space meaningful (Friedland & Alford 1991, 243).

In contrast to the way Rothstein (1996) describes the importance of the (relatively formal) political institutions for solving problems of collective action, Friedland and Alford (1991) claim that the meaning making made possible by institutions, as well as their con-tradictory nature, comprise the very preconditions for any kind of political agency. They argue that ‘some of the most important struggles between groups, organizations and classes are over the

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appropriate relationships between institutions, and by which insti-tutional logic different activities should be regarded and to which categories of persons they apply’ (Friedland & Alford 1991, 256). As is obvious, Friedland and Alford argue for the coexistence of a number of different institutional logics within society, creating in-stitutional contradictions through which individuals and organiza-tions negotiate, struggle and cooperate in different ways. Actors are, however, constantly dependent upon these institutional con-tradictions within which they act, as their material and symbolic structures facilitate the meaning making of such social actors. This is because

Institutions constrain not only the ends to which their behavior should be directed, but the means to which those ends are achieved. They provide individuals with vocabularies of motives and with a sense of self. […] institutions set the limits on the very nature of rationality and, by implication, of individuality. Nonetheless, individuals, groups, and organizations try to use institutional orders to their own advantage (Friedland & Alford 1991, 251).

According to the understanding of Friedland and Alford, actors – be they individuals or collective units – are not completely subject-ed to these structures, as the contradictions creatsubject-ed by the coexist-ing institutional logics open spaces for such actors to produce new truths and stories of themselves in relation to the structures that surround them. Consequently, it is, according to Friedland and Al-ford, ‘through the actions of individuals and organizations [that] the institutional structures of society are not simply reproduced, but transformed’ (Friedland & Alford 1991, 254-255). Without denying the inertia created by the structural pressure of institution-al logics, the model developed by Friedland and Alford underline the need for agency in order to be able to account for any kind of institutional change without ending up in hyper-individualistic ra-tional-choice explanations. They argue that individuals or groups ‘can manipulate or reinterpret symbols and practices’ and that ‘un-der certain circumstances they are artful in the mobilization of

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dif-ferent institutional logics to serve their purposes’ (Friedland and Alford 1991, 254). As a consequence, they stress the importance of what could be called a kind of ‘symbolic politics’, as institutions are thought to comprise material as well as symbolic resources and that, as a result, ‘individual participation in various social relations should be analyzed not only in terms of the material interests that operations of the institutions serve, but in terms of the symbolic meaningfulness of that participation’ (Friedland & Alford 1991, 250), underlining the centrality of identity as a source of meaning making from which the possibilities for agency on behalf of differ-ent actors can be assessed.

Since the publication of the work of Friedland and Alford (1991), other theoretical understandings accounting for change through this kind of ‘embedded agency’ have developed elaborat-ing on the importance of identity and ‘interpretative struggles’ not far removed from the idea of the importance of the symbolic di-mensions of institutional logics. Hardy and Maguire (2008) argue that there are some circumstances under which the constraining pressure of institutionalized fields may lessen, enabling actors to engage in processes of struggle over the meaning and future of the field itself; to become, what they call, institutional entrepreneurs. One such situation is cases of growing field uncertainty or crisis, as

[…] disruptive events are capable of ‘ending what has become locked in by institutional inertia’ through the way they create ‘disruptive uncertainty for individual organizations, forcing the initiation of unorthodox experiments that diverge from estab-lished practice’ and ‘throwing entire industries into the throes of quantum change’ (Hardy & Maguire 2008, 204).

The space for agency made available is, however, of a specific kind. Taking a stance in opposition to an understanding of ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ as powerful and purposeful individual actors im-plementing their own agenda without opposition, Hardy and Maguire (2008, 205) prefer a view of the processes of entrepre-neurship made possible as ‘ongoing struggles over meaning among numerous actors, the outcomes of which are not necessarily

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pre-dictable or controllable’. In this way, they underline what they call the symbolic aspects of institutional change (cf. Friedland & Alford 1991), emphasizing the way that all actors within an institutional field draw upon a variety of discourses (or institutional logics in the terminology of Freidland & Alford) in order to find ways of framing processes of change in a way corresponding to their own desired outcomes within this ‘interpretative struggle’ over meaning. The closeness between the arguments of Hardy and Maguire and Friedland and Alford is further underlined as research on institu-tional entrepreneurialism focus ‘attention on the symbolic aspects of institutional change and, specifically, on how actors draw on different discourses, and find new ways to frame and theorize change’ (Hardy & Maguire 2008, 205). What is emphasized here is, thus, the struggle over how the relationship between different kinds of actors and institutional logics are to be understood. In this respect the identity of the actors become central, as ‘both institu-tionalism and identity have meaning at their core; as well, both theories offer accounts of the creation and role of meaning in the constitution and practices of organizations’ (Glynn 2008, 413).

From an institutional perspective, identity ‘is a set of claims to a social category’, underlining the fact that it is viewed as something pointing at ‘an actor’s position within an established set of catego-ries […] rather than a set of essential attributes’ (Glynn 2008, 419). In this way, an institutional understanding of identity highlights the importance of social meanings and structures within which or-ganizations are embedded, as well as the proposition that ‘these categories are defined by a set of symbolic boundaries that function in the construction of valued identities’ (Glynn 2008, 421). Being associated with a certain category is, thereby, a way of acquiring the public legitimacy needed for long-term organizational survival. Such institutionalized categories, Glynn (2008, 425) argues – in addition to being frameworks for public recognition – provide ‘ex-pectations about how actors should perform an identity in specific situations’, thus emphasizing the role of identity as a kind of insti-tutional force ‘that governs organizational behavior and choice; although it can at times limit choices, it also enables and advances action’. In other words, being associated with a certain social

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cate-gory – enabling certain identities – determines, to a significant de-gree, the variety of actions and symbolic resources considered available to a specific actor (individual or collective) at a certain time. Glynn states:

Institutions serve up the resources for identity-work in organi-zations by supplying cognitive templates for both the form (grammar) and content (meanings; symbols) of organizational identities. Further, by sanctioning (or legitimating) some partic-ular identity representations (or symbols) over others, an insti-tutional perspective on identity suggests that some identities may be more potent that others in particular historical periods (Glynn 2008, 426).

In the case of this work, being identified as belonging to the social category of the professions may, in other words, be of great im-portance for the Teacher Unions, as it may provide them with symbolic (and material) resources useful in order to improve the social status of their members.

The centrality of professions and professionalism within the in-stitutional approach sketched out above will be elaborated upon below. Before that, however, the next section will discuss the ways that institutions affect organizations in different ways. By doing so, it will elaborate upon the view from which the Teacher Unions are considered in this work. Being organizations within a certain insti-tutional field, they are both constrained and empowered by the in-stitutional framework within which they act. Within neo-institutional theory the study of such neo-institutional effects upon or-ganizations and their influence over processes of organizational change has been given much attention (Greenwood et al. 2008). In the next section, this research will be discussed in order to clarify the way that the Teacher Unions are understood.

2.2 Institutions and Organizations

In this thesis, the Teacher Unions are objects of analysis in their capacity as the collective ‘voices’ of Swedish teachers. As such they are analyzed as organizations with the purpose of representing

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their members’ interests in different ways. Even if the theoretical model presented in this section where developed for analysis of formal organizations, like schools, and not for analyses of associa-tions, like the Teacher Unions, DiMaggio and Powell (1991b) nev-ertheless stress the fact that professional or trade associations do have a significant role to play within different institutional frame-works, and are, just like formal organizations, affected by the insti-tutional fields within which they are embedded. In fact, Hol-lingsworth and Boyer (1997, 13) argue that associations are, in fact, ‘formal organizations […] [that] typically coordinate actors engaged in the same or similar kinds of activities’.

In this thesis, however, the associations in question – the Teacher Unions – are not considered just coordinating mechanisms, but as collective social actors in their own right, engaged in ‘interpretative struggles’ over the meaning of teachers work within the conflicting institutional logics present in the reform processes currently affect-ing the educational system of Sweden. As is obvious from the dis-cussion above, the only way to account for change under institu-tional pressure is to allow room for agency of some sort. Organiza-tions can, by using the room for agency available, become institu-tional entrepreneurs, who within interpretative struggles among numerous actors, may negotiate or conflict over the relationship between institutional logics and the actors subjected to them. In these struggles, identity plays a key role as it constitute categories through which actors may draw on particular resources (materi-al/symbolic) in order to pursue their goals. However, as will be highlighted below, organizations are not free to pursue whatever actions or strategies they want. As embedded parts of certain insti-tutional fields, they are subjected to the dominant instiinsti-tutional structures of the field in question.

In the very influential introductory chapter of their edited vol-ume The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, DiMag-gio and Powell (1991a) argue that ‘the new institutionalism in or-ganization theory tends to focus on a broad but finite slice of soci-ology’s institutional cornucopia: organizational structures and pro-cesses that are industrywide, national or international in scope. In-deed […] [it] takes as a starting point the striking homogeneity of

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practices and arrangements found in the labor market, in schools, states and corporations’ (DiMaggio & Powell 1991a, 9).

The theory was introduced in an influential article by Meyer & Rowan (1977), who formulated a critique of older versions of in-stitutionalism, rational-choice and functionalist accounts of organ-izational development (Greenwood et al 2008; Powell & DiMaggio 1991a; Pierson 2000). Against earlier arguments focused on delib-erate intentions and the creation of effective organizational struc-tures Meyer & Rowan (1977) emphasized the importance of the institutional context and its inherent ‘logic of appropriateness’ as the central forces shaping organizational development. In the in-troduction to their article they argue that

[…] organizations are driven to incorporate the practices and procedures defined by prevailing rationalized concepts of organ-izational work and institutionalized in society. Organizations that do so increase their legitimacy and their survival prospects, independent of the immediate efficacy of the acquired practices and procedures (Meyer & Rowan 1977, 340).

For organizations to obtain legitimacy they are forced to adhere to the rationalized myths of a given society regardless of their effects on the effectiveness of the organization in question. This institu-tional pressure leads to a process of isomorphism, forcing organi-zations to transform in line with what is deemed appropriate in certain institutional environments since organizations successful in ‘becoming isomorphic with these environments gain the legitimacy and resources needed to survive’ (Mayer & Rowan 1977, 352). Organizations whose technologies are not clearly linked to certain outcomes or whose output results are hard to evaluate are extra sensitive of and dependent upon their institutional environment and its’ rationalized myths. Meyer & Rowan (1977) argues that schools and governmental bureaucracies are examples of such insti-tutionalized organizations ‘whose success depends on the confi-dence and stability achieved by isomorphism with institutional rules’ (Meyer & Rowan 1977, 354). The result of these processes is a growing similarity between organizations in a certain

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institution-al environment, based primarily on the need for legitimacy and not on deliberate efforts of effective organization. However, as these institutionalized organizations morph ceremoniously with the gen-eralized myths of a given institutional setting, inconsistencies are created between ceremonial requirements and the day-to-day tech-nical activities of organizational practice. In order to avoid uncer-tainty and accusations of inefficiency and inconsistency institution-alized organizations, such as schools, decouple their formal struc-tures from the practical aspects of their daily business. In other words, in order to achieve the isomorphic status required for social legitimacy, decoupling strategies ‘enables organizations to maintain standardized, legitimating, formal structures while their activities vary in response to practical considerations’ (Meyer & Rowan 1977, 357).

Extending the thinking of Meyer and Rowan and others, Di-Maggio and Powell (1991b, 66) contend that ‘institutional isomor-phism is a useful tool for understanding the politics and ceremony that pervade much modern organizational life’. They claim that it is possible to advance a number of hypotheses concerning in what kind of circumstances isomorphic processes are most likely to oc-cur. For our purposes – studying the Teacher Unions’ actions with-in the educational system of Sweden –, two of their hypotheses are of extra importance at the level of organizations. First of all, if the relationship between an organization’s means and ends are uncer-tain, like in institutionalized organizations, ‘the greater the extent to which an organization will model itself after organizations it perceives as successful’ (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b, 75). Likewise, organizations with ambiguous or unclear goals are more likely to model themselves upon other organizations perceived as more prosperous. The reason for this is because of the point made by Meyer and Rowan (1977) that institutionalized organizations, characterized by decoupling strategies and goal ambiguity, are highly dependent upon ‘appearances for legitimacy’ (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b) for their survival. At the level of organizational fields three hypotheses are of extra interest. First, if the organiza-tions in a specific field are dependent, to a large extent, on a single source for support and resources the likelihood of isomorphic

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pro-cesses to occur increases. Secondly, and closely connected to the first, if there are extensive transactions, in a specific field, between its’ organizations and the State, a high level of isomorphism should be expected and, finally, if the level of professionalization within the field is prominent, the level of institutional isomorphic change is thought to increase (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b).

However, as is argued by Greenwood et al (2008), developments within organizational institutionalism soon turned towards ques-tion of how to account for change under such, rather structural, isomorphic pressures. This is the context within which Friedland and Alford (1991) developed the argument of conflicting institu-tional logics presented above, and where the ideas of ‘embedded agency’ and the importance of identity for institutional change were developed (Hardy & Maguire 2008; Glynn 2008).

After the publication of the article by Meyer and Rowan (1977), the importance of questions of legitimacy for organizational sur-vival within institutional fields has remained at center stage within the tradition of organizational institutionalism. According to Deephouse and Suchman (2008), the study of legitimacy within the social sciences was introduced in the sociology of Max Weber. At a very fundamental level, Deephouse and Suchman (2008, 50) claim that Weber argued that legitimacy resulted from ‘conformity with both general social norms and formal laws’. Even if Meyer and Rowan (1977) never actually defined legitimacy in their text, Mey-er and Scott provided a more extensive explanation of the concept a few years later. They claimed that

[…] legitimacy refers to the degree of cultural support for an organization – the extent to which the array or established cul-tural accounts provide explanations for its existence, function-ing, and jurisdiction, and lack or deny alternatives […] A com-pletely legitimate organization would be one about which no questions could be raised (Meyer & Scott 1983, cited in Deephouse and Suchman 2008, 50).

This definition is about legitimacy in relation to formal organiza-tions. However, in 1985, Knoke defined legitimacy in relation to

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political associations and interest groups as ‘the acceptance by the general public and by relevant elite organizations of an associa-tion’s right to exist and to pursue its affairs in its chosen manner’ (Knoke 1985, cited in Deephouse & Suchman 2008, 51).

According to Suchman (1995, 587), the most obvious strategy for building legitimacy is to ‘simply position [ones] organization within a preexisting institutional regime’. Being very closely aligned with the discussion of symbolic resources and conflicting institu-tional logics above, organizations searching for ways to create le-gitimacy in changing environments may deploy ‘efforts to embed

new structures and practices in networks of other already legiti-mate institutions’ (Suchman 1995, 588). In this respect, strategies of ‘imitation’, ‘translation’ and ‘editing’ (Sahlin-Andersson 1996; Sahlin & Wedlin 2008; Eriksson-Zetterqvist 2009) become central tools in order for an organization to adapt to or align their practic-es or identity with already legitimate institutional categoripractic-es.

As is claimed by DiMaggio and Powell, ‘when organizational technologies are poorly understood […], when goals are ambigu-ous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty, organ-izations may model themselves on other organorgan-izations’ (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b, 69) thought to be the most secure, successful or legitimate in the field. These ‘mimetic processes’ are not to be con-sidered pure translations of the modeled organizations but as ra-tionalized stories of certain practices (Sahlin-Andersson 1996). The change occurring in these processes of imitation results in the spread, not of specific practices per se but of standardized models of such practices. According to Sahlin-Andersson (1996), this opens up space for interpretation and translation in relation to the model used by the modeling organization in question, underlining the argument by Friedland and Alford (1991) and Hardy and Maguire (2008) that organizations may use – or adopt – symbolic systems from other fields or organizations in order to increase their own legitimacy in various ways. As these standardized models are translated they are also changed, or edited, to suit the specific situ-ation and the specific audiences in relsitu-ation to which the imitsitu-ation is supposed to build legitimacy. Mimetic processes are, thus, simul-taneously making organizations similar at a general level, while

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dif-ferences remain due to the locality of translations and the editing needed to make the imitations functional within the ‘new’ context or organization.

Another central strategy for organizations wanting to build or increase their public legitimacy is to pursue strategies of profes-sionalization (Suchman 1995). The centrality of profesprofes-sionalization for processes of legitimacy, as well as the important role played by professions within institutional theory at large and because of the centrality of those connections for the present thesis, the following final section of this chapter will elaborate somewhat on these is-sues.

2.3 Institutionalism and Professionalism

According to DiMaggio and Powell (1991b) professionalization is considered a central mechanism in the creation of isomorphic pres-sure on organizations within institutional fields. They describe the importance of professions for the creation of institutional isomor-phism in the following way:

Two aspects of professionalization are important sources of isomorphism. One is the resting of formal education and of le-gitimation in a cognitive base produced by university specialists; the second is the growth and elaboration of professional net-works that span organizations and across which new models diffuse rapidly. Universities and professional training institu-tions are important centers for the development of organiza-tional norms amongst professional managers and their staff. Professional and trade associations are another vehicle for the definition and promulgation of normative rules about organiza-tional and professional behavior (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b, 71).

In the terminology of Scott (2008b, 233), professions are occupa-tions, or social agents, that create, convey and apply ‘cultural-cognitive, normative, and/or regulative frameworks that govern one or another social sphere’. In other words, they ‘function as in-stitutional agents – as definers, interpreters, and appliers of

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institu-tional elements’, thereby being ‘the most influential, contemporary crafters of institutions’ (Scott 2008b, 223). As such, Scott claims that professionalism in itself constitutes an institutional model (or logic) governing the social structures regulating knowledge work in contemporary societies. As such, the model is constantly being re-defined or changed, resulting in the importance of understanding that the occupational groups we label as professions ‘vary from time to time and from place to place’ (Scott 2008b, 233).

Leicht and Fennell (2008, 433-434) – while underlining the role of professional schools and professional associations as groups ‘that exert normative pressure through their socialization (and con-tinued re-socialization) of occupational incumbents’ – argue that social transformations in the institutional environment of the pro-fessions are challenging their traditional high status position within the division of labor (Leicht & Fennell 2008). This challenge – in the case of the welfare professions – stems from shifts in the insti-tutional environment towards New Public Management (NPM)-styles of public service provision and new technologies transforming the traditional ways of delivering professional services and thereby the foundational relationships between profes-sionals and their clients. In the words of DiMaggio and Powell:

The increased professionalization of workers whose futures are inextricably bound up with the fortunes of the organizations that employ them has rendered obsolescent (if not obsolete) the dichotomy between organizational commitment and profes-sional allegiance that characterized traditional profesprofes-sionals in earlier organizations […] Professions are subject to the same co-ercive and mimetic pressures as are organizations (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b, 71).

As is obvious from the discussion above, professionalism and pro-fessionalization play key roles both as institutional forces in them-selves, and as the foundation for strategic projects employed by or-ganizations in order to create and maintain legitimacy in relation to different audiences, not least the general public and state author-ities. This becomes obvious, in the context of this study, as it is a

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central concept in discussions of the future of the Swedish educa-tional system and the teachers working within it, used by education policymakers and the Teacher Unions alike. But how are we to un-derstand the meaning of being professional and how can we ex-plain the apparent flexibility in the use of the concept in discus-sions on reforms aimed at improving present-day public-service systems? In the next chapter, focus will be given to a discussion of developments within the sociology of professions needed in order to understand the arguments of this thesis.

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3. PROFESSIONAL THEORY

The second theoretical perspective used in this thesis is that of pro-fessional theory. The purpose of this work is to understand how the idea of teacher professionalism is constructed by the Teacher Unions within Swedish educational policy debates. The chapter aims to provide an understanding of a traditional way of concep-tualizing professions and professionalism and to discuss ways in which this conceptualization has been challenged in the wake of public service deregulation reforms, and with what consequences for occupations striving towards professionalization. The chapter also presents the concept of ‘professional projects’ and some cen-tral aspects associated with claiming control of a professional ju-risdiction as tools for analyzing the policies of the Teacher Unions.

3.1 Professionalism as an Institutional Logic

Throughout the history of the sociology of professions the question of how to define a ‘profession’ in relation to other occupational groups has been a central area of debate and contestation. Today, the distinctions between professions and other occupational groups are even more complex due to the fact that, as Fournier (1999) ar-gues, the concept of ‘professionalism’ has become related to occu-pational groups never before thought of as being ‘professional’. According to Dent and Whitehead (2002), being a professional has become the leitmotif of work in postmodern society as we are all expected to perform ‘professionally’.

Crompton (1990) claims that the word ‘profession’ has different meanings in different contexts. She states that, in English, the

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con-cept has ‘inescapable moral overtones, whereas in French, for ex-ample, the word is a descriptive term translating as “occupation”’ (Crompton 1990, 149). Dating back to the time of Durkheim, the different efforts of defining the essential properties of professions have described them variously as being occupations built upon the normative value of professionalism and, thereby, being of vital im-portance for the stability of social systems; as having certain essen-tial properties or ‘traits’ – autonomy, discretion, code of ethics, al-truism etc. –, or as being powerful social agents capable of execut-ing activities or strategies for preservexecut-ing their already prominent social position (Svensson & Evetts 2010; Molander & Terum 2008). However, as is argued by Svensson and Evetts (2010, 10), ‘it no longer seems important to draw a hard and fast line between professions and occupations but, instead, to regard both as similar social forms which share many common characteristics’1_{. This}

elas-ticity when it comes to the question of definition is important, among other things because of the fact that, as Fransson and Jonnergård (2009) argue, some of the most interesting develop-ments and challenges within contemporary sociology of professions are the growing professional aspirations of what was earlier re-ferred to as the semi-professions (Etzioni 1969), for example teach-ers, nurses and social workers. These are all occupational groups not considered fully professional in any classical way of under-standing the concept, not least because of their, traditionally, strong association with and dependence upon state bureaucracies.

As the question of defining what separates professions from oth-er occupations seemed hard to resolve, the focus, within research on professions, shifted somewhat from the concept of ‘profession’ to analyses of ‘professionalism’ within different kinds of work con-texts.

As the focus of this study is upon the professional aspirations of the Swedish Teacher Unions it is, however, important to have an idea of what a traditional understanding of professionalism implies

1_{Brante (2011, 4) however, argues that ’if the study of the professions is or seeks to be a discipline of}

its own, its object of study must be ”constituted” as a specific object of knowledge’. He argues that professions must be clearly distinguishable from other types of social phenomena if the sociology of professions is not to be ‘part of ordinary work-life research, or the sociology of organizations’.

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in order to get an appreciation of what it is the Unions seek to achieve. In this context, Freidson’s (1994, 2001) idea of profes-sionalism as a specific logic of work organization provides such an ‘ideal-type’ image of what being professional comprises, and indi-rectly summarizes a classical way of understanding the foundation-al vfoundation-alues of occupations normfoundation-ally classified as being professions. This ideal-type includes the following five characteristics:

1. specialized work in the officially recognized economy that is believed to be grounded in a body of theoretically based, discretionary knowledge and skill and that is accordingly given special status in the labor force;

2. exclusive jurisdiction in a particular division of labor creat-ed and controllcreat-ed by occupational negotiation;

3. a sheltered position in both external and internal labor markets that is based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation;

4. a formal training program lying outside the labor market that produces the qualifying credentials, which is controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education; and

5. an ideology that asserts greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of work (Freidson 2001, 127).

This ideal-type professionalism, however, has been criticized – as have many studies on professions and professionalism – for being narrowly constructed from analyses of the occupational circum-stances of medicine and law within Anglo-American societies. Con-sequently, Crompton (1990, 150) states that ‘the status of “the professions” in Britain and the United States is a consequence of this particular historical legacy, and [that] it would now be widely accepted that “profession” is not a generic or universal concept in Sociology, but is, rather, specific and Anglo-American’. There is, of course, merit in this kind of criticism, not least the argument by Brante (2010) that different kinds of state formations tend to gen-erate different kinds of ‘professional types’ as there is ‘an

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im-portant structural association between, ultimately, social formation and the development of professions’ (Brante 2010, 76). Conse-quently, there is reason to assume that it is not unproblematic to use Freidson’s theory in an analysis of professions in a Scandinavi-an context, as there are fundamental differences in the social for-mation of Anglo-American and Scandinavian societies. However, Freidson’s model of professionalism is used, in this work, primarily as a way of understanding professionalism as a kind of institution-alized ideal-type logic of work organization that may be desirable for occupations in differing social contexts. This desirability is spread across the world not least because of the centrality of pro-fessional terminology – however defined – within international trends of welfare system restructuring. Furthermore, as is argued by Svensson and Evetts (2010), the recent transformations of the welfare states of Scandinavian countries may have diminished the differences between the traditional model of Scandinavian welfare societies and other kinds of state formations resulting in a reevalu-ation of the usefulness of professional theory for understanding contemporary occupational/professional developments within these contexts.

3.1.1 The Organizational Challenge to Professionalism

As a result of contemporary transformations of welfare bureaucra-cies (such as the Swedish) into smaller and more autonomous or-ganizations for public service provision (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson 2000), practically all professional work today takes place within or is dependent upon some kind of organization, pub-lically or privately managed. As a result of the increasing intercon-nectedness between professions and these organizations, the re-search interest in the processes and dynamics of professionalism within organizational structures has increased (Muzio & Kirkpat-rick 2011). A central issue within this research concerns the effects on the traditional way of understanding professionalism (Freidson 2001) by the increasing importance of the logic of work organiza-tions and their management, following upon the dismantling of the organizational settlement of the traditional welfare state (Clarke & Newman 1997; Evetts 2013).

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Evetts (2010) presents three different ways of understanding professionalism in contemporary societies. The first departs from what she calls the positive view of professionalism as a normative value, a view originating in the work of Parsons and being closely connected to the ideal-type logic of professionalism developed by Freidson (2001). In this version, ‘professional relations are charac-terized as collegial, cooperative and mutually supportive and rela-tions of trust characterize practitioner/client and practition-er/employer interactions’ (Evetts 2010, 126). As a consequence of these strong relations of trust, within this view of professionalism the external imposition of rules governing work are minimized and the discretionary freedom of professional practitioners, based on recognized expertise and competences, are maximized.

The second, and more pessimistic, take on professionalism, ac-cording to Evetts (2010, 127), as primarily developed in the works of Johnson (1972) and Larson (1977/2013) in the 1970s, regarded professionalism as primarily ‘a successful ideology’ and strategies of professionalization as ‘processes of market closure and monopo-ly control of work’ designed to improve the rewards and occupa-tional self-interest of already powerful occupaoccupa-tional groups.

The third version of professionalism combines the two opposing views presented above as it argues that professionalism must be understood as a discourse of occupational change and control within work organizations ‘applied and utilized by managers’ (Evetts 2010, 127). Fournier (1999) claims that in this view, pro-fessionalism works as a disciplinary mechanism, primarily when it is introduced into occupational contexts not normally considered ‘professional’. By using the desires of members of a certain occupa-tion to be considered, or to feel like, professionals the rhetoric of the normative value of professionalism is applied but, simultane-ously, transformed into a discourse ‘which inscribes “autonomous” professional practice within a network of accountability and gov-erns professional conduct at a distance’ (Fournier 1999, 280). Muzio and Kirkpatrick (2011, 397) argue that

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According to this view normative discourses are deployed ‘from above’ by organizations to socialize and reshape individual identities around corporate priorities – thus achieving ‘control at a distance’. The effect is to legitimize processes of occupa-tional change, which paradoxically favor raoccupa-tionalization, stand-ardization and accountability over individual autonomy, discre-tion and judgment.

The appeal of professionalism as a normative occupational value is transformed into a discourse of control used by managers in order to facilitate processes of change within organizations, as being pro-fessional is transformed into doing ones best in order for the or-ganization as a whole to achieve, often externally set, performance targets. As Evetts (2010, 131) claims, ‘the work organization’s management demands for quality control and audit, target setting and performance review become reinterpreted as the promotion of professionalism’.

The increasing influence of what Svensson (2010) refers to as market legitimacy has forced professionals to standardize or codify their knowledge and competencies in order to make them possible to put into contracts or to be evaluated in retrospect. Evetts (2010, 137) claims that ‘professional work is defined as service products to be marketed, price-tagged and individually evaluated and remuner-ated’. The competencies of professionals are, in other words, trans-formed into commodities for sale on the public service market, re-sulting in severe consequences for the relationships of trust so central to the notion of professionalism as a normative value and as a dis-tinct third logic of work organization (cf. Hanlon 1998). The rela-tionship between employers and professionals within marketized public service organizations are transformed as each individual prac-titioner’s performance must be maximized in order for the organiza-tion to reach its often pre-set targets, for which management is held accountable in relation to external stakeholders as well as client-customers. The work of professional practitioners must, as a result, be subordinate to processes of managerial supervision, assessment and audit, comprising the very opposite of relations built on trust in the expertise of professional practitioners.

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The increase of organizational professionalism within work or-ganizations has also fundamentally changed the relationship be-tween professionals and their clients as ‘the establishment of quasi-markets, customer satisfaction surveys and evaluations, quality measures and payment by results’ (Evetts 2010, 137) have trans-formed the former relationships of trust into relationships between customers and a variety of different competing service product providers. Drawing on the work of Reed, Muzio and Kirkpatrick (2011, 395) state that ‘it has been suggested that the longer-term trajectory [for professional work as described by Freidson] is one of cultural demystification, managerial routinization, technological commoditization and, in short, deprofessionalization’. So, why is it then, that the attractiveness of professionalism as an occupational value continues to work its magic on occupational groups not normally considered self-evident members of ‘the professions’?

One very simple answer to this question is that occupational groups, not traditionally described as professions, embrace the pos-sibility of being associated with professionalism because ‘it is per-ceived to be a way of improving the occupation’s status and re-wards collectively and individually’ (Evetts 2003, 409). Additional-ly, Evetts argues, the external introduction of professional termi-nology – however defined – in relation to aspiring occupations may also inspire the initiation of internal strategies for professionaliza-tion as some occupaprofessionaliza-tions have ‘been able to use the normative as-pects (and the discourse) [of professionalism] in constructing its occupational identity, promoting its image with clients and cus-tomers, and in bargaining with the states to secure and maintain its (sometimes self) regulatory responsibilities’.

These arguments are much in line with the discussion of the im-portance of professions and professionalism within the institutional framework presented in the previous chapter. In this way, profes-sionalism, as described by Freidson (2001), may be regarded as a kind of institutional logic, containing certain symbolic resources, (cf. Friedland & Alford 1991; Hardy & Maguire 2008), used by organizations wanting to secure or increase legitimacy within a given institutional field. However, it is obvious that the organiza-tional logic characterizing contemporary processes of public service

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reform are challenging the traditional meaning ascribed to profes-sionalism in fundamental ways, contributing to the flexibility or elusiveness surrounding the use of it within, for example, debates on reforms relating to the work of teachers.

3.2 Professional Projects: Strategies of Professionalization

As was argued by Lundström (2007), after the external introduc-tion of professional terminology in relaintroduc-tion to Swedish teachers in public policy documents on education, a professional discourse evolved within the policy rhetoric of the Swedish Teacher Unions, making the professionalization of teaching into a central political ambition.

Professionalization is normally understood as ‘the collective struggle of members of an occupation to define the conditions and methods of their work, to control “the production of producers” […] and to establish a cognitive base and legitimation for their oc-cupational identity’ (DiMaggio & Powell 1991b, 70). Expressed somewhat differently, Evetts (2013, 5) defines the concept of pro-fessionalization as ‘the process to achieve the status of profession [which] has been interpreted as the process to pursue, develop and maintain the closure of the occupational group in order to main-tain practitioners’ own occupational self-interests in terms of sala-ry, status and power as well as the monopoly protection of the oc-cupational jurisdiction’. Inherent in both these definitions is an as-sumption of professionalization as a process actively pursued by occupational groups, underlining a view of these occupational groups as social actors. In his defense of the work of Larson, MacDonald (1995, 12) states that researchers should ‘regard social processes as the product of individual and collective actions’, thereby distancing himself (and Larson) from ‘stratification theo-ries’ of, in this case, the development of professions, thought to be too static to provide useful explanations of processes of profes-sionalization. This process, MacDonald (1995) argues, is better understood through the use of Larson’s (1977/2013) concept of ‘professional project’.

Larson (1977/2013, 104) suggests that the professional project ‘can be identified by its related objectives of market monopoly and

Negotiating teacher professionalism : on the symbolic politics of Sweden&apos;s teacher unions

PETER LILJA