Several Western welfare states have recently implemented some sort of market inspired reforms of there public educational systems. The marketisation of public education has typically implied the introduction of free school choice, voucher systems, competition among schools, and deregulation. As a consequence, teachers’ roles in school are under alteration. Today, the teachers are not only expected to implement national curriculum and use their skills and knowledge to support the learning processes of there pupils. Teachers are also expected to take on the role of being creative sellers of their schools. Not surprisingly, marketisation of public education has commonly induced popular debates in countries where such reforms have taken place. Market proponents emphasise the potential of marketisation as a key to development while market critics claim worries about the loss of traditional values of public education as a result of marketisation. No matter of standpoint, both kinds of arguments are based on the assumption that marketisation of education truly influences teachers. However, does marketisation of public education matters for the ways teachers practice their profession? Despite a clear public interest in the issue, the willingness of grasping the consequences of marketisation for public education has been surprisingly low among educational scientists. For researchers interested in effects from marketisation in public education, Sweden is a particularly interesting case. Sweden has gone from being one of the most regulated public educational regimes of the world to be one of the least regulated systems. Even though marketisation has generally transformed the Swedish high school system on an institutional level, the institutional impact of market based reforms is not equally distributed over the country. Institutional differences are manifested on both the municipal and local school level. While some municipalities to a larger extent organise its high school education in accordance to market principles, others remain more traditional in the way they organisation the production of public education. As a consequence, the competition between high schools is now far-reaching in some municipalities while other municipalities experience significantly less competition. Also, profit-based schools are now operating alongside with public schools within the public educational system and several stock companies are now producing public education. Based on theoretical arguments manly founded in public administration literature, market norms are assumed to be more prevalent among teachers working in profit-based schools and in high competition municipalities since such institutional contexts particularly promote market standards. In the light the of the Swedish case, the proposed paper test whether high school teachers working in municipalities with a high degree of competition practice their profession differently than teachers working in low competition municipalities. Also, it is tested whether teachers in profit-based schools practice their profession differently than teachers working in public schools. Finally, the impact of competition and school-responsibility is related to the impact of individual variables. The results show, on the one hand, that teachers who are working in profit-based schools to a larger extent practice their profession in correspondence to market principles. On the other hand, when controlling for both institutionally and individually bound variables, there is no evidence of impact from competition on teachers’ practice of their work. However, analysis indicate that both the teaching subject, social class belonging and ideological preferences among teachers are likewise determent for how teachers practice their work in the classrooms. More surprisingly, the educational level of individual teachers seems to have no impact on how teachers practice their work.

The results are based on both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative interviews with Swedish high school teachers as well as a survey including Swedish high school teachers constitute the empirical base of the project. Hence, a significant part of the paper reports results from statistical analysis.

Marketisation of public education influences teachers’ practice of their work. On the one hand, being employed by a profit-based school increases the incentives for teachers to act in accordance with market principles. Hence, teachers working in profit-based schools to a larger extent base their decisions on market norms in comparison to public school teachers. On the other hand, the results indicate a weak impact of competition among schools for how teachers practice of their work. Marketisation of education is, however, not the only reason why individual teachers lean on market based principles in their practice of their work. Individual variables can explain a lot of the variation between teachers in regards to how the practice their profession.