The global discourse of quality, competitiveness, efficiency and effectiveness as a precondition for the survival and the welfare of nations in a rapidly changing environment impinges upon the totality of social and political life and to a large extent shapes the underlying assumptions that inform the formulation of education policy. Educational research over the last decade or so has been mainly preoccupied with the way this discourse has been employed by national and supranational organizations to justify top down educational restructuring across the globe. Adopting the reverse point of departure, the paper focuses on the way the selective appropriation of this global discourse by other strategic agents activated in the field of education policy, is utilized to further certain sectoral interests. In this sense, the paper conceptualizes global discursive imperatives, not only as constraints within which strategic agents are obliged to maneuver, but also as resources that can facilitate strategic action. Utilizing Giddens' structuration theory and Mouzelis' concept of hierarchical positioning of social agents, the paper examines the institutionalisation of a certain type of teachers' continuing education in Greece. According to structuration theory, social transformation is the outcome of an interplay between structures, defined as rules and resources, which are appropriated by agents with strategic orientations. However, the appropriation of these structural capacities is not symmetrically distributed to all social agents in social hierarchies. This "restructuring of structuration theory" on the one hand opens up space for an investigation of policy formulation in terms of the interaction of hiearchically situated strategic agents, while on the other retains a conceptualization of agency as knowledgeable and reflexive transformative action. Drawing upon the analysis of focused interviews conducted with key agents and the content analysis of policy documents, the paper highlights the way the specific education policy was shaped by the operation of formal and informal networks of interactive agents. However, as this case study indicates, strategic action was denser and more transformative at the bottom rather than the top of the hierarchy. This implies that education policy is not always subject to top down restructuring, rational planning, or global and regional imperatives, but involves bottom up strategic interaction and sectoral interests.