From late 1970s onwards the Western world gained much greater uniformity in terms of preferred goals and standards of policy. The practices of corporate governance including emphasis on efficiency and accountability permeated professions traditionally funded by state, such as teachers and medical workers. The term GERM (Global Education Reform Movement), coined by the Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg (2010), captures the essence of this movement which interprets education systems as tools for raising the competitiveness of national economies. The ideology that undergirds the movement is known as neoliberalism and it includes at least three defining features: application of New Public Management, standardization and increasing accountability of schools, teachers and other actors in education. However, the policy applications and responses to neoliberal ideas and reforms take different forms in various societies and education systems. Moreover, the transformation of different education systems according to neoliberal principles has happened at their own pace.

The first signs of neoliberalism in education occurred in Western countries such as UK and United States in mid- to late 1980s and by early 1990s these ideas had reached the former Soviet Union which followed these developments with a delay. Since at least 1985 socialist countries were thrown into the rapid flow of events following Perestroika in the USSR which led to the deterioration of socialist welfarism within less than a decade. As teaching obviously belongs to the scope of ‘welfare professions’ (Brante, 1989) it has undergone a shock of adjustment to a new reality both in former socialist countries in 1980s and 1990s. Fundamental changes (Waks, 2007) apparently would not have been possible had they not been accompanied by the transformation of values and routines of teaching profession.

The application of neoliberal ideas in very different political, economic and cultural contexts brought about various consequences and challenges for education systems and the teaching profession, including the change of the concept of teacher professionalism and the need for developing a new type of professionalism for the market economy. The symposium concentrates on the reforms and developments of educational institutions and the teaching profession from the mid-1980s in the countries of the former Soviet Union such as Russia and the Baltic States. Post-Soviet countries with their common postwar background on the one hand and substantial cultural dissimilarities on the other present an extremely interesting opportunity to study the introduction of ‘post-welfare’ condition on a set of cases neighboring in space and time. In order to understand how deep the changes have actually been, we need to unpack both organizational dynamics and individual patterns. That said we would like to focus our symposium on the interplay of ‘external’ (socially conditioned) and ‘internal’ (individually developed norms and values) (Ringarp, 2012) factors of changes in the teaching profession throughout 1980s and 1990s in Russia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Brante, T. (1989) Professioners identitet och samhälleliga villkor, in S. Selander (Ed.) Kampen om yrkesutövning, status och kunskap. Professionaliseringens sociala grunder. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Ringarp, J. (2012). The problem of the welfare profession: an example – the municipalisation of the teaching profession, Policy Futures in Education, Vol. 10 (3), 212-222. Sahlberg, P. (2010). Rethinking accountability for a knowledge society. Journal of Educational Change. 11(1), 45-61. Waks, L. J. (2007). The concept of fundamental educational change. Educational Theory, 57(3), 277–295.