In order to develop an organisation the aim could be to find best practices and identify favourable factors at a certain point in time (Cragg, 2002). There has been a growing interest in studying and understanding processes in improvement work. The interest has been the process that the organisation undergoes and why events evolve in the way they do (Czarniawska, 2006). The process is in focus and by understanding the process and identifying supporting and hindering forces the possibility to plan and implement the improvement work in a systematic way increases. Sometimes schools use strategies to improve their work.  The study presented is about organisation processes in schools. It is based on a five-year long cooperation between the Swedish National Agency for Education, two communities and one university, where a research based strategy for school improvement was used in two different schools. The schools were to follow the strategy, guided and educated by an experienced school development researcher.

 The aim of the study was to describe and understand how processes were initiated, developed and completed in the work with a strategy and to see how different parts of the process were related to each other. The following research questions were formulated:

• What organisational processes can be identified in the two school improvement projects?

1. What underlying patterns can be distinguished in the form of generative mechanisms?
2. How do different types of organisational process relate to each other and what importance do generative mechanisms have in the process?
3. What results do different organisational processes lead to?

According to Pettigrew, Woodman and Cameron (2001) it is not possible to study organisational processes directly, but rather individual and collective actions that develop in a context. Pettigrew (1997) considers the actions to have an underlying logic which gives a meaning and has to be interpreted and understood in a theoretical perspective in order to make the processes and mechanisms visible. This paper describes a way to analyse school improvement processes based on the intentions presented before and during the improvement project, where teachers and students together in work groups were responsible for the running of the project. Focus is therefore on the culture of individual schools and how organisational processes influence the improvement work (Fink & Stoll, 2005).

To seek an answer to how planned improvement work develops is nothing new and organisational change is often described as either planned or emergent. The strategy used for school improvement in the two schools can be considered as a support to planned improvement similar to Lewin’s (1997) idea of how planned change should be executed in different steps to realise the intentions at hand. Theories on emergent change show that change can emerge unintentionally within a planned project (Christensen, Laegreid, Roness & Røvik, 2005). In this study there was an interest in seeing how planned and emergent related to each other. Previous research has described improvement processes in schools in different phases; initiating, implementing, institutionalisation and diffusion (Miles, Ekholm & Vandenberghe, 1987). This research has presented an overview of how organisational processes in schools develop when conscious and planned improvement processes are executed. This knowledge is not enough to gain a deeper insight into what it is that influences the course of events. Hargreaves and Godson (2006) point to the importance of a theoretical understanding of change which can provide insight into both context and mechanisms of change in an organisation. The aim of this study is to provide this knowledge and therefore Van de Ven’s and Poole’s (1995) four distinct process theories are used in the analysis.

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