For what now seems a long time, teachers and their professional status have been questioned and put under pressure by various parties involved in education – national governments, supra-national agencies (OECD, EU) and also parents who increasingly act as consumers and make demands of the ‘service’ delivered by teachers (Krejsler 2013). Constant waves of education reform (Ball 1994, 2008) add to that picture e.g. by installing new ‘quality systems’ (e.g. accountability, audit, evaluation, control, etc.) into schools. These systems lead to ‘regimes of performativity’ according to some researchers (e.g. Ball 2008, Taubman 2009), while others (Slavin 2002) view them as in fact improving the quality of schooling and raising the performance of students. Also new concepts, evidence-based programmes, and ‘learning gurus’ (e.g. Hattie, Robinson) flood teachers and schools. Teachers’ autonomy is under pressure – for better or worse.
In parallel to this, there are high expectations to school leaders. They are increasingly seen as important for realising various education policies, and from influential positions they are regarded as one of the most important factors for improving student outcomes (Leithwood et al. 2004, Robinson 2011, Day et al. 2009). Apple (2001) and Ball (2008) have described them more critically, e.g. as managerialism and one element of a larger ‘reform package’ travelling around the world to homogenize the educational systems.
This creates something of a paradox. One the one hand teachers seem to be de-professionalized or at least questioned on basis of their professionalism; on the other hand school leaders seem to go through a process of professionalization and might eventually develop a profession of their own. Leaders are almost solely recruited from the population of teachers (European Commission 2013), and they are still educated and socialized in a common relationship with teachers. That means the outcome of school leaders’ professionalization project (Larson 1977, Witz 1992, Bøje 2016) is uncertain. It might orient them out of the teaching profession, or it might orient them back into the profession where they will assume a role as a temporary leader. A third possibility is a more mixed picture where different school leaders in different educational contexts adopt a variety of professionalization strategies.
Based on previous and existing projects on school leaders in primary and upper secondary school in Denmark, we raise the following research question in this paper: which professional strategies do school leaders pursue, and to what extent do these strategies orient the leaders back into or out of the teaching profession?
Theoretically, the paper will draw on a range of ideas and concepts from, respectively, the sociology of professions, educational leadership, and organization theory (e.g. Abbott 1988, Witz 1992, Noordegraaf 2011, Scott 2008). Especially the concept of strategy will be developed since we use that concept for analytic purposes. Particular branches of the sociology of professions are relevant to that end, e.g. the works by Larson (1977), Witz (1992), and Abbott (1988) who describe conflicts, ruptures, divisions of labor, and professionalization projects in and between professions. Also we will attempt to employ Bourdieu’s notion of strategy (Bourdieu og Wacquant 1996, Anderson 2016) – as a form of practical reason with no explicit or conscious meaning yet a relatively clear determination – as it is somewhat closer to the analysis of behavior by individual persons (school leaders). Within the sociology of professions, strategy refers to action by social groups. Thirdly, we will critically discuss the more consultant-like perceptions of strategy (e.g. Mintzberg et al. 2005) where strategy is generally seen as a rational and conscious piece of work performed by a leader.
