Newer sets of public management approaches, borrowed from the private sector, have been introduced to increase the quality of schools in many education systems, in particular in the Western world. This presentation reports on how performance management has been implemented in Canada and Norway, exemplified by investigating approaches in some local school authorities. In Quebec (Canada), Result Based Management (RBM) policy in education was implemented by School boards (SB) since 2002. Thru statistical tools and various pedagogical monitoring and control mechanisms, SB are developing a management of pedagogical practices of teachers in various ways and with different intensity. School managers and SB’officers are able to visualise, evaluate and regulate some pedagogical practices of teachers, related directly or indirectly to the targets to be performed by schools or SB. In Norway, a combination of performance management, including data use, indicators and target setting was implemented in the early 2000s and developed further by increasing accountability practices and the use of incentives, and by adding risk analysis. The intention is to mobilize educators’ work effort in order to improve student outcomes and to a greater degree monitor processes leading up to outcomes (Skedsmo & Møller, 2016). In the presentation, we provide examples of the mediation role played by actors, tools and institutions at the intermediate level in the process of diffusion and institutionalisation of new management approaches. One the one hand, new expectations of a result-based and instrumental reflexivity are strongly expressed by school managers in both countries. On the other hand, we also find examples of how leaders engage with, influence, or rebuff NPM demands to craft their internal school culture, following their specific sets of professional values and interpretations of local governing discourse (cf. Honig & Hatch, 2004; Horenczyk & Tatar, 2002). Moreover, we discuss implications for teachers’ professional autonomy (related to power or knowledge ; Champy, 2009 ; Freidson, 2001). This professional autonomy is reduced in practice, even though the teachers keep a subjective feeling of autonomy. We develop also in Quebec the teachers’ contrasted responses to the institutional pressure exerted by managers : rejection and decoupling on one hand, assimilation on the other (Coburn, 2004) and finally renouncement to some valued practices. Our presentation is based upon a pluralistic theoretical framework (french sociology of public action, neo-weberian sociology of professions, and neo-institutionnalist approach of organisations).

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