During the last decades the traditional view on the school principal as the main actor influencing school development and student results has been challenged. Several arguments have been put forward; research has only been able to show that school leadership matters but not how and in what way (Leithwood, et al. 2004), school leadership has been shown to be a process of interaction and influence of multiple actors (Crawford, 2012) situated in local preconditions (Liljenberg, 2015). A distributed perspective on leadership has therefore been suggested (Gronn, 2000) as an important framework for understanding educational practice (Diamond & Spillane, 2016). This perspective focuses on what people (formal leaders or not) do together and with what resources, but also on how the situation, including organizational structures and cultural contexts, shape the interaction between people and influence the educational practice.

In this paper we take a distributed perspective as a conceptual framework to study organizational activities and structures that govern and support the educational practice in a school. Diamond and Spillane (2016) use the concept of educational infrastructure to emphasise the importance of the situation borrowing from Giddens (1979) theory of structuration when they say that the structural conditions of a situation are both the medium and the outcome of a situation like an educational practice in a school. Diamond and Spillane suggest that the educational infrastructure contains both obvious and less obvious components that influence teachers’ instructional quality. Obvious components are for example teaching approaches, curricular materials and student assessments. Less obvious components include organizational routines, formal positions, tools of various sorts and set of norms and cultural-cognitive beliefs.

The article presents findings from a case study investigating school leader activities, organizational structures and processes in two Swedish schools in the same school district. The results show that the organizational aspects vary considerably between the two schools. In Alfaville, we identified a dominant norm and cultural-cognitive belief in being visible and accessible to each other. Three situational arrangements contribute to this accessibility; 1) a café in the centre hallway of the school functioning as an informal meeting and access point, 2) Monday morning meetings for all staff, teachers as well as caretakers and cleaners, promoting everyone to raise issues or give information, 3) a counselling team of experienced teachers helps teachers to informally and swiftly handle conflicts among students and other disturbances in their teaching. As a result, the teachers feel less alone in their job, established a joint responsibility based on a strong sense of collegiality and a flat democratic organizational structure.

In Betaville we identified a constant search for external solutions or formulas to inform practice in a positive way. Two structural activities contribute to this search for new methods or solutions; 1) a trust in professional development by formal courses on the latest instructional trends, and 2) the content in meetings, networks or courses offered or commanded by the school district office. As a result, the constant flow of new ideas drains the organization on energy and time for internal exchange of ideas and experiences.

The identified organizational structures and activities clearly affect the teachers’ educational work, but in different ways. The governance from the district level were the same but the interpretations and actions influencing the educational practice were bounded by local and emerging structures at each school. Our conclusion is that framing of organizational conditions in terms of educational infrastructure visualize important aspects of a school’s management system, an often overlooked aspect of governing and supporting teacher work.

This paper is based on a qualitative and explorative case study focusing on school leadership in two schools in the same municipality school district in Sweden. In that sense we apply a multiple-case design (Yin, 2009) with each school seen as a specific case consisting of teachers and leaders in a school context. The two schools took part in a larger research project on school leadership and were selected purposively in order to include schools with different student outcome in the 9th grade. Both schools have the same school district manager and belong to the same district office offering the schools the same training opportunities. In both schools there are two principles cooperating closely even though they formally are responsible for different school grades. Alfaville is a lower secondary school with grades 7 – 9 and approximately 420 students and Betaville a full compulsory school with classes from preschool class to grade 9, in total approximately 440 students. Both schools have divided the teachers into inter-disciplinary teams led by team leaders and have established subject groups led by subject leaders. The team leaders and the principles constitute each school’s management group. The student outcome of each school varies. Alfaville is overachieving concerning student grades in the final 9th year compared to an estimated value based on the students’ social and ethnical composition (based on a statistical model from The Swedish National Agency for Education). Betaville, on the other hand, is quite underachieving in the same comparison. The study is based on ten 45 to 60-minutes semi structured interviews with principals, teacher team leaders, lead teachers and teachers in Alfaville and with nine equivalent persons in Betaville. Participative observations on management and teacher team meetings on each school were also conducted. The empirical data from the interviews and observations concerning organizational activities and structures that are expected to govern and support the educational work, were coded and analyzed thematically. Variations in between the schools were identified and their influence on the teachers’ educational practice distinguished.

The results show that the educational infrastructure varies considerably between schools in the same school district. Different organizational structures clearly affect teachers’ instructional work. The distributed leadership in Alfaville is organizational/relational based on what Diamond and Spillane (2016) call less obvious components of the educational infrastructure. This means that organizational actions, norms and beliefs support an internal learning process between teachers (Larsson et al. 2007). In Betaville the distributed leadership is more educational/individual with its base in obvious components of the educational infrastructure meaning that established organizational structures supported a desire for external and formal competence development opportunities. Our results are in line with Blossing and Ertesvåg (2011:167) who argue that where “an individual learning belief prevails, the hunt for the single, magnificent improvement idea can appear overwhelming”. As Alfaville is a school with higher student results than Betaville our results can tentatively support the notion of Blossing and Ertesvåg that school improvement is difficult to achieve in schools where the staff members embrace an individual learning belief. Crawford (2012) argue that an organizational perspective has gradually disappeared from the discussion of leadership while this paper finds that the design of organizational conditions is an important aspect of school’s management system. It is an often overlooked aspect of governing and supporting teacher work. By applying the concept of educational infrastructure from a distributed perspective, the management of schools becomes a matter of how organizational structures and processes guide the school’s professional activities. Using this perspective, the discussion about how schools can be developed becomes different than when the focus lies on the single school principal or even by many, more or less formalized leaders in cooperation. An indirect way of governing emerges based on an ongoing organizing (Weick, 1979), rather than on traditional management training, development and control.

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