The professionalization of school leaders is frequently debated all over the world and many nations have invested massively in education for school leaders (Huber, 2010). One reason for this urgent focus on professional training and education is the growing recognition of school leaders as important to or even crucial for student achievement and learning (Bøje & Frederiksen 2019). The urgency of these investments is not primarily linked to professionalization in the traditional sense; rather, it´s linked to responses to globalization in and the economization of the education sector. Globalization, it´s imagined, calls for enhancing the competitive edge of nations and the upskilling of a nation’s human capital, which in turn calls for education reform and the upskilling of educational professionals (Rönnström, 2015, Mundy et al, 2016). The economization of the public and education sector has been discussed as a New Public Management (NPM). Economization has, inter alia, meant changed conditions for public sector organization, augmented professionalization of leaders, increased standardization linked to conceptions of quality and the elevation of effectiveness as the overarching norm for public sector success. The importance of NPM as a condition for school leadership and the professional roles of school leaders has been discussed by Pashiardis and Brauckmann (2019) in terms of edupreneurial leadership and the edupreneural role of the school leader.

In this paper, we examine the education and implied knowledge base of Swedish school principals, and to what extent and in what sense recent attempts to educate principals can count as professionalization. The National school leadership training program (NSLP) is compulsory for newly appointed principals. It´s designed as a three-year long part time in-service or job training program, and as an advanced academic program at the university. It´s regulated by the state, governed by the National Agency of Education, provided by selected universities and it aims at the professionalization of school leaders. The complex program design gives rise to questions about the program as a promoter of professionalization, or more precisely what kind of professionalization the NSLP aims at.  

Professionalization, globalization and economization of school leaders and school leadership are co-dependent but not necessarily converging processes. The education of principals in Sweden is clearly influenced by a globally structured agenda based on instructional leadership, but this influence also challenges Swedish traditions of school leadership (Pashiardis & Johansson, 2016). Moreover, the NSLP aims at some kind of standardization although it differs from recently developed leadership standards in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany or China (Wei, 2017, Young et al, 2017). However, as Ingvarson et al (2006) argues, most standards for school leaders are developed for purposes linked to economization, such as performance management. If this is correct, the standardization of school leadership cannot be linked to occupational professionalism in the traditional sense, but to a steadily growing organizational professionalism in late modern society marked by globalization and economization (Evetts, 2011).

It´s against this background we critically examine and investigate into recent reform and institutionalization of principal training and education in Sweden, and more precise: 1) the political, economic and professional motives for the NSLP, 2) the character of NSLP as a site for professionalization and as a promoter of knowledge base for principals, and, finally, 3) to what extent and in what sense the training and education of school principals can count as a professionalization of school leaders. We draw our theoretical framework from profession oriented sociology and history (Svensson, 2010), from the recently developed tradition of social imagination studies (Rönnström, 2015; Taylor, 2004) and from the field of educational leadership and management, and particularly research into the professionalization of school leaders and leadership standards.

In this study, we critically examine the political, economic and professional motives for the NSLP, and the character of NSLP as a site for professionalization and a promoter of a knowledge base for Swedish principals. We also critically examine to what extent and in what sense the training and education of school principals in Sweden can count as professionalization, a process we have recent to think anew in a changing landscape of professionalization, or so we will ar-gue. To be able to examine NSLP as a site for professionalization we have collected, examined and analyzed data and documents from different sources. First, we have based our research on poli-cy documents, laws, regulations and commissions relevant for or playing constitutive roles in the recently developed NSLP in Sweden. This type of data reflects the making of and the de-bate on the NSLP at the national policy level. Second, we have followed the National Agency of Education and their governance of the NSLP from 2009-2019. We base our research on all pub-lically available data and documents produced by the National Agency of Education in terms of goal documents, yearbooks, annual reports, conference invitations, evaluations and other doc-uments that express directions, intentions and content connected to the NSLP. Third, we also follow the institutionalization of the NSLP at the different universities selected as providers of the NSLP. Six universities were selected 2009-2015, then new selections were made in 2014 and 2020. We base our research on data and document from all selected universities with re-gard to their program design, annual reports, study guides and course material for the period 2009-2015. The data and document have been analyzed with an analytical framework drawn from our earli-er work on the professionalization, globalization and economization in education, and from re-cent sociology of professionalization and social imagination (Ringarp, 2012; Rönnström, 2015). In our analytical work we conceptualize different motives for the NSLP at the policy level, we reconstruct the character of professionalization and the promoted knowledge base at the level of the governing National Agency of Education and at the level of the institutionalization at dif-ferent universities. Finally, we suggest a new understanding or a re-imagination of the profes-sionalization of school leaders.

The recent globalization and economization of the education sector have created new condi-tions for the professionalization of school leaders, but also for our social scientific understand-ing of professionalization which can be seen as a changing landscape. The NSLP is an interesting case in this context. We argue that the recent development of principal training and education in Sweden constitutes an example of new forms of organizational professionalization growing of importance in society. The NSLP is not, or only to a vanishing degree, a case of occupational professionalization, i.e, the traditional understanding of professionalization in the sociology of professions. We argue that the NSLP is part of an ongoing process of professionalization “from above” rather than “from within” (Evetts 2011). The professional training in NSLP seems to transform the participating school leaders into organizational professional leaders and school leaders as edupreneurs. At the same time, as a case of organizational professionalization, we argue that the standardiza-tion of school leadership in Sweden promoted by the NSLP is a weak and limited form of stand-ardization compared to recent developments in other countries in Europe, the US and Asia. This is so because of the vague and visionary character of the policy documents, and because of the limited use of the weak standardization within the context of the NSLP. The mandatory charac-ter of the NSLP is at odds with traditional views of professionalization since occupational profes-sionalization seems to depend on a prior organizational professionalization. Finally, the NSLP stresses the role of the principal as an agent for the organizational professionalization of teach-ers. As a consequence, the recent economization of education and organizational professionali-zation of principals seem to move the principal away from the community of teachers and to-wards a primary identification with local school organization and administration and with the national governance of education.

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