What had often been praised by techno-enthusiasts as “disruption” and “innovation” became more of a harsh reality during 2020 with the fast reorganization to online learning due to the pandemic. With a short timeframe, schools were forced to prepare for distance education and teachers had to adapt, creating online teaching activities while at the same time making sure students were well-cared for educationally, socially, emotionally, and technologically. With the fast reorganization to online learning during the pandemic, the global platform market received more influence and further reached into the core of schools’ everyday work (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). In this sense, fast digitalization has not only made the political economy of school digitalization more apparent, but also highlights how digital work is conditioned by time and the socio-technical coordination of people and technologies (Wajcman, 2015).

This paper focus on how teachers regulate and are regulated by digital platform work and in particular, how digital work is regulated by time in different ways. Our interest is both the kind of work done by teachers on digital platforms and how platform infrastructures condition and challenge teachers’ work and work time. The purpose is to explore and problematize the temporal governance of digital work, inscribed in the uses and logics of digital platforms, and forms of governing powers where productivity is considered core value. Analytically, instances where there are pronounced tensions in terms of temporal issues, between the demands of digital infrastructures or professional performance, and school teachers’ everyday work priorities and regulated work hours is of particular interest. The study builds on analyses of already identified tensions in relation to school reforms more generally as existing between the regulating principles of market efficiency governance and the teaching profession’s work conditions (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Ball, 2003; Lundström & Parding, 2011).

The political economy that pushes for school digitization was already strong in Europe and many other parts of the world before the pandemic began. Platform infrastructures, commonly provided by global platform businesses like Google and Microsoft and through Learning Management Systems are not exotic anymore, but are instead everyday technologies in workplaces like schools. Even so, platform technology provided by for example Google increasingly has taken the role of an infrastructure, sociotechnically connecting clouds, software, people, data (Plantin et al., 2018). This “platformization” comes with the business logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), profiting on the individuals’ data production with the arguments of making public sector workplaces more efficient and streamlined, and of facilitating teachers’ pedagogical and administrative work.  Questions around workload and the intensification of teachers’ work have once again risen up the political agenda (c.f. Fitzgerald et al., 2019). However, research on how school teachers’ work and work situations are changing in relation to digitalization still is relatively scarce (Bergviken Rensfeldt, Hillman, Selwyn, 2018; Selwyn, 2020; Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017; Shulte, 2019).

We draw on a Swedish project case, in collaboration with and extending an Australian project (e.g. Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017). Empirical material was collected in and connected to the digital work of teachers in two upper secondary school forms, two school forms that characterize the Swedish marketized education system, namely, one public school and one independent for-profit school. Methodologically, the ethnographical approach used is policy and infrastructure ethnography, combined with trace ethnography of teachers’ online and offline work.

For conducting the policy ethnography, we firstly examined the policies and infrastructures implicated in teachers’ work, combining analyses of policies and platform technologies (Kitchen & Laurialt, 2014). Policy material from the regional municipality or school consortia organizations of the two schools, including extensions to national and European or international levels, e.g. strategies, guidelines, agreements on work time, digital work and platform infrastructure implementation, maintenance and support, was combined with analyses of the digital platforms and applications used in the school organizations of the participating teachers in the study. Further information from stakeholders like IT management or external platform provider companies on decisions, regulations and functionality on these different levels of platform use or data platform infrastructures, e.g. classifications of work activities in data platform standards was also collected via policy documents and interviews. Starting from the schools in the selection of policies and moving out from them, have resulted in a variety of policies that can be considered influencing digital work. In line with this, rather than regarding policies as archival documents, we aimed at selecting policies that were in use, “at work” and perhaps contested in the school workplaces in different ways. The trace ethnography started with four teachers (one man and one woman from each school) self-reporting their own activity logs on digital work based on three selected work days, followed up by a form of online focus group interview which was based on the logs and questions raised from the researchers and focus of the study. The teachers were then also involved in identifying and documenting their own data production and the traces they leave on different digital platforms via a digital self-tracking application capturing time-based screen activity. Conducting digital trace ethnography raise ethical concerns around private integrity which we have tried to counteract by involving the teacher participants themselves in self-tracking of their digital activities of work and by providing tools (self-reported activity logs included) allowing self-reflection of when and where their digital work takes place. The integrative trace ethnography approach (Geiger & Ribes, 2011) used, hence include both ethnographic and computational social science methods. These methods are themselves characterized by temporal categories, timelines, etc. but invites for making visible different temporalities in the ethnographic material.

Digital work was analyzed based on tensions between temporalities that could be both static and dynamic but nonetheless were shaping teachers’ work (c.f. Thompson & Cook, 2017). The temporalities were understood as constructs and intertwined with spatialities of school teachers’ digital work. A preliminary finding is that digital work of online learning follows the assigned task and rhythms of schooling, but also extends more widely with the global time of digital platforms and the different temporalities produced in such environments, expanding, fragmentarizing and interrupting work in different ways. In line with Alirezabeigi, Masschelein & Decuypere (2020, p. 203), the digital work activities “not only follow the school time-table and the script of the teacher, but it equally follows the global time”. For example, the analyses included the teacher’s officially-regulated working hours in terms of classroom and workplace time, their self-regulated work time (“förtroendearbetstid”) as well as non-regularized time, all governed by certain ideals of performativity (c.f. Ball, 2003). Similarly, such entities were also translated into platforms datafication classifications of standard school activities (mainly teaching, examining and “other activities”). Hence, digital work temporalities were co-created with the operating tasks prompted by commercial platforms and activities inscribed in the systems, and the overall life cycles of platform infrastructures (updates, procurements, etc). Furthermore, the pandemic situation from March 2020 made certain temporalities around digital work visible, describing a “before-during-after Corona”, with transformed digital work experiences around attending to students and fulfilling new work tasks, implicating work intensification, strategies for work-life balance and coping with presence bleed. In sum, different temporalities and concerns in teachers’ digital work are at work, co-shaped by professional concerns, and the political economy and governance of platform infrastructures, which further add to the aforementioned research which identified tensions of market governance and teachers’ work conditions and professional concerns.

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