Professional agency is a newly invented concept which has its roots in the sociological discourse of human agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Bandura, 2018) born out of a discussion of the nexus of ‘ontological subjectivity’ versus structuration (Archer, 2013; Giddens, 1984), and elaborated generously by scholars recently. The sociological definition aggregates interpretations of agency as a stance of reflexive prioritising and consequently struggling towards commitments in the circumstances ‘of not our making or choosing’ (Archer, 2007). The concept of professional agency has been amply explored both theoretically and qualitatively (Goller, 2017; Evans, 2017) more than quantitatively in various domains and with diverse epistemologies (Vähäsantanen et al., 2017; Eteläpelto et al., 2013). Meanwhile quantitative tools for measuring this construct (including delineating its internal structure) have been implemented recently for the purpose of exploring multifarious vocational contexts (Vähäsantanen et al., 2019, 2020), where new inventions in support of teachers' work-related agency in particular situations have been highlighted mostly due to the endeavours of scholars from Finland (Pyhältö et al., 2015). 

Sharpening the tool for measuring work-related agency across professional domains (the public sphere, IT sector and healthcare) is still in progress (Goller, 2017; Vähäsantanen et al., 2019) and one particular instrument may not suffice; meanwhile, inventing separate tools for each profession may lead to the proliferation of the concept, which will result in a methodological crisis and will reshape the root theory in such a way that it loses its consistency and depth. This well may lead a full range of scholars to explore this construct in ‘historical blindness’ (Toomela, 2010a,130), in which the already-existing methods and tools may be forgotten and manifested later as potential ‘rediscoveries’. The validation of the already existing instrument in multifaceted vocational contexts may help to both fine tune it and prove its robustness for further general use across various cultures and professional fields.

Consolidating the methodology of measuring teachers' work-related agency has both scientific and applied significance. Teachers' professional ‘ultimate concerns’ (Archer, 2013) are not only shaped by their social roles, but may be ‘ideationally mediated’ (Hay, 2016) by the society and exceedingly confined by a profession which exhibits fairly strong social determination, predestined life-long commitment (Kelchtermans, 2017) and socially expected ‘ideal identity’ (Wei, 2021). All of the above, in addition to far more mundane cultural and structural constraints, may activate in teachers a ‘modus vivendi’  (Archer, 2007) where ‘maintenance of a state of affairs’ (Vähäsantanen & Eteläpelto, 2015, p. 12) will outmanoeuvre all strategies of occupational optimism in default of socio-occupational promotion (Kelchtermans, 2017). Teachers' agency may provide the lens for cognitive mediation through which they may construct an ‘alternative modus vivendi’ (Archer, 2007), redefine pessimistic projects and find pleasure in living out the vocation. The scientific significance of cross-cultural validation and the adaptation of newly invented measures for teachers' professional agency, considering the specifics of diverse regional contexts, may assist in the development of the proper methodological toolkit for further advancement of the concept. The aim of the study was to validate and adapt to the Estonian education domain an instrument for measuring the professional agency of teachers following the design proposed by Vähäsantanen et al. (2019). The mentioned professional agency scale utilised subject-centred sociocultural epistemology (Eteläpelto et al., 2013), emphasising transformative occupational agency, associated with proactivity and ‘job crafting’ (Goller, 2017), as well as with 'change, novelty and variety' or social morphogenesis (Archer, 2013). Tested so far only regionally , the scale hadn’t yet been adapted to other contexts or validated in different cultural and structural affordances. The author proposes its adaptation and first measures in the unique cross-cultural educational context of Estonia.

A professional agency multidimensional construct was validated between the two samples – teachers of both types of schools – via exploratory factor analysis (Vähäsantanen et al., 2019), the factor structures were compared between two samples and the reliability of the scale and its subscales was tested on each sample. Convergent validity was tested by computing Pearson correlations of agency scale with other theoretically substantiated constructs (Vähäsantanen et al., 2019; Goller, 2017; Pyhältö et al., 2015). Finally, teachers' agency on two dimensions, ‘Influencing at Work’ and ‘Developing Work Practices’, was compared between the groups using an independent-samples t-test. The study focuses on exploring and validating the mentioned methodological tool across two contrasting cultures, and provides the first measures of teachers' work-related agency in Estonia (which had never been measured before), with considerations of the potential complexities of adaptation of the unified instrument for measuring the professional agency in (1) cross-cultural contexts and (2) particularly in the teaching profession. On the basis of the aspects outlined above, the study aimed at: (1) Modification, cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the professional agency scale which had previously been invented to measure ‘action-based’ professional agency following the subject-centred sociocultural approach (Vähäsantanen et al., 2019) among teachers in Estonia's schools The author assumed that: H1: The teachers' professional agency in this context is a two-dimensional construct consisting of ‘Influencing at Work’ (IW) and ‘Developing Work Practices’ (DWP); H2: Both dimensions of agency are positively related to decision making; H3: Both dimensions are positively related to occupational satisfaction; H4: Both dimensions are positively related to collaborative learning. (2) Measuring the levels of professional agency of the two groups of teachers – in Russian schools (RUS sample) and in Estonian schools (EST sample) – assuming that the levels of professional agency of teachers in the RUS and EST samples are different: H5: Teachers in the EST sample will report higher levels of professional agency than the teachers in the RUS sample.

The study aimed at the modification, adaptation and validation of the professional agency measurement tool proposed earlier by Vähäsantanen et al (2019), validated so far only regionally in Finland (Vähäsantanen et al, 2019, 2020), with application to the modern Estonian education context, which combines two contradictory cultures (Vihalemm et al., 2020) and is distinct in its parallelism due to the quite weak socio-cultural integration of the majority and minority schools in a single national schoolscape. The validation of a tool as well as modifying it specifically for the teaching profession and applying it to measure teachers' work-related agency in Estonia's unique cross-cultural context seemed to suggest valuable outcomes for operationalisation of the concept internationally. As the education context of Estonia offers a clear example of the morphogenetic and morphostasic contradistinction where, due to various cultural and structural complexities, majority and minority teachers may externalise their occupational identities (Eteläpelto et al., 2013) in a multidirectional logic of creative transformation versus cultural reproduction (Archer, 2013), the author validated and applied the same domain-specific instrument crafted from the cross-domain tool of Vähäsantanen et al. (2019) to the two ‘cultures of teachers’ separately. The hypotheses H1-H4 were confirmed. The scale validation across the two groups of teachers showed a stable two-factor structure of the agency construct among the population of teachers in Estonia, consistent with the factor structure of this scale across various professional domains in Finland (ibid.). The validity of the scale was supported by finding positive correlations with decision making, job satisfaction and collaborative teaching and learning (confirming hypotheses H2-H4). Meanwhile there was no statistically significant difference in levels of agency between the teachers in the Russian and Estonian schools, contradicting hypothesis H5. Considerations about applying ‘action-based’ transformative-oriented epistemology in measuring teachers' work-related agency in cross-cultural contexts is discussed further.

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