The focus of this paper is how teachers’ work is regulated and materialised through the relational arrangements of digital technologies. In particular, we pay attention to temporal aspects of work through the issue of work intensification as the generated effect of complex sociotechnical and affective arrangements, which include the experiences and self-regulation of subjects managing time pressure demands (Creagh et al., 2023) and exploitation of emotional labour as part of today’s performative work life (Zafra, 2017). Decisive for how this is played out, are the resources in teachers’ work and positions of teacher labour within different school systems, issues that have become a concern in policy (e.g., Education International, 2023; UNESCO, 2024) often suggesting that teachers be released from work burdens to secure the teacher labour workforce. Based on a sociomaterial understanding of work and as part of a larger international research project, we set out to explore and mirror the issue of work intensification through the Swedish and the Mexican case. Methodologically we draw on thick school ethnographic descriptions consisting of field note observations, interviews, diaries and logbooks, and platform mapping. Actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and the concept of jumping scales (Barad, 2007) were used to relationally analyse the local–global arrangements that concentrate teachers’ work time and produce work intensification, yet also to highlight the resistance and interruptions to such forces. Analytically, we focus on the sociomaterial time-ordering devices in teachers’ work to sync or counteract temporal frictions and tensions exemplified by (digital and analog) documentation of completed work tasks and calendar coordination (Wajcman, 2019). Our analyses show that work intensification is enacted in Sweden and Mexico through political and teachers’ unions pressures, demands of platform technologies and communication operating on a 24/7 timescale and continuous and yet unpredictable work events of control and care in everyday work. Discussions on teachers’ work often problematised the tensions between global and local demands of work performativity and argued that the global neoliberal agendas won over local demands, de-nationalising and de-regulating teachers’ work (e.g. Robertson, 2013). Our argument, however, is that there are still very powerful local forces speaking to collective work and social justice issues beyond individual well-being and employment discourses (Supiot, 2023) that shape teachers’ work, that are made visible as we mirror our different local cases and their global entanglements.

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