Teachers hold a key position in today’s society where education is seen as imperative for prosperous societies. The Swedish school system is under influence of various governance forces which can be described as the logic of the profession, the logic of the bureaucracy and the logic of the market. Changes such as this influence the conditions for teachers’ work. However, teachers, just as other public sector professionals, are faced with the dilemma of working in accordance with the values of the profession and with the aims of the work organisation. This is often described in terms of the tension between profession and organisation. This tension becomes particularly interesting to study in times of changed governance, for example the introduction of school choice and the marketization of schooling.

The Swedish case is interesting in an international perspective as the development is part of a common school marketization trend, in which Sweden can be regarded as “a good example” from a market perspective. Sweden makes up a distinct case in the substantial shift of school policy, the fast expansion of market-solutions and the strong state support for the construction of an arena for competition in which student fees are neither allowed nor needed, while profit for shareholders are allowed. The privatisation and marketization of public services has indeed become a force to count with in Sweden, not least visible in the upper secondary schooling. The school choice reform has in a few years lead to independent upper secondary schools today make up almost 20 per cent.

The aim of this paper is to examine how upper secondary teachers in independent as well as public schools experience the conditions surrounding their work, in relation to the school choice reform, focusing on the issue of competition. We will also discuss what this may mean for teaching as a profession.

The article uses sociology of professions to analyse the changed governance of teachers’ work. Freidson’s (2001) three logics of how work can be organized and controlled are used as a theoretical framework. His approach illuminates the logics of the profession, the bureaucracy and the market. These logics are ideal-types, and as such do not exist in their pure forms. However, the benefit of using this categorisation as an analysis model is that it sheds light on how teachers are situated in a dilemma in a tension between different logics, and it highlights the complexity of the context of teachers’ work today. The three logics can be seen as discourses “infused with values” (Selznik, 1957). All three of them involve ideas about how work should be governed, organised, carried out and evaluated. They can be described as discourses, or value systems, influencing the work. According to Freidson (2001:5), his model is “able to provide a stable point against which empirical variation and process can be systematically compared and analyzed”. 

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