This study is situated within research on the platformisation of education and examines how everyday work practices of teachers in a Swedish upper-secondary school are reconfigured over time following the procurement and implementation of a uniform, municipality-wide learning management system (LMS). The study is located within a period of ongoing change in the digital infrastructure of Swedish education. Over the past decade, digitalisation has unfolded through shifting national strategies, the incorporation of GDPR into everyday administration, and the COVID-19 pandemic as a systemic stress test. More recently, curriculum revisions, public debates on screen use, and rapid introduction of generative AI (GenAI) into classrooms have added further pressure to established digital arrangements. GenAI, in particular, constitutes a key domain where tensions between professional-pedagogical judgement and managerial or data-driven logics become visible. Together, these developments underscore digitalisation as an ongoing and everchanging process.

Against this backdrop, the study focuses on what happens after a platform has moved beyond initial implementation and become a taken-for-granted part of everyday school practice. While much research on educational platforms concentrates on moments of introduction or policy design, less attention has been paid to how platform infrastructures are stabilised, adjusted, or contested over time as they become embedded in teachers’ professional routines. The study therefore directs attention to how earlier sociotechnical configurations, involving both platform arrangements and teachers’ work practices, are reworked as the LMS becomes part of the school’s infrastructural landscape.

The empirical setting is the Swedish education system, which can be described as highly decentralised, with responsibility for organising and governing education being distributed across municipalities and independent organisers. This governance structure affords considerable autonomy at school and teacher level and has historically allowed substantial freedom in shaping educational practice. Against this background, the municipal introduction of a shared, municipality-wide digital platform represents a new form of coordination, making Sweden an analytically productive context for examining how platform infrastructures intersect with professional judgement and institutional expectations over time.

Aim of the study

The aim of the study is to examine how teachers’ everyday work practices are reconfigured over time in relation to the continued use of a municipality-wide LMS, focusing on how the platform becomes embedded in daily work and how established pedagogical, administrative, and communicative practices are stabilised, adjusted, or challenged.

Research questions

The study is guided by the overarching research question: How does platformisation meet institutional logics in educational contexts?

This is operationalised through three research questions:

1. How does platformisation reconfigure institutional logics in everyday educational practice over time?
2. How do teachers and other school staff navigate competing institutional logics as the LMS has become taken for granted and generative AI tools are introduced into existing platform infrastructures?
3. How are institutional logics renegotiated over time through changes in platform use, data practices, and policy expectations related to digitalisation and education?

Theoretical framing

The theoretical framework combines infrastructure studies with an institutional logics perspective (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012). Adopting an STS-informed platformisation lens, the study examines how platforms organise everyday educational activities and how institutional expectations are enacted in practice (Latour, 2005). This enables attention to how platform features shape practical reasoning, responsibility, and forms of visibility (Bowker & Star, 2008; Hartong & Decuypere, 2023).

The institutional logics perspective provides a complementary account of how historically embedded norms, values, and accountability arrangements shape organisational practices and professional legitimacy (Thornton et al., 2012). In platformised education, institutional logics are translated and hybridised through sociotechnical arrangements, particularly in tensions between professional-pedagogical judgement (Freidson, 2001) and managerial or data-oriented logics emphasising standardisation and comparability (Williamson, 2017).

The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research design aimed at understanding how teachers’ everyday work practices are organised, negotiated, and reconfigured through a municipality-wide LMS. Empirical material is generated primarily through semi-structured interviews, with a smaller number of observations and walkthroughs of platform use used to contextualise and deepen the analysis. These supplementary methods are used to situate teachers’ accounts in concrete sociotechnical practices and to capture how interactions between teachers, organisational expectations, and platform features unfold in everyday work. The empirical material consists of interviews with a limited number of teachers and IT-management staff, covering key pedagogical, administrative, and support roles at the school, largely involving the same participants, or individuals in equivalent professional roles, as in an earlier study. Interviews focus on teachers’ experiences of pedagogical, administrative, and communicative work in relation to the LMS, as well as their interpretations of changing expectations linked to digitalisation, data practices, and the introduction of GenAI. As a follow-up study, the design enables attention to how professional roles, responsibilities, and ways of working have shifted over time as the LMS has moved from an initially contested intervention to an established and largely taken-for-granted part of the school’s infrastructural landscape. This longitudinal orientation supports an analysis of both continuity and change in platform-mediated work practices. Analytically, the study draws on two main analytical lenses: infrastructuralisation and an institutional logics perspective focused on tensions between professional-pedagogical and managerial or data-oriented logics. The analysis attends to how these logics become visible through routine practices, moments of tension, and situations where the LMS and related technologies become especially consequential, for example through workflows, documentation requirements, and visibility regimes. Ethical approval has been obtained, with particular attention to informed consent, confidentiality, and the handling of interview material concerning professional judgement, organisational expectations, and digital work practices.

Empirically, the paper is expected to explore how an LMS has become embedded in and backgrounded by routine educational work, while remaining consequential in situations where competing demands arise, such as documentation practices, communication norms, workload management, or changing governance expectations. The analysis is expected to examine how LMSs are reconfigured as new sociotechnical elements intersect with established platform infrastructures, and how introductions of digital technologies, such as GenAI, contribute to similar reconfigurations by reshaping previously stabilised arrangements. This is expected to support an understanding of digitalisation as an ongoing and situated process in which practices are continuously stabilised, repaired, and renegotiated. By foregrounding infrastructuralisation and institutional logics in a longitudinal, school-based study, the paper is expected to contribute empirical and conceptual insight into how platformisation reshapes professional work beyond moments of implementation. Conceptually, the study also refines platformisation and institutional logics as complementary lenses. Platformisation is expected to draw attention to the role of infrastructures and the organisation of teachers’ work, while institutional logics foreground how norms, values, and professional rationalities shape actors’ interpretations and actions within these infrastructural arrangements. These dynamics resonate with broader European shifts towards platform-based coordination in education systems characterised by professional autonomy, positioning the study within ongoing debates on governance, professionalism, and digitalisation in education. Practically, the study seeks to offer insights into how schools and municipalities might approach what is often framed as “sustainable” digitalisation, by identifying what supports professional judgement and pedagogical autonomy as digital platforms increasingly shape how education is organised, documented, and governed. By focusing on everyday LMS use in a school context, the study contributes to research that conceptualises digitalisation as a situated and evolving set of practices, highlighting how digital infrastructures and institutional expectations are entangled in everyday work, with implications for future design, policy, and professional development.

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