Teacher professionalism and agency in managerialised schools

This article examines the evolution of contemporary professionalism in school contexts increasingly shaped by managerialism. It focuses on teachers in Swedish schools and how they relate to growing managerial demands. Empirically, we introduce two scenes at the intersection between managerialism and the teaching profession. First, we examine the introduction of first-teacher (förstelärare, a state-funded career position for experienced teachers in Sweden) positions, where some teachers to a greater extent are involved in managerial tasks. Second, we analyse individual differentiated pay (IDP) for teachers in Sweden. Drawing on two in-depth studies of how teachers navigate these developments, the article aims to advance understanding of professionalism by foregrounding agency as central to how managerial reforms are enacted in practice.

Traditionally, professionalism is characterised by a specialist expertise, acquired by training and not accessible to those outside the profession (Freidson, 2001). By claiming jurisdiction over certain areas, boundaries are created that separate the profession from other actors (Abbott, 1988). In a sense, professionalism involves shielding it from other influences (Noordegraaf, 2015). It has been described how professions adhere to another logic than other actors within organizations, typically managers (Freidson, 2001), or represent a domain with specific guiding principles which conflict with those of other domains (Kouzes and Mico, 1979). One source of conflict is the amount of autonomy reserved for professionals. Strong professions, such as doctors or lawyers, are often described as having a high degree of autonomy and discretion in the professional work (Brante, 2013; Freidson, 2001).

In the literature, there is a recurring story which portrays how professions in the public sector have been weakened, professional autonomy has been curtailed and professions have been de-professionalised in the last decades, often as a consequence of New Public Management (NPM) reforms (Sehested, 2002). Especially, teachers have been highlighted as a professional group particularly exposed to such reforms, as their work has increasingly been subject to external accountability measures, standardization and performance management. This has not only reshaped the conditions of their work but also affected their professional identities and agency (Day, 2002, 2012). This development can also be understood as part of a broader transformation of teacher professionalism, in which external demands have redefined the conditions of teachers’ work over time (Hargreaves, 2000).

There is a stream in the literature that questions the idea of de-professionalization and adheres to a perspective in which professionalism is seen as more of a dynamic concept which changes along with different societal developments. Some authors refer to a new professionalism which includes more dimensions than what is typically included in traditional professionalism. One such scholar is Noordegraaf (2015, 2020) who describes how professionalism naturally involves an organising aspect. In this perspective, the conflict between managers and professionals or between subsequent logics or domains in organizations (Muzio et al., 2013; Numerato et al., 2012) can be problematised. In fact, professionals of today, to varying extents, are increasingly participating in managerial work (Mulcahy and Perillo, 2011; Noordegraaf, 2007, 2015; Waring, 2014). Illustrative of this is the role of professional elites who to a greater extent than other professionals engage in managerial tasks and often work more closely to management (Alvehus et al., 2019c, 2021; Waring, 2014). Meanwhile, professionals are involved in standardizations, evaluation and other calculative practices which all are ways of organising professional work, not distinct from it but rather an essential part of it (Abbott, 1988; Fırtın, 2023; Fırtın and Karlsson, 2020; Fırtın and Kastberg, 2020; Freidson, 2001; Waring, 2014). Important to remember is that professions thus involve hierarchies where different professionals might have various positions with different capacities to control (Alvehus et al., 2021; Brante, 2013, 2015). Embracing this view of the heterogeneous nature of professions where some professionals have positions in which they do broader work than solely the core work of the profession (Kurunmäki, 2004), the view of professionals becomes one where they are active and reactive (Day, 2012), both affected not only by the environment but also with capacity to influence it (Alvehus et al., 2021; Eklund, 2021a; Freidson, 1984). In this vein, teachers have also been conceptualised as agents who actively interpret, negotiate and shape reforms and changes in their everyday practices (Sachs, 2000).

In this article, we adopt this perspective on professions since it is perceived as representing how professionalism works in practice rather than clinging to utopian images of it (Eklund, 2021a). We argue that research would benefit from greater attention to the agency of professionals, particularly within managerial environments. The agency of professions stems from their ability to exercise control over knowledge (Abbott, 1988; Fırtın, 2022; Freidson, 2001). Moreover, from the perspective of new professionalism, under specific contextual circumstances, professions of today may also have agency in other aspects of professional work, including those connected to managerial realms. In this article, we therefore attend to the heterogeneous nature of professionalism in which the concept can vary in terms of meaning, while being influenced and moulded by the agency of professionals. The aim of this article is therefore to add to the conceptual discussion on the meaning of contemporary professionalism in a context affected by managerialism, by highlighting the agency of professionals.

This article is based on two empirical scenes representing an ongoing trend of managerialism in Swedish schools with slightly different focuses. The first empirical scene is centred around a reform in which so-called first teachers were introduced. This reform aimed to improve pupils’ results by strengthening the teacher profession (SFS, 2013:70). With the support of government subsidies, newly appointed teachers received a monthly salary increase of 5,000 Swedish crowns (approximately €500). However, the criteria were broad, and subsequently, it became up to local levels, most often individual schools to determine what the position was to entail. Previous studies show that first teachers worked more closely to management and were involved in managerial tasks (Alvehus et al., 2019a, 2021; Eklund, 2021a). Thus, we conclude that this reform can be seen as reinforcing a managerial landscape. The second empirical scene concerns the determination of teachers’ pay based on individual merits and performance, so-called IDP system. The stated purpose of IDP was to reward individual achievement and motivate improvement by differentiating monthly pay (Larsson et al., 2021, 2022). In practice, however, the system introduced new calculative devices and evaluation criteria that translate teaching performance into measurable and comparable units. While intended to make teachers accountable and align their efforts with organizational goals, previous research demonstrates that such performance-based pay arrangements often produce unintended consequences at both the organizational (Bracci et al., 2025) and individual (Fırtın and Kastberg, 2020) levels in Swedish schools. Rather than reinforcing professional responsibility, the calculative infrastructure of IDP can be understood as part of a broader managerialist landscape that increasingly shapes the conditions of teachers’ work. This article contributes to research on teacher professionalism by showing that managerial reforms are not only external pressures on professional work but also become sites where professional agency is exercised, negotiated and used to shape how managerial arrangements operate in practice.

There is no uniform and streamlined definition of professionalism. Rather, the concept can be filled with different meanings, and there is a wide diversity when it comes to what components scholars include in the definition. In classical professional theory, professionalism is connected to concepts such as autonomy and discretion for professions and jurisdiction to set boundaries around the professions, making professions independent from external influences (Abbott, 1988). This outlook is beneficial when it comes to explaining conflict which rises when external actors and influences might threaten the position of professions.

However, as was hinted upon in the introduction, professionalism is increasingly described in the literature as more of a dynamic and evolving concept. Nevertheless, proponents of a new professionalism do not necessarily fill the concept with similar meaning (Eklund, 2021a). New professionalism can be referred to as an expression of managerialism (Evans, 2011; Evetts, 2009, 2011; Svensson, 2006). Here, professions receive a rather passive stance, making new professionalism a consequence of managerial demands rather than something including agency of professions. Thus, professionalism is evolving and redefined, by actors like managers or the state who use their power to control professional work, rather than by the professionals themselves (Evetts, 2013). This is often explained as a consequence of a neo-liberal agenda introduced by NPM reforms (Anderson and Cohen, 2015; Goddard, 2002). This type of professionalism is thus a disguise of managerialism (Evetts, 2009, 2011).

Even though many contemporary professionals are closely connected to and involved with managerial work (Bourgeault et al., 2011; Mulcahy and Perillo, 2011; Noordegraaf, 2015, 2020; Waring, 2014), there are also scholars putting forward another view of the evolving or new professionalism in relation to this development where the agency of professionals is emphasised. Rather than seeing professions as victimised by NPM influences, one can highlight the capacity of professions to redefine professionalism. This perspective aligns with work on hybrid and connective professionalism but places stronger emphasis on how professional agency shapes how managerial arrangements are enacted in practice. Given the diversity of contexts in which professions operate, the role of context becomes central. Professions are heterogeneous in nature (Eklund, 2021a), making generalisations about their relationship to management problematic. As is emphasised by Noordegraaf (2015), managerial or organizational ideals can influence professions in a variety of ways. In this, it is possible that professionals although involved with managerial work can remain closely engaged in the professional core work (Alvehus et al., 2021; Llewellyn, 2001). As Noordegraaf (2015) emphasises, we might refrain from making too strong distinction between professionalism and managerialism since interests can be intertwined in practice. Noordegraaf (2020) refers to a view of professionalism as connective which illustrates how it can embrace different logics and be characterised by a closer connection between different contexts. In this, the organising dimension becomes natural in professional work rather than something distant and threatening to professions.

Embracing this more active role of professions, the picture of the functioning of organizations becomes more nuanced. Rather than always characterised by conflict, this view seemingly is a fairer representation of organizations in practice (Eklund, 2021a). One way of expressing it is by defining the functioning of organizations as a result of negotiation where several actors have agency and influence over the work performed. Allen (1997), for example, highlights how the orders of organization are constantly negotiated and something that actors actively use to legitimatise behaviour (Fine, 1984).

While professionalism and managerialism are often described in the literature as two contrasting dimensions, we build on the research that views professionals as active participants who navigate and reshape their organizational settings (Fırtın, 2022). From this perspective, professional agency becomes central for understanding how professionalism operates within managerial environments.

This perspective also resonates with a broader international literature on teacher agency and professional identity. For instance, Pantić (2015) conceptualises teacher agency as embedded in professional responsibilities, highlighting how teachers’ actions are shaped by structural conditions and both broader and local contexts. Similarly, Biesta et al. (2015) emphasise that agency is not a property individuals possess but an achievement that emerges in the interplay between beliefs, context and available resources.

More recent contributions further develop these perspectives by linking agency to professional identity and decision-making in practice. Deniz and Pinar (2025) show how teachers invoke agency through creatively navigating structural conditions, while Deniz (2025) conceptualises agency in relation to a “professional zone of acceptance” that shapes how teachers relate to school leadership practices and highlights the importance of understanding contextual conditions when introducing these practices. In a similar vein, Walls et al. (2025) highlight how teachers’ decisional capacity is shaped through professional learning contexts, raising questions about the situated and relational character of agency in practice.

Across several strands of theory, agency is conceptualised as something accomplished in concrete situations rather than possessed by actors as a stable attribute. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) define agency as a temporally embedded engagement with social and organizational contexts. They differentiate between an iterative dimension that draws on past routines, a projective dimension that opens up alternative future possibilities and a practical-evaluative dimension that enables actors to make judgements in the contingencies of the present. Agency, in this view, varies across time and circumstance. Actors switch between orientations and recombine them as they respond to emerging problems or tensions. This temporally sensitive understanding resonates with Biesta and Tedder’s (2007) ecological conception of agency as achieved in relation to available cultural, material and relational resources.

Institutional theory further illuminates how these agentic orientations unfold within structured contexts. While actors are embedded in institutional arrangements, they contribute to initiating, maintaining or redirecting institutional practices (Battilana et al., 2009; DiMaggio, 1988; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). This scholarship highlights the constitutive character of agency: actors do not simply comply with or resist institutional expectations; they interpret, translate and adjust them through everyday practice. Such interpretations often take the form of situated, small-scale adjustments rather than overt institutional entrepreneurship (c.f. Battilana et al., 2009). Yet these adjustments shape how managerial steering instruments function in practice.

Within the sociology of professions, these insights align with perspectives that emphasise the hybrid and connective character of contemporary professionalism (Noordegraaf, 2015, 2020). Professionals frequently work across boundaries, engage with managerial tools and participate in organizational coordination while sustaining professional commitments. Similarly, Eteläpelto et al. (2013) and Vähäsantanen (2015) show how agency is intertwined with professional identity and depends on how actors mobilise both social and individual resources in specific contexts. Their studies demonstrate that agency may involve adopting, adapting or reinterpreting managerial tools, often pragmatically and incrementally.

These dynamics are particularly visible in Nordic school systems, where decentralization, increased accountability and marketisation coexist with traditions of professional discretion and collegial autonomy (Bracci et al., 2025; Dahlstedt and Fejes, 2019; Lundstrom, 2012; Mausethagen and Mølstad, 2015). Recent research shows that teachers’ manoeuvring space is shaped not only by national policy but also by local leadership, peer culture and organizational routines (Nordholm et al., 2023; Qvortrup et al., 2025). Autonomy-supportive leadership can strengthen teachers’ projective and practical-evaluative capacities, while evaluation systems and performance measures can channel agency toward more iterative and risk-averse orientations.

These strands of literature motivate an approach to professionalism that foregrounds agency as a situated and negotiated accomplishment. This approach moves beyond binary portrayals of professionalism and managerialism and instead focuses on how professionals engage with managerial tools and sustain professional commitments within a managerial landscape. It is against this backdrop that our empirical analysis examines how teachers enact agency, and how their actions contribute to shaping how managerial arrangements are enacted in Swedish schools.

This article draws on two qualitative research projects originally conducted as part of doctoral dissertations. Although the projects were designed separately and examined different aspects of Swedish school reforms, both investigated how managerial forms of steering intersect with teachers’ work. For the purposes of this article, we conducted a systematic re-analysis of both datasets, bringing them into dialogue through a shared conceptual lens focused on professional agency in managerial environments.

We adopt a qualitative synthesis design (Silverman, 2024) within the broader field of qualitative secondary analysis, which involves the systematic re-use of existing qualitative data to address new analytical or theoretical questions (Heaton, 2012; Irwin and Winterton, 2012). Our aim is not to aggregate findings but to generate new conceptual insights through theoretically informed re-reading across studies. Following Heaton (2012), we treat the datasets as contextually embedded yet analytically extensible, enabling a dialogue between empirical materials and new conceptual concerns. Rather than merging the projects into a single dataset, we treat them as two distinct but comparable empirical scenes that illuminate how teachers navigate managerial expectations. This design enables analytical generalisation across cases while preserving the contextual specificity of each study. The two reform settings, the first-teacher reform and IDP, are analytically connected through their positioning within broader processes of managerialisation in Swedish schooling.

The first empirical scene stems from a study of the Swedish first-teacher reform conducted in 2015–2018. The material includes 40 interviews with first teachers and 52 meeting observations conducted across municipalities in western Sweden. The second scene builds on a study of IDP conducted in 2017–2018. This dataset consists of 16 interviews with teachers, principals and municipal administrators across municipalities in western Sweden, as well as analyses of 22 documents, such as collective agreements, local salary criteria, manuals and policy texts, totalling 451 pages. Both studies were carried out in Swedish compulsory schools and together capture variation in organisational conditions and reform implementation.

Our analytic strategy is abductive and reflexive, involving iterative movement between empirical material and theoretical concepts (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2017). This abductive strategy aligns with the qualitative secondary analysis, where iterative engagement with existing material supports theory development beyond the scope of the original studies (Heaton, 2012). The re-analysis proceeded in several steps. First, both datasets were re-read in their entirety with attention to teachers’ accounts of how they engage with managerial reforms, tools and expectations. Second, we conducted a focused coding of segments relating to expressions of professional agency, such as negotiation, adaptation, resistance and reinterpretation. Third, we compared patterns across the two datasets, identifying similarities and differences in how agency was enacted under different managerial arrangements. Finally, these empirically grounded patterns were iteratively related to the theoretical framework on professional agency and connective professionalism, allowing us to refine and extend the conceptual argument.

Given that both authors re-analysed material from their own prior research, issues of reflexivity and confirmation bias were carefully considered (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2017). To mitigate the risk of reproducing earlier interpretations, we returned to interview transcripts, field notes and documents rather than relying on previously published analyses. We actively sought out instances that challenged our emerging interpretations, including accounts where teachers experienced constraints or limited scope for agency. Analytical decisions were discussed continuously between the authors in order to question taken-for-granted assumptions and ensure that interpretations were grounded in the data rather than in prior conceptual commitments.

Although the first-teacher reform and the IDP system differ in purpose and design, both are situated within a broader shift towards managerialism in public-sector organisations. Managerialism involves strengthened managerial control, the use of steering devices and increased calculative and evaluative practices, often with weakening effects on professional autonomy (Carvalho and Correia, 2018; Evetts, 2016; Noordegraaf, 2020). These tendencies are particularly visible in the Swedish school sector, where decentralisation, performance management, the free-school choice system and performance-based pay have reshaped teachers’ working conditions (Bracci et al., 2025). Some argue that Swedish teachers have experienced significant de-professionalisation (Stenlås, 2011; Svensson, 2006). Examining two reform settings within this wider managerial landscape allows us to show how teachers exercise agency across different organisational arrangements and how the meaning of professionalism is negotiated in practice. While the analysis is informed by our broader research on professionalism in the Swedish school sector, prior studies are not treated as additional empirical data but as a sensitising background that supports the interpretation of patterns identified in the two datasets. The empirical material analysed in this article remains the primary basis for the claims made. The aim of this approach is not to provide exhaustive accounts of either reform but to use theoretically informed re-analysis to generate conceptual insights into how professional agency is enacted within managerial environments.

An artificial intelligence (AI) software tool has been used to proof-read the manuscript but has not altered its content.

All participants were informed about the purpose of the studies, participation was voluntary, and informed consent was obtained prior to data collection.

When the first-teacher reform was introduced, uncertainty surrounded the purpose and responsibilities of the new position. Municipalities and private organisers could apply for state funding, but the formal criteria were broad and allowed for local interpretation. Applicants were required to hold a teaching certificate, have at least four years of documented experience and demonstrate an ability to develop teaching (SFS, 2013:70). On paper, the reform can be interpreted as an expression of managerialism by introducing hierarchical differentiation, financial incentives and career ladders. Yet, the effects of the reform were far more complex and not uniformly experienced (Alvehus et al., 2019b). In some areas, responsibilities were determined centrally by municipal administrators; in others, principals retained significant autonomy. At several sites, the reform initially had limited practical consequences beyond the salary increase (Alvehus et al., 2019c, 2021). In contrast, in other contexts it became a starting point for more ambitious pedagogical development, where first teachers took leading roles in subject-specific initiatives, research collaborations or cross-school networks (Alvehus et al., 2019a).

Over time, many first teachers found themselves drawn into managerial domains. They attended meetings with school directors, represented colleagues and coordinated school-development work, often taking on roles as subject experts and leading professional-learning activities (Alvehus et al., 2019c). This development brought them closer to the managerial sphere without fully leaving the collegial one. In doing so, they occupied an intermediate position that challenged the traditionally flat structure of the Swedish teaching profession (Helgøy and Homme, 2007; Lilja, 2014). While professional–managerial relations are often described as a binary of alignment or resistance (Andersson and Liff, 2018; Kurunmäki, 2004), first teachers did not uncritically embrace managerial ideals, nor did they reject them outright. Instead, they continuously negotiated their roles and position, acting within and upon the managerial structures surrounding them.

A first issue was legitimacy. Colleagues frequently questioned the fairness of appointments, and first teachers themselves sometimes felt exposed when their additional salary lacked visible justification. Many sought to establish legitimacy by voluntarily taking on extra tasks and responsibilities. They distanced themselves from the image of the “excellent teacher” and instead emphasised concrete contributions, such as preparing materials, organising development meetings or supporting colleagues (Alvehus et al., 2021). Through these actions, first teachers used their agency to define the emerging role and make it acceptable within the collegium. Structural conditions also shaped this development. Principals were frequently occupied with administrative and accountability-related tasks, which limited their opportunities to lead pedagogically. They increasingly handed over responsibilities to first teachers:

Thus, in this vacuum, first teachers increasingly acted as pedagogical leaders and knowledge brokers (Alvehus et al., 2021). They initiated work on reading comprehension, grading practices, inclusion and subject didactics, topics that resonated with both colleagues’ concerns and broader organisational agendas.

These initiatives often originated from teachers’ own professional concerns, which strengthened collegial support. At the same time, the initiatives often aligned with broader organizational goals. First teachers thus mediated between professional and managerial rationalities, sometimes translating professional priorities into terms recognised by management. One first teacher explained how they had encouraged the principal to drive certain types of development work. They continued:

This mediating function also extended to boundary-setting. First teachers occasionally resisted managerial pressures, illustrating how agency can operate defensively and creatively. These instances indicate that agency was not only enabling but also involved boundary-setting and constraint. For instance, when parents requested to the principal that classrooms remain open after school hours, first teachers refused, questioning supervision and safety. Similarly, they resisted attempts, communicated through principals, to influence grading decisions, emphasising professional judgement and integrity (Eklund, 2021b). In other cases, they reframed top-down instructions, such as interpreting pupil surveys in ways that reflected local practice rather than bureaucratic expectations. A key enabler of such actions was trust. Where principals allowed first teachers autonomy and refrained from micromanagement, first teachers used this space to anchor development work in collegial norms. One first teacher described how the principal had “in practice handed over school development” to them. This delegation paradoxically limited managerial intrusion by embedding developmental initiatives within professional practice rather than administrative oversight. At the same time, the empirical material also points to structural limits to such agency, particularly in relation to access to formal decision-making arenas:

This suggests that teachers’ manoeuvring space is constrained by their position outside formal decision-making arenas.

Over time, many first teachers established themselves as collegial, rather than managerial, leaders. They repeatedly emphasised that their role was not to supervise or assess colleagues. For example, they refused to observe lessons without invitation and avoided offering direct criticism (c.f. Alvehus et al., 2019a). Instead, they framed their leadership as facilitative, providing support, creating spaces for discussion or helping colleagues interpret policy documents. Maintaining respect for colleagues’ autonomy was central. As one first teacher noted, it was important “never to enter another teacher’s classroom uninvited.” This careful positioning suggests that managerialism does not simply override professionalism. Rather, managerial structures became part of the environment within which professionals acted. While the reform introduced new hierarchies and accountability mechanisms, it also created opportunities for professionals to reinterpret and reshape managerial ambitions.

The later stages of the reform further underscore this dynamic. Initially, the idea of the “excellent teacher” dominated policy discussions. Yet this label was resisted by the profession, partly because appointment procedures were opaque. First teachers and their colleagues gradually shifted the role towards more concrete and collectively meaningful responsibilities. They defined criteria, clarified expectations and established norms of practice that emphasised pedagogical development. Their movement upwards in the hierarchy was accompanied by strong commitments to collegial autonomy and professional norms, and they used their agency to shape the role accordingly.

The evolution of the first-teacher role illustrates how managerial influences are negotiated rather than simply adopted or resisted. Managerialism forms part of the context in which professionals act, but it does not determine their actions. First teachers’ agency involved both translation and transformation: translating managerial demands into pedagogically meaningful work and transforming managerial tools so they aligned with professional priorities. First teachers neither capitulated to nor rejected managerialism; instead, they used the openings created by the reform to reinforce professional concerns, shape organisational practices and contribute to a pattern in which managerial tools were repurposed to serve professional ends. This illustrates a mode of professional agency that is embedded, negotiated and productive within managerial environments.

In Swedish schools, as in much of the public sector, salaries are determined individually and differentiated according to assessed performance, merit and skill (Andersson and Schager, 1999; Larsson et al., 2022). This approach resembles international experiments with performance-related pay, which have generated criticism for being demotivating, divisive or misaligned with the collective and relational foundations of teaching (Chamberlin et al., 2002). Critics argue that IDP introduces managerial forms of control that constrain teachers’ autonomy and weaken collegial solidarity (Lundstrom, 2012; Nilsson Lindström, 2020). At the same time, some studies note that individualised pay can offer opportunities for recognition, career progression or enhanced bargaining positions (Larsson et al., 2021). The empirical material presented here shows how this tension is negotiated in everyday work. Rather than accepting or rejecting individualised pay outright, teachers navigate the system strategically. Their actions suggest how professional agency can re-enter and influence how managerial environments operate in practice even when these are designed to regulate or discipline professional work.

The pay determination process can be described as comprising two broad steps. First, the entry-level salary is set. This is typically negotiated between principals, municipal human relations (HR) officers and occasionally local union representatives. Factors such as teacher experience, formal qualifications, market demand and statistical considerations like age or gender influence these negotiations (Fırtın and Kastberg, 2020). The second step is the annual salary revision, in which each teacher is evaluated in relation to municipal or school-specific criteria. In principle, these criteria are supposed to link salary increases to measurable achievements. In practice, the degree to which individual performance affects outcomes varies significantly across municipalities and schools. Salary revisions are often shaped as much by local political decisions, fiscal constraints and collective bargaining agreements as by assessments of individual merit (Fırtın and Kastberg, 2020; Recascino Wise, 1994).

Although individualised pay was introduced to enhance accountability and incentivise performance, its enactment reveals a more nuanced dynamic. Teachers often find ways to manoeuvre within and around the system. At the same time, these strategies also reflect the constraints of the system, as teachers must adapt to its rules rather than fundamentally alter them. Through these everyday strategies, agency resurfaces in a framework intended to standardise evaluation and steer behaviour. Across the interviews, teachers described pragmatic ways of engaging with individualised pay. Rather than openly rejecting the managerial idea that salary should reflect performance, they used tactical strategies to reassert some control over the outcomes. One of the most common strategies was the use of salary-based mobility. Teachers explained that by changing schools or municipalities, they could negotiate a significantly higher salary than any internal revision would yield. As one teacher noted:

This mobility was not only economically rational but also framed as a moral response to what many teachers perceived as an unfair system. Internal salary revisions were often described as insufficient to recognise long-term commitment or accumulated competence. By contrast, moving between municipalities displayed one’s value more clearly and provided leverage in negotiations. Another teacher expressed: “You cannot get ten thousand [of Swedish crowns] more if you stay, but every time I have changed jobs, I have also gained experience and raised my salary.” Mobility thus became a calculative and strategic form of agency. However, this form of agency is unevenly available and may privilege those able or willing to move, while leaving others more constrained within existing structures. Frequent teacher mobility can disrupt continuity in teaching and affect students’ learning trajectories, particularly in subjects where qualified teachers are scarce. As one teacher noted, students may “get new teachers all the time,” disrupting continuity in learning. In such cases, schools face difficulties in replacing staff at short notice, which can place additional strain on both organisational functioning and the teaching conditions. Teachers adapted to the system rather than resisting it, using managerial instruments to pursue professional ends. This was a way of reclaiming influence in a regime where static employment was seldom rewarded and where incentives tended to favour new recruits over loyal employees.

Collective professional norms also played a significant role in counterbalancing managerial fragmentation. Teachers frequently referenced a moral dimension of professionalism grounded in solidarity rather than competition. As one teacher reflected: “I think it is an important question today, whether we get further by thinking only of ourselves or of us. I want us to think of us.” Collegiality here acted as a subtle yet potent counterweight to the individualising tendencies of IDP. Through their emphasis on shared responsibility, teachers reframed managerial demands into collective commitments. A Montessori teacher described how her team approached reforms: “We tried to adapt to the reforms, but maybe it does not show as much because we do not just accept everything as it is.” This indicates that professionals integrate managerial tools selectively, filtering them through professional cultures rather than adopting them wholesale. A similar dynamic emerged around inclusion work. Teachers transformed managerial requirements for efficiency and documentation into actions grounded in care and ethical obligation. The shared sense of purpose provided a buffer against the atomising effects of individual performance evaluation. These examples suggest how teachers use their agency not to reject managerialism but to reinterpret it. In these accounts, agency appears within the managerial landscape. The IDP system, far from simply eroding professionalism, becomes a site where professionals reinterpret and adapt managerial tools.

Teachers’ strategic mobility and their collective ethical norms point toward a form of embedded professional agency. Managerialism is neither accepted nor rejected in any absolute sense but is translated into locally meaningful practices. Through these translations, managerial devices lose some of their disciplinary edge and become part of professional routines oriented toward pedagogical values. Rather than portraying professionals solely as constrained or victimised by managerial control, the material also shows how they engage with and sometimes reshape how such control operates in practice. Teachers use managerial infrastructures to sustain autonomy, transform accountability into dialogue and protect core professional values. Their acts of manoeuvring indicate that managerial environments are not fixed, but open to ongoing adjustment in practice. Thus, the case of IDP illustrates how managerial control and professional autonomy coexist. Managerial structures provide both constraints and openings, and professionals navigate these unevenly to uphold their own standards and priorities. The IDP system becomes not only a tool of control but also an arena where professional agency is expressed, negotiated and made visible in everyday work.

This article set out to explore the meaning of professionalism in school contexts increasingly shaped by managerial reforms. Across both empirical scenes, our analysis shows that teachers are not merely recipients of managerial interventions. Rather, they actively interpret, negotiate and adjust such interventions in ways that shape how they operate in practice. These engagements take different forms, including negotiation, where teachers reinterpret managerial demands in light of professional norms; selective acceptance, where elements of reforms are incorporated into existing practices; and subtle resistance, where teachers counteract or redirect managerial landscapes. In this sense, professionalism is not simply weakened or replaced by managerialism but reworked through teachers’ situated efforts to uphold pedagogical, collegial and moral commitments within changing organisational conditions. Their capacity to do so aligns with a view of agency as something enacted through situated practices (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Rather than being exercised through grand gestures or deliberate institutional interventions (Battilana et al., 2009; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), professional agency in our article unfolds through small, ordinary actions that nevertheless influence how managerial arrangements are enacted and understood. This challenges the idea of a dominant and suppressive discourse of managerialism exerting uniform pressure on teachers (Evetts, 2009, 2011).

The two empirical scenes illustrate this dynamic. In both cases, teachers’ actions can be understood as forms of negotiation, selective acceptance and at times subtle resistance to managerial demands. The first-teacher reform and individualised pay can be interpreted as managerial interventions: they introduce differentiation, career steps, evaluation procedures and monetary incentives. Yet the teachers involved did not simply absorb these arrangements. Instead, they worked to connect them with their understandings of professional work, thereby reshaping how managerial steering functioned in practice. In the first-teacher reform, teachers occupying hybrid roles moved closer to managerial arenas and yet often worked to anchor these roles in collegial norms and pedagogical concerns. Rather than acting simply as extensions of management, they frequently functioned as intermediaries who translated managerial ambitions into professionally acceptable forms. This aligns with research on professional elites who operate between professional and organisational arenas and act as intermediaries rather than as extensions of management (Alvehus et al., 2021; Blomgren and Waks, 2015; Freidson, 1984). In the case of IDP, which is often portrayed as a mechanism of managerial control that fragments the profession and reduces autonomy (Lundstrom, 2012; Nilsson Lindström, 2020), teachers navigated calculative and individualising arrangements through strategic mobility, practical judgement and collegial norms to counteract the individualising tendencies of the pay model (Fırtın and Kastberg, 2020). Across both scenes, the findings point to a situated reshaping of managerial arrangements in practice. The article therefore argues not that managerialism as a broader system is transformed in any general sense, but that its local enactment is mediated and reworked through professional agency.

This qualification is important. Our findings should not be read as suggesting that managerial reforms are harmless or that teachers always possess meaningful room for manoeuvre. Agency is context-dependent and unevenly distributed. The opportunities identified in our material were closely tied to specific enabling conditions, including trust, supportive leadership and room for interpretation within local organisational settings. Where such conditions are weak, managerial reforms may be experienced more narrowly as control, surveillance or fragmentation. The analysis therefore does not reject concerns about de-professionalisation, but it does suggest that these concerns need to be balanced with closer attention to how teachers act within, around and sometimes upon managerial structures in everyday work.

Across both scenes, managerial arrangements become entwined with the moral, pedagogical and collegial dimensions of teachers’ work. This development aligns with the idea of connective professionalism (Noordegraaf, 2007), where professionals work across organisational boundaries and adjust managerial tools to fit professional purposes. What emerges is neither a simple shift towards a “new” professionalism nor a linear erosion of traditional forms, but a situated blending in which professional concerns are incorporated into managerial arrangements (c.f. Blomgren and Waks, 2015; Evetts, 2011). This blending does not result from deliberate institutional redesign but from teachers’ everyday engagement with reforms, where managerial tools are adapted to fit pedagogical and collegial priorities.

The article thereby contributes to research on teacher professionalism by showing how professional agency shapes the local enactment of managerial reforms. While previous research has often emphasised either de-professionalisation or hybridisation, and professionalism is often discussed in “new” terms (Eklund, 2021a; Evetts, 2009, 2011; Noordegraaf, 2015, 2020), our analysis shows more specifically how teachers engage with managerial reforms through everyday acts of interpretation, translation and selective adaptation. This extends discussions on hybrid and connective professionalism by showing that managerial tools do not only impose new expectations on teachers; they also become objects of professional mediation. Professionalism, in this sense, is not only shaped by reforms from above but also by how teachers make these reforms workable, legitimate and meaningful in practice. This also resonates with international research emphasising teacher agency as situated and closely linked to professional identity and decision-making in practice (Biesta et al., 2015; Deniz and Pinar, 2025; Pantić, 2015).

These findings also have implications for educational leadership and policy. For school leaders, the analysis suggests that professional agency is more likely to develop when leadership creates interpretive space, supports trust-based relations and allows hybrid roles to gain legitimacy through collegial anchoring rather than narrow top-down control. For policymakers and local authorities, the findings indicate that reforms such as career structures and performance-based pay cannot be understood only in terms of formal design. Their effects depend substantially on how they are interpreted and enacted in schools. Reform designs that leave room for professional judgement, protect collegial relations and avoid overly rigid performative criteria are more likely to support professional responsibility than those that rely primarily on measurement and compliance.

More broadly, the article suggests that the relationship between professionalism and managerialism is better understood as dynamic and co-constructed than as a simple opposition. This also resonates with broader arguments that teacher professionalism has been historically reshaped through changing reform agendas and external expectations rather than simply displaced by them (Hargreaves, 2000). By focussing on these situated forms of agency, the article offers a way of understanding contemporary professionalism that is neither nostalgic about a lost autonomy nor reductive in treating managerialism as wholly determining. Instead, professionalism appears as an evolving accomplishment, formed in the ongoing interaction between organisational reforms and the professional actors who interpret and enact them.

This article draws on empirical material generated within a larger research project led by Professor Gustaf Kastberg Weichselberger at the University of Gothenburg. The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Professor Gustaf Kastberg Weichselberger and Professor Johan Alvehus to the design and execution of the original project, which provided the empirical foundation for the present study.