Changed ground rules for professionalism? : About how the Swedish Association of Local Regions and Counties' labour politics have shaped teachers' status, autonomy and legitimacy

This essay concerns teacher professionalism and how its prerequisites have been affected by the politcs of the employer organization Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR). In Sweden, the government has during the last thirty years carried out extensive school reforms, fueled by the paradigm of New Public Management. On the whole, these reforms have contributed to the so called 'de-professionalization' of Swedish school teachers. However, the impact of labour politics has to great lenghts been neglected in political research on teacher professionalism, and that is the gap which this thesis aims to fill. By using a wide range of material, such as collective bargaining agreements, policy documents, debate articles and semistructured interviews, a reconstruction of the SALARs' labour politics has been made. Furthermore, an ideal-typical analytical framework of the two contrasting and competing governance models new managerialism and professionalism was applied on the reconstruction. The results are in short that the organization in many ways has contributed to the de-professionalization process which Swedish school teachers have undergone. By allocating power and authority to headmasters and municipalities, the discretion and legitimacy of theteacher profession itself has been circumscribed. Via these policies, a clearer hierarchy between the profession and its headmasters has come into place. Furthermore, the results indicate that the SALAR promotes organizational norms and values, rather than professional dito. In the light of the now being 'recruitment crisis' and the low attraction of the teaching profession, the results are particurlarly relevant