Team organization in the Danish grammar school – more selfmanagement, more standardization?

Abstract

This article examines the organisation of teams in the Danish upper-secondary school. Teamwork has been one of the central concepts in the number of reforms that have aimed at modernizing the Danish education system within the last 20 years. One of the main concerns in the political and scholarly debates in relation to these reforms has been how this modernization involves the dismantling of what is called the 96 Abstracts “teacher as private practitioner” who is being replaced with more a more flexible selfmanaging employee that will take a broader responsibility for the whole organisation. The organisation in teams is presented as a central way of bringing that change about. The article shows how the discourse of these changes of the teacher profession in practice is carried out through a rich production of standards in the practical organisation of teamwork in the individual upper-secondary school. Through empirical examples from a research project on managing and organisation, the article shows how the translation of teamwork in practice concerns standardising through manuals, schemes and minutes allocated for meetings that coordinate and thereby transform the activities of those working with them. The article shows that somewhat paradoxically deploying standards becomes the means of creating more flexible, responsible and co-managing teachers. However, the standards themselves also take a lot of work to be able to act in practice, and thereby new ends and means are established that create an explosion of visible and invisible work for managers and teachers in the upper-secondary school. The article argues that teamorganisation can be viewed as an example of the ways in which a management rationale that seems to be moving away from rules and forms and rather focus on flexibility, self-management and responsibility for the whole organisation, in practice does not mean fewer standards and less management. Rather, it requires a lot of standardising work to enact flexibility in practice.