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Politics of the Workplace

In general terms, politics refers to the social and structural arrangements and priorities of public and civic life. It therefore encapsulates a whole range of issues relating to structures, policies, values (spoken and unspoken), positions, visions, rationales, goals and actions.

The concept of workplace politics can have different meanings for different people. It can connote the small issues that take on huge significance (eg who uses which coffee mug!). Go to http://www.shaziamirza.org/articles/timesed_jan03.html for a fun article from the Times Educational Supplement on this and other staffroom battles.

For others, politics in the workplace evokes concepts of power and power plays - often in ways that make professional life difficult. A support service for teachers in the UK, for example, is getting increasing numbers of calls from teachers about conflict at work. Conflict with bullying managers now double the number of calls about difficulties with student misbehaviour. The network's support service has helped 76,000 teachers in England and Wales over the past four years - and four-fifths of the calls were from women. Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3566093.stm

It is interesting to reflect about questions of conflict raised in the example of the use of the coffee mug. There may well be some interpersonal and personality issues contributing to the conflict. Yet the difficulties are also connected to the positions of the people within the school and how they operate in these positions. The topic is therefore also centrally connected to the politics of school life.

Sometimes ideas about school reform are raised or implemented without discussion (at the school level, at least) of the political view and intention behind them. Two researchers from Canada have explored the implications of this issue. Delhi and Fumia look at the ways in which teachers make sense of the work they do and their professional identities, as they negotiate school and individual practice resulting from externally generated (and often ideologically based) reforms.

Delhi, K. & Fumia, D. (2002). Teachers' informal learning identity and contemporary education reform. http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/sese/csew/nall/res/56KariDehi.pdf

Similarly, work in Queensland has looked at the implications of teachers 'on the ground' dealing with reform in their particular schools. In Developing teacher professional learning communities: The case of Education Queensland, Jo Ailwood (The University of Queensland) and Kirran Follers (New Basics Branch, Education Queensland) take as their starting point the need for teachers not only to be intellectuals, but to function as intellectuals. Teachers, they argue, are a 'nodal' point for social and political change and therefore have to be able to work and think in particular ways for the processes of change to be effective. http://scs.une.edu.au/CF/Papers/ailwood.htm

One theme that clearly emerges, despite differences in research approaches, is the importance of open debate about the big issues (political issues) underlying the work of teaching. This is explicitly called for in a media release from the Open University in the UK where head teachers are asked to ensure that ideological differences and diversity are valued and discussed in their schools. They claim that, where this does not occur, a culture of individualism rather than collaboration thrives. See http://www3.open.ac.uk/events/2001126_55994_nr.doc

The following audit includes questions that add political dimensions to the concepts of the collegiate teacher and the collective staff group. Some of the issues may be important to take up in a professional development or planning context.