Claiming the relational leftovers—professional authority among educational paraprofessionals in Swedish lower secondary schools

Abstract

This article explores the consequences of the occupational dynamics that have been triggered by the remodelling of the educational workforce in Sweden. Teachers’ work has become increasingly focused on teaching the curriculum, and new lower-status paraprofessional personnel are being hired to perform work that has been ‘hived off’ by teachers. The paraprofessionals enter this abandoned occupational domain of work and attempt to possess authority over it by processes of interaction, negotiation, and rhetoric. To address these occupational dynamics, we draw on data from fieldwork at three different lower secondary schools. Our findings demonstrate how social influence is coproduced by paraprofessionals in their daily interactions with their colleagues and stakeholders and how this social influence gives them access to a domain of work that is separate from teachers, creating an occupational authority that entails a dependency on the paraprofessional services. Four approaches to achieving this were found in data: (1) Creating close and nonauthoritarian working alliances with pupils, (2) producing soft power by relational ties, (3) residing in pupils’ spaces, and (4) operating as intermediary links between parties in the school. By paying attention to lower-status paraprofessionals' coproduction in social processes in which professional authority is negotiated and (re)constructed, this article has the potential to bring new insights into how contemporary processes of specialization of the teaching profession can pave the way for the emergence of a new profession in school.