Teaching with Technology - Policy Reform and Professional Labor in the Digital Age

Despite the unpredictable consequences of technological change on professional work, varied stakeholders increasingly expect professionals to adopt new technologies in their work practices. These demands can further become inscribed in public policy reforms. How do such technology-related policy reforms shape professional work? And how do professionals navigate the pressures of these reforms? To understand these questions, I studied technological policy reform in the Finnish educational system during the 2010s. I leverage insights from a 16-month ethnographic study of Finnish schoolteachers, extensive archival materials, and interviews with field participants. In the first essay, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork to understand how organizations balance professional autonomy and managerial control during technology alignment. My findings suggest that an intra-professional division of labor—specialization of work tasks within a given professional community—might allow organizations an alternative pathway to navigating technological change as a middle ground between unfettered professional autonomy and strong managerial control. In the second essay, I examine the field-level dynamics of technological policy reform: how can professions reclaim autonomy over technological choices amidst stakeholder demands of technology adoption? My analysis shows that teachers and supportive stakeholders then engaged in the process of relational deconstruction, a coalescence of varied actors around critical narratives about the technology reform. Following this contentious period, educational stakeholders negotiated technological resettlement, which accommodated teachers' and their stakeholders' demands. In the third and final essay, I return to my ethnographic data to understand workers' experiences at the receiving end of educational policy reforms. I focus on how members of occupational sub-groups navigate occupational inequality in the workplace. Drawing on the literature on identity work, I find they engage in three identity narratives to cope with occupational inequality. However, a labor process reading of these findings shows these very same narratives also engage workers in "games," which contribute to the organizational and institutional system producing their experiences of inequality. Altogether, my dissertation contributes to understanding how technological change alters professional labor in the digital era. Overall, this research proposes that scholars of work, technology, and professions pay renewed attention to who is involved in these technological alterations, whose interests they serve, whose not, and how their consequences are distributed.