Part-Time Politics

Abstract

During a multi-district study on part-time teaching employment, part-time teachers, school administrators, and teachers’ association officials spoke about a range of micropolitical activities related to part-time teaching arrangements as a component of flexible workforces and as an element of flexible workplaces. The study was conducted in one Canadian province during a period of rapidly imposed changes, including funding cuts, typical of the globalized school restructuring movement. We describe administrators’ strategic efforts to mobilize their biases related to part-time teaching employment by organizing their micropolitical resources either to support that preference or to minimize such arrangements. We discuss the strategies that part-time teachers used in order to survive as flexible workers, and sometimes to flourish in rather fragile versions of flexible workplaces. We conclude by noting micropolitical themes that have application beyond the little-studied subculture of part-time teaching. These themes offer insights about power, perceptions, values, and gender that apply more widely to the micropolitics of school organizations.

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