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.

Both earlier Swedish research and reports in the Swedish media suggest that students and teachers perceive norm conflicts regarding test-taking and grading: on one hand, high-school-students (year 7 -12) and teachers feel expected to strictly adhere to rules prohibiting cheating in school; on the other hand, they feel expected to apply these rules flexibly to facilitate students achieving good grades. This study aims to address this conflict from student perspective and answer the following question: To what extent do high-school students perceive that social norms support rules against school cheating? The data for this quantitative study was collected from 199 high-school students. Using a norm-sociological model (Svensson, 2008), the data was subsequently analysed to illuminate in what way students understood the social norm against cheating in school and what significance they allocated to these values in their social environments. The results show that the high-school students perceived the social norm against cheating to be significantly stronger than the social norm for cheating. Secondly, the students perceived that teachers, principals and parents clearly viewed cheating negatively, and imbued the no-cheating norm with great importance. Thirdly, the students perceived that their peers were ambivalent to cheating.

Schools in Sweden need to handle an acute lack of teachers. One way to handle this problem is to hire new staff who can work with social and administration tasks, enabling the teachers in school to teach some more classes instead. This study examined two secondary schools in Sweden where this way to solve the problem was tried out. The aim of the study was to highlight possible consequences for teachers’ core practices (teaching), and discuss whether more teaching might involve another sort of teaching. In this analysis, Ryle´s distinction of “achievements” versus “tasks” was being used (Ryle, 1949). Another aim was to highlight possible consequences for teacher-student relationships and possible consequences for the teachers´ working conditions. The empirical base was five focus group interviews with the teachers. The findings indicate that the new work model might turn into a “mechanical teaching”, more of an achievement than a task, in Ryle´s sense. Moreover, while new staff was hired to solve social problems among students, teachers still describe how they handle acute conflicts in the school environment; “because I´m an adult”. Finally, even though the working conditions are still demanding, the clarifying of job boundaries has contributed to less work stress.