Reforms towards defining, measuring and demarcating professionalism in teachers has been a global policy trend since the turn of the millennium, encapsulating a vast array of system-wide efforts towards teacher professional standards in the pursuit of high-quality teaching (Sachs, 2003; Page, 2015). The Swedish school system has been no exception, apparent in the enforcement of a teacher certification and registration reform in 2011 that re-centralized the power of defining ‘applicable’ teachers from municipal- or school level management back to the national government. This paper focuses on an expansion of this reform to include teachers within the Swedish School-age Educare (or SAEC) in 2019. The extension broadens the professional standards paradigm to include teachers of extended education - a pedagogically and traditionally novel entity when compared to those within the traditional school system. Simultaneously, local managerial actors within a majority of Swedish municipalities and SAECs’ where struggling to acquire personnel of ‘fit’ due to a national teacher shortage, affecting their possibilities of successful hiring- and recruitment work (Andersson, 2020). 

By exploring the response and organizing efforts following this apparent policy dilemma within a Swedish municipal case, this paper aims to answer the following question: How, in terms of organizing, do the municipal actors construct hiring routines in response to the incongruous relationship between reform goals and environmental constraints?

 From a theoretical approach grounded in organizational sensemaking (Weick, 2005), this paper utilizes the concept of organizational routines (Feldman & Pentland, 2003) to explore the relationship between municipal actors (individual and shared) interpretive and enactive processes in finding and acting towards solutions to the policy dilemma, and by this facilitating change within their educational practice. The analytical separation, as well as co-constructive relationship, between routines ostensive aspect (abstract, idea-based and guiding towards action) and performative aspect (actual routinized action) serves as the foundation for the conceptualization of this process within the paper. The paper draws from empirical data from a case study carried out within a Swedish municipal site (Andersson, 2022), which in turn is part of a larger PhD-project. Data gathering and analysis was carried out using strategies derived from grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), with empirical material being extracted from interviews with multiple categories of municipal actors central to the planning and performance of hiring routines. 

The results point to routine construction as a possible strategy for adapting to contextual obstacles in the enactment of reform initiatives, while simultaneously creating prerequisites for educational quality and identity construction. In this case, the reform initiative was made sense of based on its ability to assist in the construction of legitimacy and quality within the educational program – translating into an ostensive script and detailing ‘the right way’ of performing hiring routines. However, when this ostensive script did not harmonize with resources or capacities within the school units through its actual performance – pragmatic routine scripts were constructed in order to detain some sections of the initial sensemaking, while adapting to environmental constraints.