The iron cage of the music teaching profession: A multi-case study on how primary music teachers in Spain understand bureaucracy

Abstract

Despite being an unavoidable part of the music teaching profession, bureaucracy remains an under-studied and ill-defined topic in the research literature. However, its investigation may benefit the music teaching profession by re-thinking policy, informing music teacher education programmes and fostering a mutual understanding among music teachers and policymakers. Therefore, in the present study, we aimed to investigate the understandings of Spanish music teachers in relation to bureaucracy and to compare these with the views of the teachers of other subjects in primary education. The perspective of purposefully selected music teachers were thus explored in-depth and contrasted with the views of their counterparts in a multiple case-study design. Our findings contribute a taxonomy of bureaucracy in the music teaching profession. Additionally, we conclude that the views of our music teacher participants on bureaucracy are mainly negative and slightly more pessimistic than those of their counterparts. In discussing our results, we connect these views with the Weberian ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy and Arendt’s ‘government of Nobody’ as a substitute for democracy in governing education. Finally, we hypothesise a dystopic future of deprofessionalisation as a result of these primary music teachers’ declared lack of control over their own organisational tasks.

Moving forward in the world: Outcomes and communication for effective reform

“…At the macro level, problems in communication can stem from gaps between bureaucratic entities and meso-level actors like teachers and school administrators, be they related to trust, policy implementation, or community building (Mateos-Moreno & Bravo-Fuentes, 2023). Bureaucracy may also render academic environments (across types of education) slow and overwhelming through an overflow of information, thus leading to poor teacher-student relations and worsening the quality of classroom experiences (Nash, 2019).…”