This paper examines cycles of digital platform procurement in the context of the marketized educational sector in Sweden. It focuses on how teachers’ work is structured by these cycles, the digital platforms they result in, and the political and administrative regulations that guide them. More specifically, our interest is in understanding the consequences of disruptions caused by the recurring periods of procurement and implementation that school administrations and teachers must adapt to. The purpose is to explore and problematize tensions including those between the functionalities and experiences promised by platform providers and those actually delivered, and those associated with the time and effort required to engage in the often complex and uncertain work of restructuring routines to the logics instantiated in a new digital platform. 

In the Swedish context, platform technology has increasingly taken on the role of an infrastructure, sociotechnically connecting clouds, software, people, and data (Plantin et al., 2018). This “platformization” comes with the business logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), profiting on the individuals’ data production while positioned as making workplaces more efficient. While this logic has been well-articulated, research on how teachers’ working conditions and routines are changing in relation is relatively scarce (Bergviken Rensfeldt, Hillman, Selwyn, 2018; Selwyn, 2020; Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017; Shulte, 2019).

This study builds on analyses of tensions that have already been identified in relation to school reforms more generally as existing between the regulating principles of market efficiency and governance and the working conditions in the teaching profession (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Ball, 2003; Lundström & Parding, 2011). The analysis presented is situated in relation to a politico-economic push for school digitalization that has been a decades-long process, both on a global scale and within the Nordic countries. It contributes to the body of work showing how digital platforms such as Learning Management Systems commonly provided by global technology companies like Google and Microsoft restructure everyday workplace technologies in schools according to the imagery of global platform infrastructures.

As part of a larger project on digitalization and teachers’ working conditions, empirical material was collected through ethnographic engagement with school administrators and teachers in an upper secondary school while they became acquainted with and restructured their routines for a new Learning Management System. This involved policy and infrastructure ethnography, combined with participant observation and trace ethnography of teachers’ online and offline work.

Previous findings from the project show how digital platform infrastructures are embedded in and an influential part of teachers’ work occasioning changes and disruptions in their working conditions and routines. This study adds to these findings by showing how the economic logic of educational governance forces teachers in public schools to restructure their work routines to new platforms in cycles that comply with procurement laws, but may be in tension with their professional knowledge and pedagogical judgement.