The aim of the project and the development during the project. The aim of the project is to study how and to what effect teachers and other school employees mobilize their rights to a safe working environment. The main idea behind the project is to discover how and if legal steering mechanisms promote rights and safety for employees in local school environments. The aim of the project developed further as the project progressed. The work environment of schools in Sweden was tense because of strong pressures on schools to provide better results in international tests of students learning skills and by increased competition among public and private schools to attract students as financial resources were determined by the number of students in the particular school. It was apparent, during the project, that schools used different adaptive strategies. Case studies of eight schools shoed that two of the schools participating in the study were forced to change principals. The aim of the project was developed to analyze how schools, in a process of tension and change, found successful mechanisms to re-establish a safe and fulfilling work environment. Cases of work injury/sickness gathered with the Swedish Work Environment Authority showed a need for a development of the aims of the project. Threats and violence were more often directed towards other employees, such as teacher aids, than at teachers. However, more non-physical violence was directed towards teachers. It was necessary to gather more cases over a longer time period to be sure of our results.

Some Comments on the Methodology of the Project.  The research method combines a longitudinal survey material of conflict at school with an ethnographic study of eight different schools in two different cities, an analysis of 2,200 reported cases to the Swedish Work Environment Authority of work injury/illness due to threats and violence at school or to psycho-social organization of schools (2012-2016), serie interviews with five teachers and administrators at each of the eight schools at four different time periods between 2014 and 2016 and follow-alongs with environment inspectors at individual schools. Focus group interviews were also done at each of the eight schools.

Three Important Results from the Project that will make a "front line" Contribution to the International fFeld: The most important result and contribution to the project is the development of the concept of "strategic violence." We minted the concept, strategic violence, in order to frame the behavior that individual teachers and other employees were subjected to at their work place. It was obvious from analysis of the reported cases by individual employees and from series interviews over time with school employees, that the intention of "strategic violence" was to get rid of a particular employee. This behavior has been invisible in the scientific literature. Instead a metaphor of "bullying" is used to discuss behavior between individuals at work.  This is an incorrect metaphor that individualizes behavior as a personal problem, or a relational problem instead of recognizing it as a public issue and very much connected with the organization of the workplace.

Another important result of the project is the discovery that students in need of special help or who were being defined by faculty as difficult were being sorted out of the classroom through a variety of mechanisms. This sorting-out process seems to have carried over to teachers sorting-out each other as suitable or not suitable to be at work.

The third result from the project with implications for the international field of school climates, is that schools in Sweden were creating a "buffer zone" by increasing employment of an assistant category of employee as a way to meet teachers continuing distress of their work environment. This is a double-edged knife. On the one side it does alleviate demands on teachers during the work days that they find disturbing. Such as a bothersome student disrupting the classroom. On the other side, schools administrative leaders and teachers themselves began to fragmentize the work of teachers as more and more details surrounding teacher are given to "assistents" who are not pedagogically qualified as teachers. The bigger the use of a "buffer zone" with more employees, the greater the distance between the teacher and the student. Teachers are also losing much of their autonomy the more fragmented their work process becomes.

New Research Questions that Developed from the Project: A new research question can be, What are the consequences of de-professionalization of teaching? Are we seeing a change in basic obligatory education and how it is to be transmitted?  Another new research question revolves around employment in the public sector. What are the consequences for the welfare state when it becomes more and more difficult to find and keep educated employees? What happens to the welfare state if it is deemed as a bad employer? And what happens when employees in the public sector simply cannot do their job? This leads to a third question and that is the competition between private and public providers of public services. As competitive private enterprises try to establish and expand within the public funded public sector, will work environment and the question  of who can provide the highest quality employees to meet public needs lead to a segregation of the work market?  It is also obvious that more research on "strategic violence" is need. We discovered "strategic violence" by reading hundreds of narratives provided by workers. It is slowly becoming recognized in the research field on work, health and safety that what has been ignored is "work-centered-experiences."  These experiences are not captured by isolated surveys of work environment but have to be seen in the narratives produced by workers themselves. We see our work as being as a fore-runner in developing the methodological tools to fill a needed empirical gap.

The Projects International Dimensions.  The project has reached out to the international community by continually submitting working papers for presentation at international conferences. The following papers have been presented, discussed, and used to develop networks of researchers in related areas of the welfare state, worker safety, professions, social policy and economics, private and public organizations: 12th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Prague 2015, Hetzler, A. & Flaherty, C.”Regulating Social Rights”;  American Sociology Association, Chicago 2015, Hetzler, A. ”War at Work”; 28th Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Berkeley 2016, Hetzler, A. ”Framing Work Injury and Sickness in a Changing Welfare State,” Flaherty, C. & Andersson, P. (2017). Norms in Action: The Individual Student in the School Climate. Paper presented at the 2017 American Sociological Association Conference in Montreal. Also the international dimension of the project was enhanced by a visiting fellow opportunity for A. Hetzler, PI, at  Harvard University under 2017 with weekly meetings at the  SCANCOR-Weatherhead group, https://wcfia.harvard.edu/projects/scancor Spring 2017 Work within the project was discussed with a group of international scholars continually and the projects theory and empirical work was discussed more formally at the Conference om ”Organizations, Institutions, and Nation-States,” and A. Hetzler ”Decline of the Welfare State? Merging the Public and Private Sector.” as well as participation in the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion 2017-2018. https://inequality.wcfia.harvard.edu

Project Groups Distribution of Results outside of the Scientific Community.  The project has had a steady information exchange with the statistical analysis department of the Swedish Work Environment Authority. Meeting and exchange of project results was done at all the schools that were involved in the project. Research results were also presented on two educations with the Principal Leadership Educational Program. The teacher's union paper, Lärartidningen, and daily newspapers presented information from the project. Swedish TV presented results from the project on the national news program in 2017. Meeting with municipal heads of education at one large city has taken place. When the book on the project results is released in April 2018 meetings explaining the results will be presented to the union major representatives.