RT Journal Article
T1 The iron cage of the music teaching profession: A multi-case study on how primary music teachers in Spain understand bureaucracy
A1 Mateos-Moreno, Daniel
A1 Bravo Fuentes, Paloma
K1 Música - Estudio y enseñanza
AB Despite being an unavoidable part of the music teaching profession, bureaucracy remains an understudiedand ill-defined topic in the research literature. However, its investigation may benefit themusic teaching profession by re-thinking policy, informing music teacher education programmesand fostering a mutual understanding among music teachers and policymakers. Therefore, in thepresent study, we aimed to investigate the understandings of Spanish music teachers in relationto bureaucracy and to compare these with the views of the teachers of other subjects in primaryeducation. The perspective of purposefully selected music teachers were thus explored in-depthand contrasted with the views of their counterparts in a multiple case-study design. Our findingscontribute a taxonomy of bureaucracy in the music teaching profession. Additionally, we concludethat the views of our music teacher participants on bureaucracy are mainly negative and slightlymore pessimistic than those of their counterparts. In discussing our results, we connect theseviews with the Weberian ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy and Arendt’s ‘government of Nobody’ asa substitute for democracy in governing education. Finally, we hypothesise a dystopic future ofdeprofessionalisation as a result of these primary music teachers’ declared lack of control overtheir own organisational tasks.
PB Sage Journals
YR 2023
FD 2023
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/32644
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/32644
LA eng
NO Mateos-Moreno, D., & Bravo-Fuentes, P. (2023). The iron cage of the music teaching profession: A multi-case study on how primary music teachers in Spain understand bureaucracy. International Journal of Music Education, 02557614231196594.
NO The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publicationof this article: This work was supported by the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación,MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), under grant to Project Musihabitus (ref. PID2020-118002RB-I00).
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 19 ene 2026