Teachers' Work: curriculum restructuring, culture, power and comprehensive schooling.

The article examines the specificity of the institutional dialectical dynamics of how recent policy impacts on teacher cultures and in turn how teacher cultures impact on policy. The study illustrates the complexity of the development of Occupational strategies and identifies at a time of rapid organisational change. This could not have been predicted on the basis of a "priori" sociological assumptions concerning teacher responses. Further theory-led empirical work might serve to demonstrate the wide range of responses to the restructuring of teachers' work. This may enable one, in relation to student responses to schooling, to move beyond a search for a teacher typology and construct a grammar of modes of challenge, which accounts for hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies. This may facilitate the generation of theoretical models that help one to incorporate one's understanding of school work-pIace micro-politics within more general explanations of the changing nature and structure of teachers' work, at a time of rapid socioeconomic, political and technological change. In turn, this may provide much needed support at a critical time for State teachers, students and comprehensive schooling.