ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with presenting teacher views about the teaching career, in order to put ‘empirical flesh’ on the ‘structural bones’. It presents two sources: first, from forty semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers occupying a variety of promotion positions in different sectors of the school system; and, second, from five group interviews conducted throughout the state. The majority of interviewees regarded school teaching to be an occupation that offered recruits the possibility of pursuing a career. The more promotions minded a teacher the greater the extent to which they stressed their career in organizational rather than occupational terms. The particular type of career chosen depended very much on the values of the teacher concerned, and his or her motives for becoming a teacher. Interviewees were asked to indicate the extent to which, and the ways in which, the school teaching career could be conceived of as consisting of a number of different stages.
