ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of factors that are identified using DES statistical data and career history material from interviews with married women primary and infant headteachers. The career history study was guided by interactionist principles. The interactionist concern with meaning, experience and the social construction of reality has resulted in the concept of 'the subjective career'. In the subjective career, a career is an individual experience. Life history material can tell about the socio-historical, institutional and personal influences on a career. In existing career history research on teachers and teaching it was the first phase of the teaching career, teacher socialization, together with particular crises in the teaching career, both institutional and personal, that received most attention. The chapter emphasizes the interrelationship between contexts and strategies. It is important to understand how the characteristics and processes in the labour market are affected by expansion and contraction, and also how these characteristics and processes are negotiated by individual teachers.
