A Sociological Perspective on Teacher Stress

Teaching is generally reported to be a very stressful occupation (Borg and Riding, 1991b; Borg, Riding, and Falzon, 1991; Galloway, Panckhurst, Boswell, Boswell, and Green, 1987; Kyriacou and Sutcliffe, 1977b, 1978a, 1979; Laughlin, 1984; Solman and Feld, 1989). In recent years, in some parts of the world at least, the problem seems to have grown worse (Manthei and Gilmore, 1994). This fact in itself suggests, as Durkheim (1970) showed with regard to suicide, that stress is as much a social and historical issue as it is a psychological one. It is, in short, a multilevel and multidimensional phenomenon, requiring a number of theories of different kinds for full comprehension rather than one all-embracing theory or model. In this chapter, I examine some of the sociological factors behind the increases at micro, meso, and macro levels. The micro refers to social factors within the teacher's biography and person; the meso is related to institutional and other middle-range factors; the macro deals with wider forces deriving from global trends and government policy. The interaction between the three is the field on which teacher experiences are played out.

To study this interaction, I bring together two approaches that I believe have particular relevance: interactionism and some recent formulations about “deprofessionalization” and “intensification” of teachers' work derived from theories of the labor process.