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Digital technologies have flooded schools worldwide for decades, adding digital dimensions to roles and practices (Heffernan & Selwyn, 2023). Despite this, research on digitalized school leadership is scarce and often remains abstract, emphasizing broad systemic transformations while overlooking how digitalization is enacted in specific contexts (Krein, 2023). This lack of empirical grounding complicates efforts to critically assess the nature and implications of digital transformation for school leaders. 

To address this gap, the present study examines distance teaching in Swedish schools as a situated case of digitalization. Distance teaching entails novel challenges for school leaders, disrupting established norms, infrastructures, and professional practices. By foregrounding this example, this study focuses on who really needs digitalized school leadership and under what conditions it becomes essential.

The aim of the study is to examine the relation between digital transformation and school leadership in the context of distance teaching. This inquiry is particularly relevant  to Nordic research, where school leaders’ roles have become increasingly relevant—both in relation to new governance forms (Gunnulfsen et al., 2023) and the limited studies on how school digitalization affects their responsibilities (Willermark et al., 2024). The study is grounded in the assumption that digital transformation is not a linear or uniformly experienced process, but one that may be perceived as ambiguously, positive, negative, developmental-often simultaneously-by different actors. Rather than being defined solely by technological adoption, digital transformation is understood as a substantial reconfiguration of educational activities. 

Methodologically, the study draws on 24 in-depth interviews with school leaders, teachers, administrators, and onsite facilitators, as well as 29 hours of observations of meetings and collaborative activities. Using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an analytical framework, the study conceptualizes digital transformation and school leadership as embedded in a community, where tools, rules, division of labor, and collective norms interact to shape leadership needs. This analytical lens highlights how leadership emerges not as a predefined set of tasks but as a situated, collective activity embedded in digitally mediated educational practices.

Preliminary findings suggest the emergence of  two distinct but interrelated activity systems. The first concerns the development and implementation of distance teaching, which requires leadership to coordinate fragmented communities, integrate new roles, establish routines, and legitimize distance teaching as part of the school’s mission. The second relates to teachers’ remote work outside the physical school, which demands leadership to sustain collegial relationships, ensure inclusion in professional communities, and develop communication structures that substitute for informal interactions lost in digital environments. Across both systems, leadership is required to negotiate tensions between innovation and tradition, presence and absence, autonomy and coordination.

The study demonstrates that digitalized school leadership cannot be understood apart from its contextual enactment. Distance teaching exemplifies how digital transformation is not merely technological adoption but a reconfiguration of organizational practices, professional identities, and community relations. School leadership needs emerge differently depending on the activity system, underscoring the importance of situating analyses of digitalization within concrete educational settings. 

This study explores the sociocultural factors influencing talent identification within Sweden’s youth national football program. Drawing on questionnaire responses from 396 boys and 630 girls selected to a national talent program at age 15, the research applies Bernstein’s theoretical framework to examine how players’ backgrounds affect their progression to youth national teams. The findings reveal that, compared to the general Swedish population, selected players are more likely to come from privileged circumstances: their parents often have higher education, they grew up in owned homes, and they typically do not have a foreign background. Key predictors for advancing to youth national teams include being reselected for the district tournament at age 16, attending elite training environments, and growing up in small cities. Notably, for female players, having parents with elite sports experience increases their chances, while for male players, parental education is more influential. From the viewpoint of Bernstein, the study suggests that early classification of certain players as talented and valuable shapes their future selection prospects. Overall, the study highlights how both explicit and tactic pedagogical relationships between coaches and players reproduce social norms and hierarchies. We argue that reforms in coach education, as part of the recontextualization field, could help selection processes better reflect the diversity of Swedish society.

Remote teaching in Sweden has emerged as a response to the persistent challenges of rural education, including sparse populations, urbanisation, declining birthrates, and long travel distances. This study investigates the historical genesis of remote teaching in northern Sweden, particularly in small rural schools, where digital technologies have been used in K-12 education. Through a microhistory approach, we examine early developments in digital education, drawing from interviews with key stakeholders involved in school development and governance from the 1980s to 2010. The findings suggest that the integration of digital technologies in rural Swedish education was driven by both necessity and innovation, as schools sought solutions to sustain education in sparsely populated areas. The study contributes a historically contextualised perspective on remote teaching, emphasising the long-term challenges of rural schooling and the role of digital technologies in addressing these issues. By analysing the early adoption of digital education in Swedish rural municipalities, we provide insights into the evolution of remote teaching and its implications for future educational practices.

The article adopts a critical approach regarding the political ambition of educational technologies (edtech) in schools. The focus of the article is to understand how school digitalization policy works on people in schools through meaning-making objects for thinking and acting towards digitalization in schools. A case of Swedish principals working with digitalization in schools was investigated in their municipal context of school development, where they were guided by a policy instrument of the Swedish National Agency for Education. Policy documents, from the agency’s instrument, transcribed interviews with principals, and principals ‘development plans’ (local policy), were analyzed with a focus on what objects seem to guide the thinking and actions of the principals. Specifically, the focus of the analysis regards what meaning digitalization school policy may be conveying to principals in schools, what meanings they attribute to edtech, and how they orient their and teachers’ work towards objects of digitalization in schools.

Purpose: In the so-called digital age, there is a basic assumption that digitalization entails rapid and dramatic change in schools, education and society. However, a challenge for educational research is to clarify what digitalization precisely means. This paper aims to develop, test, and validate a digital transformation scale (DTS). More specifically, the aim is to validate digitization, digitalization and digital transformation as hierarchical levels of sociocultural learning in school and education by using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a framework.

Design/methodology/approach: An exploratory factor analysis (EFA), with principal-axis factoring as an extraction method, was used to examine the number of factors underlying the data.

Findings: Results show that the three dimensions in the DTS questionnaire explain 68% of the variance and that all dimensions show high internal consistency (a >0.87). This means that the internal structure of the DTS corresponded to the internal structure of the theory.

Research limitations/implications: The results show that the internal structure of the DTS corresponded to the internal structure of the theory and may be used quantitatively to analyze digital transformation in school organizations. However, further research is needed in other contexts and larger samples with the use of confirmatory factor analysis to develop knowledge in this area and the use of DTS.

Practical implications: This tool and theoretical construction could be used to discuss digital transformation in school and education, both local and in general. Seeing digitalization from a sociocultural perspective makes possible to conceptualize and discuss this as a process ranging from small technology investments on an individual level to digitalization as strategic and organizational development.

Originality/value: This DTS can be used quantitatively to study and analyze digital transformation in educational contexts and provides educational researchers with additional tools to articulate what they mean by digitalization.

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that materializes digitalized school leadership practice. The policy instrument is made available as a ‘helpful tool’ by a Swedish official education agency. The paper scrutinizes the policy knowledge process set to work within the instrument by the agency. Particularly, how the instrument may influence people to come to know and change schools, and how responsibility and risk of digitalization in schools seems to first be transferred to, and then between, people in schools. The paper is concluded by a discussion of how (a) three knowledge phases interact in the knowledge process of the instrument, (b) the technical – rather than social – solution that digitalized school leadership practice is found to be, and (c) implications for digitalization in schools as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon of interest to research.

This article is a review of recent Swedish leadership research in two large public-sector areas: education and care. By comparing and contrasting research in these areas, we unveil the specifics and commonalities of research in public-sector leadership. We reviewed research articles from 2018 to 2020 and analyzed theories used, data-gathering methods employed, and topics researched. The results show some fundamental differences between the two areas. Compared to research on education, research on care is to a larger extent non-theoretical and is often focused on change management, quality assurance, and leaders’ roles in employee health. Conversely, studies on education are theory driven and mostly focused on leaders’ roles in learning and shared leadership. We discuss the state of Swedish public leadership research and make suggestions for mutual learning and moving forward in this research field.

How can digitalization in schools be led towards positive outcomes? This has for education policy makers in Sweden been a question for decades. In recent years, formal school leaders in schools have come in focus in policy as important not only for schools in general, also specifically concerning digitalizing schools. The expectation is that school leaders leading of digitalization in schools will improve learning in schools by way of ‘harnessing’ the many supposed opportunities of digital technologies for learning. The thesis, in four empirical studies including school leaders, teachers, students and others, investigates how learning is lead through digitalization in schools beyond school leaders. The research questions asked are (RQ1) how can digitalization in schools as learning be understood and (RQ2) who is leading learning through digitalization in schools and by what means? Cultural-historical activity theory is utilized to understand learning as a relation between individual (person) and society. This entails, on the one hand, that (RQ1) how digitalization in schools as learning can be understood is answered by understanding learning as a relation between individuals and society in concrete (real) activities. On the other hand, given the individual learning-society relation, (RQ2) who is leading learning through digitalization in schools and by what means is constituted by many possible whos and means, not just formal school leaders. The results from the capstone’s analysis entail that how learning is lead through digitalization in Swedish schools beyond school leaders, is a process that spans national governing via national education agencies, urbanization in sparsely populated regions, and large-scale municipal digitalization projects. That is, concrete activities where societal needs for learning are different in kind, and yet where the expectation in policy concerning digitalization in schools would entail that any formal school leader, individually, is supposed to be able to deliver on societal needs.

This position paper suggests digital development of the Change Laboratory (CL), a third-generation, activity theo-retical, educational participatory methodology. Moreover, it provides a blueprint of developing educational meth-odology through acknowledging and building upon methodologies foundational assumptions. Examples are givenof the CL in contemporary educational research, where the methodology is seeing continued use for developmentof educational work practice. This is followed by a principled argument for the development of the Digital ChangeLaboratory. By using both synchronous and asynchronous digital technologies, the Digital Change Laboratory maygive educational researchers additional pragmatic, collaborative, and participative-focused research tools that specifi-cally enable collaborative engagements between research and practice to cross the boundaries of time and space. Theunique contribution of the paper is a conceptual development of the CL methodology, which is of importance consid-ering that publications using the methodology with digital technologies for collaboration are hard to find. Moreover,the contribution is to educational research methodology in general, where there may be an increasing need to crossthe boundaries of time and space to meet future societal challenges via digital technologies.

One work task that face Nordic school leaders, not least during the precarious time of the pandemic, is digitalization in schools. This task is related both to the work activities of organizational change and improvement traditionally associated with the school leader role (Harris et al., 2003), and to the changing work activities that “the digital age” imposes on schools (Fischer et al., 2020). Political responses to digitalization in schools include developing notions such as “school leaders’ digital competence” and policy instruments that put the notions to work. For example, Nordic countries regularly and increasingly see national strategies and action plans regarding digitalization in schools.

Present paper aims to contribute with a critical perspective regarding one Swedish policy instrument. The contribution may be particularly relevant for educational researchers interested in digitalized school leadership practice. The instrument is theoretically understood as (a) an active device (Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2007) that attempts to steer Swedish school leaders regarding digitalization in schools, and (b) a policy instrument in today’s digital education governance (Williamson, 2017).

The instrument can be described as a school improvement intervention, created by Swedish National Agency of Education (SNAE), and called Leading Digitalization (LD). SNAE describes LD as a step-wise process tool and guide to, for example, superintendents and principals in leading digitalization in Swedish schools. The outcome of LD is that school leaders and teachers together formulate a concrete development plan. However, given what research on public policy instruments has concluded for many years, LD is not simply a guiding tool, but an active socio-technological device. Moreover, a device that contains abstract notions and steering of school leaders thinking and actions.

However, working as a school leader, and relating the concrete work tasks of digitalization in schools to abstract political notions inscribed in policy instruments, leaves room for a process of translation. This translation process includes embodiment, agency and beliefs that impact the enactment (Freeman & Sturdy, 2015) of digitalized school leadership practice.

The unique contribution of the study is a synthesis of (a) analyses of LD documents as policy inscriptions, (b) analyses of Swedish school leaders’ beliefs in an interview179study regarding LD, and analyses of the new inscriptions that the same school leaders have created in their own policy instruments (i.e., their LD development plans).