Trust Relationships and Professional Identities in Greek Primary Schools: A Study in the Context of Permacrisis

In the present paper, we attempt to present and analyze the levels of trust in the school unit, both the existence of trust relationships and the degree to which they exist, as well as the quality that characterizes them. We focus on differentiated professional identities and whether these are related to levels of trust. The structural condition of the permacrisis is particularly important for the study. The fact that Greece's recent social, economic, and political context has been characterized by volatility also adds significant weight to the study. The debt crisis, as the starting point of the successive crises, the permacrisis, has brought about insecurity and uncertainty. At the same time, the social subject cannot act within the social and economic context. The permacrisis is a compound word, defined as a prolonged period of instability and insecurity, incorporating all the crises. Health, economic, environmental, and geopolitical crises, and the social subject's sense of yet another anticipated crisis. All these individual mosaics that each crisis brings gradually make up the setting for the diversification of the professional identity of the teacher. We chose mixed methods research as the methodological approach, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as research data collection tools. The target population included teachers and primary school headteachers of primary education school units in Western Greece. The research sample was extracted from these populations through simple random sampling, ensuring the sample's representativeness. This research, including the quantitative and qualitative approaches, was conducted from May 2023 to February 2024. The main results include that the condition of the permacrisis is gradually entering the micro level, negating the linear, and replacing it with the liquid. The risk society is no longer located only in the theoretical sphere but also in the lifeworld, in the everyday life of the social subject. We observed that it is evident that the social subject, and in our case, the teacher and the headteacher, is trying to cope with multiple changes and incorporate structural crisis, liquidity, and subjective risk into his actions. Several conceptualizations emerge by linking the phenomenon of the permacrisis with the phenomenon of the trust crisis. Article visualizations: