How teacher unions exercise professional agency: a case study from New Zealand

This article examines how the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), a teacher union representing primary and early childhood educators, exercised collective professional agency across more than three decades of neoliberal education reform in New Zealand. Drawing on eight elite interviews with union leaders and archival analysis of organisational documents (1989–2021), the study identifies four distinct but mutually constitutive forms of collective professional agency: epistemic, discursive, organisational and political. Each form operates through different mechanisms and is shaped by the political conditions in which it operates. This relational account advances beyond existing literature by specifying the mechanisms of teacher union professional agency rather than asserting its possibility, and by showing how the union translated professional knowledge into policy outcomes, including the abolition of a national testing policy the profession had consistently opposed.