In this paper we depart from narrative organizational studies pointing to the introduction of change or innovation as important times for evoking, negotiating and enacting different notions and (re)constructions of the past, present and future and of “who we are” and “what we do” as organizations, professions, groups and individuals (e.g. Linde, 2001; Humphreys & Brown, 2002; Søderberg 2006; Pedersen & Johansen, 2012; Humle & Frandsen, 2016). Our case is the current processes of reforming the Danish Public Schools and we turn our attention towards micro level interactions and storytelling practices negotiating the scope and nature of the changes. In spring 2013 teachers all over Denmark were collectively locked out from their work as a culmination of a month long conflict between the teachers' union and the association of municipalities representing the employers. The dispute was primarily about “time”- about how working time was measured, about who (managers or teachers) should decide how teachers should spend their working time, and about whether or not teachers were productive enough during their working time (Bjerg and Vaaben 2015b, n.d.). After three weeks of lockout, with lots of demonstrations, media attention, and fierce public debates about teachers, their working time and the quality of the schools, the Danish government ended the conflict by introducing a law on working time for teachers, based on principles very similar to the initial claims of the employers side, who wanted the teacher’s working time “normalized”(Bjerg and Vaaben 2015b, n.d.). The new law gave school principals the right to decide how teachers should spend their working time, increased the number of teaching hours and required teachers to spend all their working time at the schools. The law was to be implemented the following year on the very same date as a major reform of all the public schools in Denmark.

Several researchers accentuates the role of everyday storytelling practices as important in the understanding of identity and sense making processes during periods of organizational change or uncertainties (Humphreys & Brown, 2002; Chreim 2007). In the daily life of organizational members these storytelling practices and performances take on many different forms of e.g. conversations, newspaper articles, ministerial documents etc. involving different actors and going on in different spaces (Henderson & Boje, 2015).We study the processes of reforming and changing the Danish public school by conceptualizing the voices of the involved actors; teachers, school managers, parents, pupils, public servants, politicians etc. as a web of story performances intertextually related across time and space (Boje, 2001; 2011; Humle, 2014b); negotiating past, present and future notions of the Danish Public Schools and the everyday work of teachers. To unfold this web of stories and story fragments we build a theoretical framework by combining the work of Boje on antenarrative storytelling (2001; 2006; 2008; 2011, 2015) with the work of Jackson (1995; 1998; 2002) who draws attention to the existential aspects of storytelling. By this combination we are able to study how different notions or storylines are produced, negotiated and contested across time and space involving existential struggles to make sense of past, present and future notions of self, work, organizing and the world of others. Particularly we study the story work of teachers as they strive to make sense of and handle all the different ambitions and notions of their work, “who they are” and “what they do” or ”should be doing”. 

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