WORK INTENSIFICATION: Lessons Learned From School Leaders in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

There is tendency to consider work intensification and its negative impacts on school leaders as a global issue. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the conversation to include perspectives on and responses to work intensification from a “developing” country’s perspective. This ethnographic qualitative study evolved over a 2-year period among three school leaders in the Dominican Republic. The data collection included semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and autoethnographic reflexivity. The findings demonstrate that work intensification is apparent among these leaders, but the ways in which they conceptualise the phenomenon represent a departure from the literature on school leaders in developed countries such as North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. The reasons include external factors such as sociocultural norms and the internalisation of workplace expectations. Although the scope of this study is small, it represents an important avenue for future, larger studies examining the phenomenon of work intensification in developing countries.