Despite being an unavoidable part of the music teaching profession, bureaucracy remains an understudied
and ill-defined topic in the research literature. However, its investigation may benefit the
music teaching profession by re-thinking policy, informing music teacher education programmes
and fostering a mutual understanding among music teachers and policymakers. Therefore, in the
present study, we aimed to investigate the understandings of Spanish music teachers in relation
to bureaucracy and to compare these with the views of the teachers of other subjects in primary
education. The perspective of purposefully selected music teachers were thus explored in-depth
and contrasted with the views of their counterparts in a multiple case-study design. Our findings
contribute a taxonomy of bureaucracy in the music teaching profession. Additionally, we conclude
that the views of our music teacher participants on bureaucracy are mainly negative and slightly
more pessimistic than those of their counterparts. In discussing our results, we connect these
views with the Weberian ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy and Arendt’s ‘government of Nobody’ as
a substitute for democracy in governing education. Finally, we hypothesise a dystopic future of
deprofessionalisation as a result of these primary music teachers’ declared lack of control over
their own organisational tasks.
