Professional credibility cycles in education: Constructing trust and expertise in a regulated state school system

Experts must adapt to immediate circumstances when managing impressions and be able to reassert credibility and exercise authority when performing professionalism. A credible professional is constructed, applied, and recognized locally as well as relationally, particularly within the context of careers in bureaucratic structures. Few studies investigate professional credibility through processual approaches assessing experts’ testimony and practice in situ as they manage their careers over a period of time. We examine the cycles of professional credibility in a rural elementary state school in Brazil, focusing on how credibility is constructed, applied, and recognized in highly regulated bureaucratic systems. We use the “credit cycle” framework from science and technology studies to analyze education professionals’ positions, career paths, and group dynamics. Our ethnographic approach included participant observation, document analysis, audio-visual data collection, and interviews with education workers. We used event-related phases and narrative analysis to analyze data and uncover insights into professional credibility, expanding the concept of the credit cycle beyond laboratories to include primary education professionals and managers. We consider how individual professional credibility is enacted by producing report cards and educational projects within what is a highly regulated educational system. What is “critical” in our research is a critique of the approach to the bureaucratization of professions that suggests that the outcome is “de-professionalization” or “proletarianization.” Our research findings highlight professional credibility’s relational, transactional, dynamic, and cyclical nature and offer practical insights for understanding and enhancing expertise in bureaucratic settings. Future studies should apply the credit cycle to other professional contexts.