This investigation represents a search for an alternative to the bureaucratic model of career development and addresses the question: how during a period of period of contraction in the education service with associated diminished opportunities for career advancement, do teachers become commi t ted to a schoo I' s work and va lues. The case study was made during a two year period in a secondary school, in which the researcher was headmaster, when the school was undergoing contraction in the mid 1980s due to demographic trends. Its focus is a bounded group of teachers in midcareer who, during a period of low morale and conflicted industrial relations, became engaged in curriculum development for low ability pupils. Staff development is presented as personal and social reconstruction and interest centres on latent social processes and the interactional behaviours of the participants. Attention is directed towards the cultural meaning that spatial and temporal contexts hold and the modes of interaction they invoke. Two broad principles, of bureaucratization and of humanization, are identified, and an attempt is made to uncover moments of social time when conditions are particularly conducive to personal growth. This leads to a fuller exploration of the concept of teacher commitment, extending beyond its calculative or instrumental aspects, to consider its emotional and evaluative components, thus transferring the discussion from issues solely of role to those of social relationships and personal identity. Thus, its contribution to research derives from the deeper insights it provides into teacher motivation and social process in schools. These are considered from the standpoint of the insider and, as such, complement other school ethnographies made by the professional social scientist. Methodological issues of insider research have been addressed, and its special strengths and weaknesses considered. In particular, categories drawn from the tradi tion of social anthropology have been used to render strange the familiar world of schools, and non-probability sampling has been adopted to penetrate its opaqueness.