Las marcas de lo institucional en el funcionamiento de las redes de apoyo: el caso de docentes peruanos en tiempos de pandemia

Teachers are a key building-block of the educational process. In a limit situation that disrupted everyday life, such as that of the COVID-19 pandemic, how were teachers’ personal support networks put into motion to respond to their emerging work-related (teaching) and personal needs? What was the role of the institutional and organizational contexts in this process? This study seeks to answer these questions based on empirical data from Peruvian secondary education teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodological design was mixed in nature (sociometric and qualitative). Several social support mobilization processes were found. In particular, we highlight the occurrence of mixed mobilization processes. Likewise, institutional (family) and organizational (educational institutions) contexts conditioned these processes in different ways. Teachers recreated organizational routines that had already existed before the pandemic, but also developed new support practices. Some of these practices tended to become routinized, but others were resisted, due to their unintended negative consequences on teachers’ lives. These results add new analytical elements to existing theories on social support mobilization processes.