Drawing on an empirical case study conducted in a Belgian University [1], this article proposes a framework to analyze how academic organizations are both structuring and structured by academics' strategies. First, it accounts for three major logics of action-Entrepreneurship, Excellence and Omnipresence-percolating three organizational dimensions-namely managerial discourses, formal and parallel structures [2]. Moreover, this paper proposes that these organizational dimensions constitute three different and always temporary states that are constantly being shaped by three phases of organizing processesnamely translation, inscription, enactment [6]. Second, drawing on Gherardi et al.'s metaphor of "shadow organizing" [3], the article identifies some ideal-typical strategies developed by academics: sober stowing away, selecting the local candidate, and invisible caring. The identification of these strategies opens up to discussing how academics are (pretending to) playing and applying the rules of the game, while also disengaging from them. In doing so, academics contribute to preserving and reinforcing the managerial discourse and the formal structure of their organization.

A major reform of teacher training has been underway for the past three decades in French-speaking Belgium, in response to the low quality of teacher training and the consequences for school teaching and learning deemed to be in deep crises. Using a number of eclectic methods (metaphors, typologies, timelines, network maps), we map controversies that arise during four steps of the policy translation process—problematization, interessement, enrolment and mobilization—by various types of actors (people, texts, working groups, institutions, etc.). Scientific and pedagogical problematizations framed by two interest groups of field level policy actors can produce objects and devices that are transformed and negotiated by political and administrative actors. However, the translation process is rendered controversial and complex as political decision-making is also flavored with backdoor political interests that are negotiated. Administrative policy actors in stakeholder institutions are trying to barter their institutional “share” in the reform implementation, adding some operational problems on the level of organizing the reform, thus reframing some of the original objectives.

The policy implementation of “reasonable adjustments”, a recent education inclusion policy that requires regular school and school governance to accommodate students with special needs, places the responsibility on several key actors, who become important gatekeepers in the process of enabling educational access (Charlier et al., 2019) to regular schooling and opportunities to students with special educational needs (Verhoeven & Dubois-Shaik, 2021). This paper tries to reveal through discursive policy and narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 2004), how the inclusion policy is translated (Callon, 1987; Dubois & Vranken, 2012) for including a student with visual impairment in a regular secondary school. These sensitive negotiations take place in what we identify in this paper as a soft policy (Lawn, 2009).