Navigating uncertainty: how do PE teachers respond to competing institutional pressures?

Abstract

Abstract Little is known about how PE teachers respond to the particularities of certain institutional pressures. Such knowledge is needed to start a discussion on how external expectations are managed by PE teachers, who in turn make internal adaptions (e.g. change in teaching elements, schedules, feedback models, work teams) that create organisational principles. Such insights might ultimately help shed new light on the origin of unintended consequences arising from policy transformation. In this study, I explored how PE teachers respond to institutional pressures embedded in policy implementation by answering the following research question: What types of responses to multiple institutional logics can be interpreted from PE teachers’ narratives about policy implementation? I utilised an institutional logics approach to analyse the data collected from 16 semistructured interviews with Swedish PE teachers. The results showed that PE teachers respond in four ways: (a) compliance, (b) defiance, (c) compartmentalisation, and (d) combination. In addition, I discuss how PE teachers negotiate competing institutional pressures and point to aspects in the organisation of teaching that are direct consequences of this process.