Research suggests that physical education (PE) needs to adapt to meet societies’ changing needs and increased diversity amongst pupils. However, despite growing pressure from often competing sectoral interests, educational reforms, and new curricula directed at PE to bring about such changes, research has not seen a more profound impact. Many policy initiatives often impact PE teachers, which means they are responsible for implementing desired changes. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising how research has paid limited attention to PE teachers’ decision-making processes regarding the envisaged change. To address this shortfall of understanding, this study’s aim is to explore PE teachers’ decision-making processes and how they relate to external pressures, interests, and reforms. To meet this aim, this article draws on an institutional logics perspective and uses data collected from semi-structured interviews with 16 PE teachers. Findings show how four institutional logics guide PE teachers’ decision-making processes: (a) a democracy logic, (b) an investment logic, (c) a professional logic, and (d) a bureaucracy logic. The results also show that, beyond the fact that logics legitimise certain decisions, they delegitimise other decisions, which requires PE teachers to navigate between logics in their decision-making processes. This navigating process requires PE teachers to handle multiple and incompatible ideas about what good PE is and how to conduct it. This knowledge, if utilised, can increase alignment between policy content and implementers’ interpretations, which may mitigate resistance to policy reforms and stimulate intended implementation.

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.

Previous research has addressed how societal demands shape ideas about appropriate practices in physical education (PE) and the consequences for those involved and for society at large. It has also highlighted the influential role of groups and organisations, including PE teachers, in shaping PE practices. However, the significance of school leaders in driving change in PE practices has been largely overlooked, despite their crucial responsibilities in decision-making, division of labour, and resource allocation. To address this gap, this study answers the following research question: what types of institutional work do Swedish school leaders engage in as they navigate government-initiated policy? Guided by the institutional work perspective and data collected in semi-structured interviews with 13 school leaders, the thematic analysis reveals that school leaders engage in structural work, operational work, conceptual work, and relational work when navigating government-initiated policy. In more empirical terms, the results indicate that most of the power to shape the implementation process is passed on to PE teachers. This suggests that although school leaders have substantial control over strategic resources and wield other forms of power, they do not necessarily significantly influence practices and beliefs in PE. The theoretical significance of these findings lies in their ability to shed light on how changes occur and explain how such changes impact widely accepted norms, rules, and structures. In practice, knowledge of how ideas and practices guide future decisions can be used in efforts to support those working in, working with, or striving to develop PE, including decision-makers, school leaders, and PE teachers.