Science Teachers' Management of Conflicting Institutional Logics: Placing Emotions Front and Center

ABSTRACT In science education, the convergence of recent reform demands with existing policies requires teachers to navigate conflicting expectations, practices, and missions when performing their job. Institutional research has invested much effort into examining how operating in such a fragmented policy environment, in which conflicting institutional logics are present, impacts teachers. However, it has paid little attention to how being caught in such a conflict can be deeply emotional. The divide between institutions and emotions is further reinforced by studies on teachers' emotions, which have predominantly focused on individual emotional experiences, diverting attention away from how emotions can be institutionally conditioned. We conducted a multiple‐case study to develop emotionally informed explanations of how science teachers manage conflicts between seemingly contradictory institutional logics, focusing on three teams of science teachers. We show (a) how each identified logic is charged with different emotions; (b) how ignoring these emotions can deepen polarization and reinforce conflicts, while careful attention to emotions can attenuate tensions between the logics; and (c) how emotions not only shape conflicts between institutional logics but are also sometimes shaped by logics. We discuss how the institutional and emotional scholarships can potentially address each other's blind spots and how positioning emotions as central to institutional processes can offer generative pathways for the implementation of science education reform.