Experienced impossibility: How principals experience and navigate competing institutional logics in Chinese international schools

International school leadership in China is increasingly shaped by the competing institutional logics of state control and market demand, yet explanations of principal turnover often focus on individual-level factors rather than on how leaders judge their work as professionally sustainable. This qualitative study examines how school leaders in Chinese international schools experience and navigate this institutional collision. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 school leaders across 10 provinces, it identifies two dynamics. First, many participants experienced the collision of regulatory demands and market expectations not simply as a tension to be managed, but as experienced impossibility: an interpretive threshold at which the space for ethically and professionally acceptable action appeared to narrow. Second, participants adopted precarious navigation, using grey-space manoeuvring and cultural arbitrage to keep schools operating without resolving the underlying value conflict. The study contributes to institutional logics theory by explaining how macro-level contradictions become consequential when actors come to perceive competing demands as no longer reconcilable through professionally legitimate action. It also extends international school leadership scholarship by positioning turnover as one possible implication of this interpretive and agentic process, not as the primary object of prediction.