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The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong’s school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure.

Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong.

This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good, and collectively re-imagine and reshape alternatives for the future.

This paper offers an international and comparative perspective and further nuances to an understanding of how neoliberal policies and ideology are recontextualized in countries across the globe given particularities of different local contexts.

The purpose of this study is to systematically analyze how homeworkers perceive, interpret and make sense of their situations in relation to work and leisure participation. Thus, this study examines the dynamics by which homeworkers struggle to manage leisure and work in their everyday lives, with a special emphasis on how they interpret and make sense of their leisure–work dilemmas.

Using the framework of a dynamic intersection of identity orientation and border-setting approach, this study analyzes qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 13 young, home-based teleworkers in Shanghai.

Unlike the purpose of family-friendly employment policies, homeworkers who had striven for a better leisure life ended up with frustration and disappointment, regardless of their attempts at separate leisure–work borders or not. In contrast, the overwhelming work in a homeworking context paradoxically led to a more fulfilling and satisfying life for most who prioritized work over all else in life.

In the cases of home-based work or other flexible work policies that aim to make a better balance of work and life, public attention has been directed merely toward a debate of whether these policies lead to an enhanced quality of leisure life or an intensification of work intrusion. However, understanding the complexity of such emerging phenomenon requires a richer, more nuanced explanation. In this light, this qualitative study of homeworkers’ lived experiences is sociologically relevant for deciphering the relationship between leisure and work in the late-modern society that entails an evolving process of negotiating identities and situational variability.

Through the study of the Liberal Studies reform in Hong Kong, this paper aims to investigate to what extent the curriculum reform makes a difference in the achievement gap between middle-class and lower-class students. Specifically, it examines the variation of the “class gap” between Liberal Studies and other traditional, core subjects in terms of the public examination results, and the major mediators underlying the class effect on the results.

Data from a survey of 1,123 students from 15 schools who studied the new curriculum between 2009-2010 and 2011-2012 in Hong Kong were analyzed using the hierarchical multiple regression models.

Students’ class backgrounds, mainly indicated by parental education, continue to make a substantive contribution to the achievement gap.

Given that Liberal Studies’ examination is compulsory for university entrance, the sensitivity of this reform to existing educational inequalities has a significant impact on students’ chances of entering local universities.

Sociologists have long observed the class gap in education, and this paper adds an important exogenous source, a curriculum change, to the analysis. The Liberal Studies reform has provided a unique opportunity to examine the potential effect of a curriculum change on the class gap. In addition, in view of the absence of empirical evidence in this topic, this paper is an effort to build the evidence base for understanding the outcomes of the reform.