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Reports upon research carried out in Taiwan to assess the relative importance of external environment, internal conditions and contextual variables as the major source or momentum for school organizational learning. Maps out the intricate causal relationships among all external, internal and contextual factors with organizational learning process and outcomes. The sample comprised 51 primary and 37 secondary schools. It was found that school internal conditions – notably transformational leadership, positive school culture and supportive structure – outrank factors from other sources as the most critical elements in promoting organizational change, irrespective of the type and nature of schools or individual personal and background factors. Environmental constraints were not shown to be the dominant forces for organizations to engage in learning. Concludes that it is the leaders through their voluntary choice who bring about organizational change.

Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

The importance of teacher leadership in enhancing school outcomes is recognized, but there remains a scarcity of research addressing the conditions for principals to nurture such leadership. This study examined how school contextual factors, i.e. faculty trust and academic emphasis, moderate the impact of principals' distributed leadership lon teacher leadership.

A nationwide survey was conducted among junior high school teachers in Taiwan. The sample encompassed schools from different geographical regions and sizes, yielding a total of 1,340 valid responses. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the potential moderating effects of interest.

There were interactive effects of principals' distributed leadership and school contextual factors on teachers' adoption of leadership roles. The impact of principals' distributed leadership on teacher leadership was amplified in environments marked by elevated levels of trust relations and reduced academic emphasis.

This study uncovers the critical prerequisites principals must address to cultivate teacher leadership. To effectively encourage heightened teacher engagement in leadership, principals must place a premium on nurturing trusting relations with their teaching staff and acknowledge that the influence of their leadership might be lessened in an environment where credentialism holds sway.

The exploration into faculty trust and academic emphasis yields insights into the conducive conditions for principals to foster teacher leadership. The identified attenuating impact of academic emphasis on principal effect within an Asian societal context highlights its significance not only as an organizational property but also as a manifestation of national cultural values.

Learning power is crucial in today's rapidly changing world, yet its application to teachers is under-explored. This study delved into the investigation of teacher learning power and examined how it matters in the relationship between teachers' experiences in lesson study and the adoption of constructivist pedagogy.

A cross-sectional survey of 226 elementary, junior high, and senior high school teachers in Taiwan was conducted, and the results were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The findings suggest that both participation in lesson study and teacher learning power were positively associated with the practice of constructivist pedagogy. Moreover, teacher learning power partially mediated the relationship between lesson study and constructivist pedagogy.

By incorporating the concept of teacher learning power and performing a mediation analysis to understand how it matters, this study has added to the expanding collection of works on lesson study explored from different perspectives and in various contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how principals in Taiwan lead student and teacher learning at a time of leadership and learning paradigm shifts and the imminent implementation of the curriculum guideline for 12-year basic education.

This study interviewed 32 elementary and junior high school principals purposively sampled based on reputation and recommendation from senior principals and government officials.

As a society which values credentialism, principals in Taiwan face challenges in executing the vision of educating student as a whole person. The authors discuss how principals are solidifying whole person education as the espoused value, how they are enforcing school-based curriculum and effective instruction, and encouraging teacher professional learning. Principals are sharing power by recruiting stakeholders’ participation in guiding school development and enacting distributed leadership, while also building relationship as social capital and soliciting support from the community to establish the conditions to improve teaching and learning.

This paper highlights how principal practices are evolving in a time of changing conception of learning from academic achievement to multiple competencies and the shifting paradigm of power from participatory decision making to distributed leadership. This paper ends with a discussion on how leadership for learning (LfL) as a community engagement has emerged.

With the shifting of the concept and paradigm of learning, principals in a high power distance society like Taiwan are now facing opportunities as well as challenges to lead teachers to engaging students in inquiry and collaboration.

This paper highlights the indigenous practices of principal LfL in a high-performing East Asian education system in a time of changing notions of learning and leadership.

Pre‐employment medical examinations with appropriate testing are required in many industries—a basic tenet of Occupational Medicine—and it has long been a recommendation of many in community medicine and environmental health for those food handlers whose close contact with open food, aspects of its preparation, processing, sale, exposure for sale, make their personal health important and in prevention of diseases and may constitute a health hazard to food consumers. Epidemiological studies have revealed too many instances of a human source of disease, especially in milk and water, for this to be denied or under‐estimated. Food poisioning outbreaks caused by a carrier, of chronic or limited duration, enable those investigating such outbreaks to see there could be advantages in medical screening of certain employees especially in certain areas of food trades. The main problem is to decide the extent of the discipline and who should be subject to it. The fact that by far the majority of the examinations and tests will prove negative should not be seen as removing the need for the service. After all, there are a number of similar circumstances in public health. Meat inspection, for example, in which a 100% inspection of all food animals slaughtered for human food is now fully established, it is not suggested that inspections should in any way be reduced despite the fact that a number of the diseases, eg., tuberculosis, no longer occurs as it once did, which was the prime cause of meat inspection being brought into being. Other areas where routine medical examinations reveal satisfactory health with only a few isolated cases requiring attention, is the school medical service. Here, the “de‐bunkers” have had some success, but if children are not regularly examined at vulnerable age levels and especially in between where the occasion demands, there is no question that much will be missed and ill‐health progress to a chronic state.