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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.

Playing as a global city, to maintain the economic dynamics and urban vitality, Hong Kong government would like to take urban regeneration in urban core as a kind of urban growth strategy. The government monopolizes land supply for urban development through the leasehold system, while the redevelopment agency is authorized to take land acquisition for urban redevelopment. The transformation of agency from Land Development Corporation (LDC) to Urban Renewal Authority (URA) reflected the formation of a coalition composed of quasi-public redevelopment agency and private developer, which facilitates land and property resumption in urban redevelopment. The URA-led projects often tend to redevelop obsolete communities into up-market neighborhoods, which possibly enables redevelopment agency and developers to gain more economic benefits from real estate appreciation. Nevertheless, evidences from some large redevelopment projects conducted by URA in Hong Kong such as Lee Tung Street, Langham Palace and Kennedy Town have presented that urban redevelopment is closely associated with gentrification triggered by displacement of original neighborhood residents. Hence gentrification in Hong Kong has raised more and more concerns about booming housing price as well as fragmentation of social networks. Through urban regime combined with growth machine approach, this paper will explain the collusion of redevelopment agency and private developers that jointly turns the URA-led redevelopment into neighborhood gentrification. And by examining Kwun Tong Town Centre Project (KTTCP), findings indicate that soaring property value will crowd low-income groups and working classes out from their original neighborhoods; and then those gentrified residential estates will be occupied by rich class. Moreover, increasing rent and operation costs will inevitably eliminate those family-operated small businesses; and then they will be superseded by high-end retailing and services. In this way, urban morphology will be reshaped perpetually through more and more gentrified neighborhoods.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct performance evaluation of eight main scientific data sharing platforms in China and find existing problems, thus providing reference for maximizing the value of scientific data and enhancing scientific research efficiency.

First, the authors built an evaluation indicator system for the performance of scientific data sharing platforms. Next, the analytic hierarchy process was employed to set indicator weights. Then, the authors use experts grading method to give scored for each indicator and calculated the scoring results of the scientific data sharing platform performance evaluation. Finally, an analysis of the results was conducted.

The performance evaluation of eight platforms is arranged by descending order by the value of F: the Data Sharing Infrastructure of Earth System Science (76.962), the Basic Science Data Sharing Center (76.595), the National Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Population and Health (71.577), the China Earthquake Data Center (66.296), the China Meteorological Data Sharing Service System (65.159), the National Agricultural Scientific Data Sharing Center (55.068), the Chinese Forestry Science Data Center (56.894) and the National Scientific Data Sharing & Service Network on Material Environmental Corrosion (Aging) (52.528). And some existing shortcomings such as the relevant policies and regulation, standards of data description and organization, data availability and the services should be improved.

This paper is mainly discussing about the performance evaluation system covering operation management, data resource, platform function, service efficiency and influence of eight scientific data sharing centers and made comparative analysis. It reflected the reality development of scientific data sharing in China.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals in discharging their roles and to further explore their engagement in informal mentoring as a coping mechanism in the absence of a structured professional development program.

The qualitative study was conducted in the form of in-depth face-to-face, loosely structured individual interviews with ten informants from a variety of personal and school backgrounds, contributing to a set of data that unveiled the basic themes.

Three dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals were identified: juggling administrative work with teaching, standing by management or siding with peer teachers, and forced innovation vs omnipresent conservatism. The findings also suggested that the informants tended toward external resources intentionally with a view to gaining emotional support as well as professional stimulation. They also engaged in informal mentoring, which took the form of observing principals’ behaviors, joining support groups organized by school governing bodies, and enrolling in academic programs offered by universities and/or professional bodies, as a way to resolve the dilemmas.

Informal mentoring has been identified as an effective approach for Hong Kong vice-principals to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to overcome workplace challenges and the feelings of loneliness experienced upon changing their role. The findings point to the importance of formalizing mentoring in vice-principal development programs.

This study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of informal mentoring on vice-principals in Hong Kong where both dual-career track systems and a structured mentoring programs are missing.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the special issue on “middle space” education leaders (those individuals who are second-in-command in schools). The special issue contains papers pertaining to mentoring those preparing for and aspiring to the assistant school leader role, as well as papers on programs that support new assistant principals/vice-principals through mentoring and coaching. The authors provide background on middle space leadership and mentoring from existing research literature, introduce the international papers selected for the issue, and identify unifying themes across the papers.

The authors provide highlights of relevant research literature on the importance of mentoring for school leaders in general, but also specifically address the need for mentoring for middle space leaders from the scant literature that exists on the topic. After reviewing the relevant literature, the authors provide an overview of the seven papers that were chosen for the issue through a rigorous peer-review process.

The co-editors of this special issue identify common themes that emerged from the papers chosen for the issue. In general, authors note that middle space leaders have unique mentoring and coaching needs, and there are few formal programs that address their needs. However, there is a growing awareness of the need to support assistant principals through structured mentoring programs, as well as preparing and mentoring those who aspire to the position.

The seven papers chosen for the special issue represent a variety of research methodologies. A limitation is that the majority of the studies are qualitative, with small sample populations. However, even with small sample sizes, commonalities can be seen across the studies and across international contexts.

This review summarizes the issues facing middle space leaders in education and how they can be effectively addressed. The global audience that can benefit from engaging with the papers in this special issue includes educational leadership faculty, educational governing bodies, policymakers, school district central office personnel, senior principals, and assistant principals themselves.

This paper and the seven that follow extend the scant research literature in the realm of middle space leaders in education. They provide unique insights – from different international contexts including the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, and New Zealand – into the need for and potential benefits of mentoring and coaching aspiring and new middle space leaders.

This paper aims to trace the evolution of two initiatives – the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative – their genesis, rationale, current form and take‐up rate. It also analyses them as education reforms in terms of policymaking dynamics. The very notion of the term “privatization” will be examined.

The article examines the two school privatization schemes in Hong Kong and Singapore, by putting into perspective a discussion of their policy implications, thereby reflecting on their similarities and differences in their agenda, implementation and implications.

The findings indicate that the DSS and independent school schemes in both Hong Kong and Singapore are in line with the global trends of privatization. It is suggested that the governments of the two places have adopted different approaches in the implementations of their schemes.

The paper shows how the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative represent attempts over the past two decades by the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively to promote school privatization.

The division of labor of e-commerce transaction system is an important research topic. However, there is a certain disparity between the current mainstream research model and the reality, which leads to a biased result. This paper aims to find the effects of transaction efficiency on the evolution of e-commerce transaction system’s division of labor and the relationships between the results and other parameters.

This paper puts forward a definition of transaction efficiency based on transaction services and establishes a model of middleman’s specialized production decision of transaction services on this basis.

The research results show that the transaction efficiency plays an important role on the change of middlemen’s division of labor level. The degree of economic specialization, price of commodities and transaction services and other associated factors also affect middlemen’s division of labor.

This paper is of great significance for evaluating the development level and forecast the development direction of e-commerce.

The synthetic application and interaction of/between the internet, Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, Industry 4.0 and other new patterns and new technologies shall breed future Web-based industrial operation system and social operation management patterns, manifesting as a crowd cyber eco-system composed of multiple interconnected intelligent agents (enterprises, individuals and governmental agencies) and its dynamic behaviors. This paper aims to explore the basic principles and laws of such a system and its behavior.

The authors propose the concepts of crowd science and engineering (CSE) and expound its main content, thus forming a research framework of theories and methodologies of crowd science.

CSE is expected to substantially promote the formation and development of crowd science and thus lay a foundation for the advancement of Web-based industrial operation system and social operation management patterns.

This paper is the first one to propose the concepts of CSE, which lights the beacon for the future research in this area.

Educators play a vital role in supporting tertiary education students’ mental health, as they have frequent interactions with their students. However, information on the strategies and difficulties educators face in this area is scarce, particularly within the multi-ethnic Asian population. Therefore, this study aims to explore Malaysian educators’ roles and challenges in handling students with mental health issues.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 12 educators from tertiary education in Malaysia. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis.

Four themes were emerged: perceived factors contributing to mental health issues among students, educators’ strategies in supporting students’ mental health, difficulties in supporting students’ mental health and training to support students’ mental health.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study exploring the roles and challenges educators face in supporting tertiary education students’ mental health in Malaysia.

The main purpose of this paper is to conduct an in-depth theoretical review and analysis for the fields of knowledge management (KM) and investigate the future research trend about KM.

At first, few theoretical basis about KM which include definitions and stages about KM have been summarized and analyzed. Then a comprehensive review about the major approaches for designing the KM system from different perspectives including knowledge representation and organization, knowledge sharing and performance measure for KM has been conducted.

The contributions of this paper will be useful for both academics and practitioners for the study of KM.

For this research, the focus is on conducting an in-depth theoretical review and analysis of KM.