Following the international trend in education towards democracy and decentralization, the Hong Kong government introduced a school-based management (SBM) system about two decades ago. It is widely recognized in the literature that decentralization, empowering school level management and marginalizing the influence of the intermediate level of governance, can result in better deployment of school resources and better meet the demands of various stakeholders. However, in the unique historical and cultural context of Hong Kong, the advantages of decentralization claimed in the literature have yet to be fully realized. This paper discusses the contextual factors affecting the implementation of SBM in Hong Kong, and examines their impact on four major stakeholders, namely the government, the principals, the teachers, and the parents in the wake of reform.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2015.1056592]

Concerning the issue of taking up new roles for principals in School-based Management (SBM) in Hong Kong, I used a comparative approach in document analysis in the study. Countries chosen for comparison were Australia (Victoria), England & Wales, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They were comparable because they have similar configuration of education systems and they had SBM. Based on the discussion of G. M. Crow about the role conception that determines the enactment of a social role this dissertation adopted his framework for understanding role change. Here it argued that before taking up a new role there is a new context for the role occupant for his (her) new perception of the role he (she) has to consider assuming. Thus new contexts of different countries created by the implementation of SBM at the school level are compared through the framework of role conception content as which is under the influences of the interaction of policy elements of SBM, the profession of principalship, and the organizational factors.
From the comparison the new context of SBM in Hong Kong secondary schools for veteran principals could be projected for it is similar to other places although she has her uniqueness. Based on the comparison the four-facet of principalship (strategic leadership, organizational leadership, instructional leadership, and the culture ethics and law leadership) advocated by the policy in Hong Kong for role change was evaluated. It was concluded that it would not be optimistic about taking up these dimensions of new role for the veteran principals due to the new context created by SBM, except the organizational leadership, which might be enhanced. Any success of the new four-facet role taking is circumstantial, not directly related to the implementation of SBM.

This study investigated Participatory Decision-Making (PDM) in Hong Kong self-managing secondary schools. It also examined teachers' job satisfaction, organizational commitment, role ambiguity and role conflict in relation to PDM. A questionnaire survey involving 959 teachers from 214 schools was conducted. Principal components analysis was used to study the underlying subscales of teachers' PDM and their affective work outcomes. Correlational analysis, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis were employed to examine the relationships between teachers' PDM and their affective work outcomes.
Two decision domains (managerial and teaching) emerged in Hong Kong secondary schools. Teachers were generally more involved in PDM in the teaching domain than the managerial domain. Teachers from School Management Initiative (SMI) schools had greater participation in managerial decisions than non-SMI schools, but there was no significant difference in PDM between SMI and non-SMI teachers in decisions related to teaching.
Non-SMI teachers were more decisionally deprived in both the managerial and teaching domains than were SMI teachers. However, both SMI and non-SMI teachers were more decisionally deprived in the managerial domain than the teaching domain. For both managerial and teaching domains, principals' support for PDM was a significant positive predictor for teachers' actual participation. Six subscales of job satisfaction emerged from the analysis: work itself, supervision, colleagues, indirect participation in PDM, workload and responsibility. There were two subscales for organizational commitment which include present and future commitment.
No significant difference between SMI and non-SMI teachers emerged for any job satisfaction subscales except responsibility. SMI teachers were less satisfied with their sense of responsibility for teaching than non-SMI teachers. SMI teachers may have diverted some of their time and