As a former colony, Hong Kong's education system has been powerfully influenced by ideas from the West. However, these influences have been mediated by a number of factors of contingency - the most important of which is culture - which shapes implementation, particularly of what counts as successful practice. The aim of this paper is to trace the interpretation and implementation of key ideas about school leadership and to offer some analytical projections into the future based on current trajectories. It explores three broad sets of constraints on the development of leadership practice: the features of the Hong Kong school system, the influence of a Confucian cultural tradition, and the process oriented nature of the professional practice of effective school leadership. The paper concludes by offering an analysis of how this dynamic process view of leadership can be used to understand current attempts to build a school-based approach to educational leadership.
[Copyright of Journal of Educational Administration and History is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620802507268]

Hong Kong is embarking on curricular and pedagogic reforms which replace modernist, Tylerian approaches to the curriculum with recommendations that echo many features of complexity theory. The nature of complexity theory-based curricula are outlined, and these are used to interrogate three seminal curriculum reform documents in Hong Kong. The article suggests that they embody a paradigm shift in curriculum thinking. However, given that complexity theory is not without its problems for curricula, a case is made for an eclectic approach to curriculum planning, and it is this that is taking place in Hong Kong's reformist agenda.
[Copyright of Pedagogy, Culture & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681360300200174]