This is a case study of three secondary schools in Hong Kong with good, average and poor public examination results. The research question is how work patterns and workplace culture of the subject departments affect educational outcomes, which refer mainly to academic results but include some non-academic activities.
In each of the three sample schools, the analysis focuses on the three main subject departments, namely Chinese, English and Mathematics. Some analysis is also extended to other smaller departments. Altogether, all three principals and over 80 teachers were interviewed, and focus group discussions were held with samples of senior class students. Observations were made of the department meetings and some school events, and data were also collected from school documents. To gauge the academic standards expected by teachers and attained by students, internal school examination papers of the main subjects and a sample of student assignments were also reviewed.
The study has identified some key elements of the workplace culture. It is found that teachers tend to separate the schoolwide world from their classroom world, and this explains many current work patterns of teachers within the subject departments. It is also found that most heads of departments are reluctant to carry out the leadership role but prefer to regard themselves at best as managers of resources or as messengers.
Subject department effectiveness is found to be commensurate with the degree of alignment between the school forces and department forces. School forces include the influences of factors such as student ability, principal leadership, clarity of school goals and major concerns, and formal school administrative structures. Department forces are derived from factors such as subject leadership, consensus about classroom teaching, planning, monitoring and evaluation, and support for teachers' work. The interplay between school forces and departments explains well the ways

This thesis aims to study the dynamic relationships between teachers and politics. Adopting the cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong, it is a comprehensive and critical study of the factors, development and consequences of teacher participation in shaping politics since the 1980s. Employing the concept of empowerment, this thesis develops an analytical framework with three independent variables, including (1) political culture, (2) union solidarity, and (3) government perception, shaping an intervening variable in personal, collective and institutional modes, and then a dependent variable, namely teacher empowerment. Teacher empowerment has three dimensions: (1) personal empowerment (process to defend their professional and political status), (2) organizational empowerment (process to articulate their interests through unions), and (3) political empowerment (the ability to influence government and other non-educational policies).
Although Hong Kong and Taiwan have experienced varying levels of democratization beginning in the 1980s, a divergence can be found in relation to: (1) the nature of empowerment, (2) teacher participation, (3) union solidarity, and (4) government perception. In Hong Kong's context, the procurement of teachers' material needs and the protection of their professional autonomy are of major concerns. In Taiwan, however, teachers aimed to alter the authoritarian approach upheld by the Kuomintang (KMT). Regarding teacher participation, educational elites co-opted into the advisory committees in Hong Kong usually utilize institutional channels to portray as a teacher representative and defend the bureaucratic views on educational issues. Despite the occasional adoption of collective actions to express their grievances, most of the teachers lack the drive to press the authorities in order to alter the official domination and hegemony. Despite the foundation of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union (PTU), it has achieved limitedly to alter the authoritarian

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.