Sociology of Education

Abstract This study investigated experiences and decision-making strategies of Student Affairs Officers (SAOs) facing significant crisis at a Sino-foreign cooperative university during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using habitual decision-making and 4 R crisis management frameworks, the study examined how SAOs navigated crisis management, anticipated student needs, and exercised decision-making authority. Findings highlight the importance of empowering SAOs through shared governance and contingency planning to enhance their capacity for managing future crises and supporting sustainable internationalization. ...

Abstract This paper examines the rapid growth of China’s science and technology (S&T) sector within the broader context of higher education, focusing on Hong Kong’s crucial yet understudied role in this transformation. While conventional narratives emphasize China’s relationship with the United States, our analysis reveals Hong Kong’s distinct contribution as a vital bridge in China’s scientific development. Drawing on comprehensive data from the Web of Science, institutional archives, university leader biographies, and PhD dissertation records, we identify three key patterns. First, Hong Kong ranks as one of mainland China’s key international collaborators in S&T alongside established nations like the UK, Japan, and Germany, though the U.S. remains the dominant partner. Second, this collaboration shows clear temporal characteristics, with partnerships intensifying during the 1990s as Hong Kong’s research doctoral programs matured and mainland students sought advanced training. Third, the collaboration exhibits distinct geographical patterns, with Beijing maintaining centrality despite distance, while Guangdong leverages its proximity to Hong Kong. Our findings challenge the perception of Hong Kong as merely a finance-driven city, revealing its role in fostering a robust academic community that facilitated knowledge transfer between mainland institutions and global scientific networks. This relationship thrived despite cultural and ideological differences, combining mainland China’s motivated talent pool with Hong Kong’s academic freedom and international connections. By documenting this understudied dimension of China’s educational development, this paper offers new insights into the forces behind the country’s emergence as a global scientific power. ...

Abstract The development of student leadership in higher education increasingly requires understanding how leadership identities are constructed through social interactions, particularly in cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on DeRue’s (2011) adaptive leadership theory, this study explores how students claim and grant leader and follower identities through their social interactions and how both cultural backgrounds and institutional contexts shape these identities in a global university in China. Participants engaged in ongoing claiming and granting processes where leadership identities were negotiated through individual, relational, and collective social interactions. Some participants needed to build trust and validate their leadership capabilities (individual internalisation), while others emerged through recognition from followers (relational recognition). At the same time, some gained legitimacy through broader group endorsement (collective endorsement). By identifying key patterns in how students claim and grant leader identities across cultural boundaries, we provide insights that can help institutions better support student leadership development while bridging cultural differences. ...

Abstract Institutional analysis typically assumes professional newcomers use strategic isomorphism to craft a legitimation project. A qualitative study of 31 tutors and their respective clients and managers in Beijing indicates how this project is continually in flux, predicating the life stages of its practitioners. Using the dyad theory of legitimacy, we find that tutors’ professional legitimacy is anchored to their ability to meet the immediate expectations of clients when they regard performance boosting as a single-dimensional priority. The tutor–parent relationship is purely market-based and reputation-driven. A tutor’s professional knowledge plays a minor role in winning parents’ approval as it has been routinized by and embedded in the techno-managerial tutoring agencies. Faced with uncertainty in teaching, tutors are increasingly resorting to ancillary services to retain clients. From this perspective, tutors are being reduced to replaceable service workers. The legitimation project is transient and beyond the grasp of individual tutors. ...

Abstract Typically understood through a universal-statist framework, modern schooling in contemporary China often contributes to the disenchantment of ethnic students. Based on year-long research in a Tibetan-serving secondary school, we provide additional insight in this discussion. We argue that to treat disenchantment as a fixed state ignores the space-temporal quality of human action. The school’s social process is multiple and momentary in nature and often undermines the seemingly linear educational programming. Under the rigid school setting emerge social spaces that expand beyond academic lessons. In those spaces, students continue to interact among themselves and with teachers, where withdrawal and marginalization happen alongside negotiation, appropriation, and participation. While disenchantment anchors the classroom experience of many, it interpenetrates and enmeshes with other aspects of student lives and is interwoven over time. By considering this complex interplay of disenchantment we upend the notion of disenchantment as a singular state, and illustrate this idea through two examples. ...

Abstract Widening achievement gaps driven by socioeconomic disparity have become a global concern. Yet, few studies have been able to track the changes and developments of socioeconomic-achievement gaps (SES-achievement gaps henceforward) across time. Using PISA data from 2003 to 2018, we estimated family SES-achievement gaps in seven Asian education systems. The findings suggest that in mainland China the gaps are most pronounced, whereas in Macao, they remain consistently modest. Other systems fall in between these two extremes. Based on the new synchronic and diachronic pieces of evidence, we extrapolate possible explanations of varying SES-achievement gaps across education systems. We found that the gaps tend to be smaller when the low-socioeconomic students perform better in academic environments. Based on our analysis, we argue that if the policy goal is to reduce the learning gap associated with social and economic division, public attention in education should be directed towards students from disadvantaged backgrounds. ...