Review of research on educational leadership and management in Hong Kong, 2000-2012: Topographical analysis of an emergent knowledge base

Over the past decade, a growing cadre of scholars from outside the ‘mainstream’ of international academic publication (i.e., USA, UK, Australia) have joined in making substantial contributions to the global literature in educational leadership and management. Observers of these trends in the development of a global body of scholarship have noted the dual importance of accumulating a broader body knowledge reflecting leadership practice across different societies as well as developing greater density of theoretical and empirical studies within specific societies around the world. A recent study of scholarship on educational leadership and management in East Asia identified a rapidly growing corpus of published studies focusing on the practice of educational leadership and management in Hong Kong. This paper undertakes a ‘topographical analysis’ of this emerging literature with the aim of describing the nature of topics and research methods employed over the past decade. The authors analyze the body of papers published in a ‘core’ set of eight educational leadership and management journals between 2000 and 2012. The descriptive study offers insights into the nature of this emergent literature from a single non-Western society. Second, the paper provides an exemplar for scholars in other developing societies for framing agendas and approaches to developing a stronger knowledge base in educational leadership and management for the future.