| This study is to investigate how a new school curriculum is institutionalized at school organization level in Hong Kong and how the organizational actors make sense of their actions towards the change. The school curriculum under investigation is Liberal Studies. Three schools are chosen in terms of the time of adopting Liberal Studies in their senior-form curriculum, namely, the early adopter which has adopted LS since 1992, late adopter which started to adopt LS after 2005, and the non-adopter which has not adopted the subject yet. In these three school cases, three types of interviewees are identified, that is, decision maker, leader and follower. By in-depth interviews with these school actors, the study aims to investigate how the actors perceive the contributing factors to this curriculum change, and how their personal schema influence the sense-making process of their actions towards the change. New institutional perspective is adopted as the guiding framework of the study and the microscopic sense-making processes of actors are the focus of investigation. According to new institutionalism actors have to construct a sense of legitimacy in responding to the respective institutional environment, in order to obtain symbolic as well as material resources for their actions. It is found that the three schools have taken regulative and normative considerations when they decided on when to comply with the curriculum change. In other words, they responded to the institutional environment in accordance with the expedient-regulative consideration as an organization as well as with the legitimate-normative consideration as a cultural entity. As for the individual actors, each accommodates the curriculum change by reconstructing his/her subjective reality. By adjusting their cognitive schema and constructing new networks of practice, these actors build different cognitive bricolages for themselves in face of the curriculum change brought about by the introduction of Liberal Studies. |
