ABSTRACT
Since 1980s, the Hong Kong education system has experienced a lot of structural reforms. These structural reforms induce two social forces shaping teachers’ emotional experiences in teaching. The two social forces respectively are the institutionalization of whole-person education and the centralized decentralization of school education. The social forces not only bureaucratize school systems, but also deskill and intensify teachers’ work. Moreover, they, especially the centralized decentralization of school education, tend to replace the educational goal of teachers’ work with administrative goals causing a difficulty for teachers to identify the “instructional” values of the intensified work. As a result, teachers generally become powerless to refuse meaningless work intensified by the structural reforms in Hong Kong.
