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Using Hong Kong as a case study, this book discusses teachers´ identities and life choices when globalisation and localisation are enmeshed, showing how competing cultural traditions and contexts act as resources or constraints in framing their identities.

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This book discusses issues related to teachers´ identities and life choices when globalisation and localisation are enmeshed. It examines how competing cultural traditions and contexts acted as resources or/and constraints in framing teachers´ identities and their negotiations in the family and the work domains according to their gender positioning, their roles in the family such as husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter and roles in the school such as principal, senior teacher or regular teacher. Contrary to an essentialist approach to identity and culture, teachers´ stories show that their identities and life choices were hardly free choices; but were often part and parcel of the culture and contexts in which they were embedded.

Teachers´ identities are found to be fluid, complex, hybrid and multifaceted. Using Hong Kong as a case study, this book provides not only traces of the continuity and changes of Confucian self and cardinal relationships but also a glimpse of how educational reform as neo-capitalist discourses in the workplace interacts with Confucian cultural traditions creating new hybrid practices (problems or possibilities or both) in the school and in the daily lives of teachers.

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´The work on teacher identity tends to be "inward looking" i.e within the field only, whereas this [book] links broader issues to the lived experiences of actual teachers. The Hong Kong experience will have broad relevance - and not just in Confucian-heritage cultural settings. In addition, the accessible writing and broad contextualisation regarding globalisation suggest it will be very relevant to educators in most countries. I think it (this book) would complement recent work on teacher identity by major figures such as Janet Alsup, June, Beynon, or Ian Hextall, and update some of the older work e.g. Andy Hargreaves, Ivor Goodson etc´

- Professor Marie Brennan, Victoria University, Melbourne

´Dr Pattie Luk has worked in this area for some time focussing on teacher identities in these uncertain times. The uniqueness of her work is in its cultural position. She is one of the few educators whose work comes specifically from a Chinese perspective. The book is theoretically rich in considering a diversity of views although there is of course a heavy weight on Eastern perspectives. But this is a strength, in my view, since these are largely missing from the large body of Western literature on this topic.More needs to be known about the distinctiveness of Eastern cultures and this book can make an important contribution in this regard.´
- Professor Kerry Kennedy, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong

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