Using Care Store as a case study, this research examines the innovative development and value penetrations of workers’ co-operative societies in Hong Kong. Care Store operates through the practices of equality and mutual care, in the unfriendly neoliberalist social order of Hong Kong. The society penetrates the dominant models of labor organization and consumption process. But the penetration of structural inequalities is limited, because the female workers of the society remain low-income laborers, social boundary and exclusion still take place, and the workers internalize their cultural inferiority. In comparison with innovative organizations in other regions, workers’ co-operative societies in Hong Kong have little opportunity to rely on or collaborate with the public and private sectors, and they explore a more progressive path of penetration in development. Practices strengthening this path can not only sustain these young organizations but also enrich the understanding of the true potentials of the nonprofit sector.

Open Science is an umbrella term that involves various movements aiming to remove the barriers to sharing any kind of output, resources, methods or tools at any stage of the research process. While the study of open science is relatively advanced in Western countries, we know of no scholarship that attempts to understand open science in Hong Kong. This paper provides a broad-based background on the major research data management organisations, policies and institutions with the intention of laying a foundation for more rigorous future research that quantifies the benefits of open access and open data policies. We explore the status and prospects for open science (open access and open data) in the context of Hong Kong and how open science can contribute to innovation in Hong Kong. Surveying Hong Kong’s policies and players, we identify both lost research potential and provide positive examples of Hong Kong’s contribution to scientific research. Finally, we offer suggestions regarding what changes can be made to address the gaps we identify.

Hong Kong is characterized by very low fertility. However, over a period from 2000 to 2015, both the total number of births and the sex ratio at birth (SRB) increased and then declined dramatically. We analysed the increases in a 2013 paper in this journal, where we largely ascribed them to a rapid growth in the number of ‘transient’ mothers from Mainland China disproportionately giving birth to boys in the territory. In 2012, policies were implemented to halt this ‘maternity migration’. Here, we explore the impact of these policies, both on births and the SRB in Hong Kong. We conclude that the rises and falls in births and SRBs in Hong Kong can, indeed, be broadly ascribed to the reproductive behaviour of transient Mainland mothers. However, the role of the Hong Kong government’s policy interventions is much less clearly defined.

The Umbrella Movement, which took place in Hong Kong between 26 September and
15 December 2014, was indisputably a defining moment in the former colony. The authors
argue that the Umbrella Movement was not a single, contingent political incident. Rather it
represented a structural change in Hongkongers’ perceived relations with the Chinese government,
which was deeply connected with the change of specific cultural, economic and political factors
pertinent to Hong Kong society in the past three decades. In conclusion, the authors suggest that
Hongkongers’ cultural perception of the closing-in of the central government’s power is a key
determinant of the perception of Hong Kong–China relations.

We identify a missing narrative about the place of whiteness in post-colonial Hong Kong. Using an anthropological framework developed by Mary Douglas, we show how white migrants who try to integrate their children into local Cantonese medium of instruction schools are challenged by recurring obstacles that highlight their whiteness and signal them as ‘matter out of place’ by transgressing colonial assumptions about whiteness in the territory. In adopting this framework, we reorient the current focus of whiteness studies away from examining the strategies and performances employed by white migrants in the production of whiteness to the regulation of whiteness by the social order. By identifying the absence of an appropriate narrative for these parents in the local education system, we highlight not just the continuity of colonial constructs of whiteness, but also the constraints upon those who try to escape them.

This paper examines the implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ (1C2S) in the two former Western colonies, Hong Kong and Macao, as a policy innovation
in managing inter-governmental relations of a large, diverse country like China. 1C2S embodies internal tensions because the Hong Kong and Chinese
governments have multiple and often incompatible goals. After 20 years, these two special administrative regions (SARs) of China are gradually being absorbed.

Using Hong Kong and Shenzhen in a comparative case study, this article addresses two important questions about digital governance: what its development sequence is, and the governance role of social media in the Chinese context. A content analysis is performed of social media communication by four sets of comparable agencies in the two
cities, using the framework of e-government interconnectivity. Contrary to general expectations, our findings show that Shenzhen was more active than Hong Kong in the governmental use of social media. The results also suggest that, against the normative and sequential models, there is no strict sequence or particular order of development that must be followed in digital governance, thus rejecting the stage-by-stage “walk before you run” hypothesis. A government can “leapfrog” or “run before it walks” in its digital governance, bypassing earlier stages of development. Furthermore, the study shows that digital governance is an important tool of institutional adaptation and development to enhance a government’s ability to respond to a dynamic environment of raising citizen expectations. State-led digitalization complements and compensates for the traditional and formal citizen–government interaction mechanisms, making offline and online institutions interchangeable and substitutable, and therefore also more interrelated and indistinguishable.

It was a great honour to be invited to review the June 2017 special issue of Qualitative Research examining democratic research practices. As social work scholars focusing on issues of gender, sexuality and intimacy, we have long been interested in how power and hierarchy in knowledge production serve to marginalise service users, practitioners and research participants. Here, we draw on our personal experience to consider what is at stake in attempting to democratise qualitative research methodologies in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Social movement researchers have investigated how personal relationships and emotional attachments are implicated in activism, but less attention has been given to the ways in which activism affects personal lives. This article addresses this issue, drawing on interviews and focus groups with Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’s active participants, bystanders and opponents to explore its consequences for family life. While those who were not involved in the movement articulated an acceptance of hierarchical family structures and their imposed silences, movement activists saw their experience of the occupation as enabling them to find a voice within their families. The Umbrella Movement, we suggest, has opened up a space for the reflexive exploration of personal life and raised the possibility of modifying Hong Kong family practices.

The present paper addresses the under-explored issue of the role of politics in the construction of masculinity, focusing specifically on political Confucianism and men’s doing of gender in the context of Hong Kong’s recent turbulent history. Between 2014 and 2016 we conducted a series of paired interviews and focus groups with 10 Hong Kong men from differing social backgrounds. Through cooperative grounded inquiry, we demonstrate how political events and figures provided points of reference for these men in the construction and performance of masculinities. We emphasize the importance of Confucian hierarchical harmony to gender performance, elaborating three cultural logics—respectability, responsibility, and romance—underpinning the doing of Hong Kong masculinities. We thereby shed light on the mutual constitution of personal and political selves and how men define and redefine masculine ideals in times of political turbulence.