The politics of teacher wellbeing: ‘Sung baang’, neoliberalism and power struggles in Hong Kong

The concept of wellbeing has attracted global attention from governments and transnational organisations concerned with the ‘teacher crisis’ in education. Since 2006, the Hong Kong government have introduced a suite of policies (‘sung baang’) to address the problem of teacher stress and burnout. Education pressure groups are critical of these efforts, however, pointing to evidence that other, celebrated policies in vogue, such as decentralisation, exacerbate the problem. In this paper we adopt the analytic of discursive institutionalism to capture the politics of teacher wellbeing as policy text and discourse, with a unique focus on how meanings of teacher wellbeing are struggled over and mobilised by different stakeholders competing to leverage their power for political gains.