Cultural Dynamics and Educational Expansions of Secondary Schools in Japan and Hong Kong: Equality for Individuals or Citizens?

While New Instituionalism now becomes one of the standard intepretations of the expansion of mass and elite education by means of comparative and statistical methods, the strength of this line of thought cannot be fully appreciated if one ignores the cultural dynamics of how institutional legitimacy and isomoprhism could also be achived in different contexts. This paper argues the importance of introducing the historical dimensions and qualitative methods to examine how legitimacy towards educational expansion could be achieved in very different contexts. The case of Japan higlhy relies on the logics of the nation-states which emphasizes equality among citizens, while the case of Hong Kong defines equality in terms of the competativeness of individuals. This paper argues why both cases could both use the same concept of "equality" and seems to be coupled to the world-society, thus examining in what sense the concept of "decopuling" is useful for institutional analysis.