Global concern over youth mental health has intensified educational attention to student well-being, often articulated through universal international policy frameworks such as those by World Health Organisation (2021), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2021). However, global policies often recontextualised when they are travelled (Robertson & Dale, 2015). Crucially, school leaders play key roles in the enactment of these policies by mediating and interpreting them within their institutional and sociocultural contexts (Agron et al., 2010; Lingard et al., 2007; Powell & Graham, 2017). As a result, leadership practices for student well-being are not a simple matter of implementation, but a situated framework shaped by leaders’ biographies, values, and resources within institutional and policy environments (Lingard & Christie, 2003; Thomson, 2016). This prompts the fundamental questions about how leadership disposition is formed and consequently impacts practices across different education systems. Within this sociological lens, this study will investigate leadership for well-being not as a technical judgement, but a socially and culturally situated form of practice shaped through leaders’ biographies and broader societal conditions.

The study is a cross-cultural comparative study that explores how school leaders in Hong Kong and Finland interpret and enact student well-being in the two distinct educational fields. Though both places engage with global discourse on youth mental health, they do so through divergent moral orders, specific governance logics, and cultural traditions. Finland’s education system is embedded within a Nordic welfare orientation that foregrounds collective care and institutional trust (Sahlberg et al., 2021); whereas Hong Kong’s system is shaped by Confucian moral values, postcolonial legacies, and meritocratic governance (Hue, 2008; Tam et al., 2021; Tan, 2024). These contrasting sociocultural backdrops offer an analytically rich basis for examining how leadership dispositions toward well-being are formed and enacted under different structural conditions.

This study is grounded within Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1990), adopting the concepts of habitus, capital, and field as relational and generative tools for analysing leadership dispositions. For this study, leadership habitus is conceptualised as a system of embodied, historically sedimented dispositions through which leaders interpret their responsibilities and act within institutional constraints (Lingard & Christie, 2003). Rather than treating leadership practices as consciously selected behaviours, this framework attends to how dispositions are shaped socio-culturally within the two educational fields and enacted through leadership practices. Grounding the study in the relational and reflexive interpretations of Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; King, 2000), the study will also treat habitus as adaptive and negotiated, which will unfold how leaders respond reflexively to challenges or tensions between personal values, policy demands, institutional expectations and the resources they have.

The inquiry is carried out through a biographical narrative inquiry within a constructivist-relational epistemology, through which to gain access to the articulated leadership dispositions that are formed over time (Chase, 2005; Riessman, 2008). It captures how leaders make sense and narrate their roles and practices in well-being policy. Reflexivity is integral to the research design, acknowledging my own positionality across insider and outsider roles (Fetterman, 2008), and treating knowledge production through this study as an ethically and interpretively accountable process (Creswell & Creswell, 2018).

In sum, this research questions for this study are as followed:

1. How do school leaders in Hong Kong and Finland articulate their embodied leadership values and dispositions related to student well-being?

2. In what ways are these leadership dispositions shaped by the interplay of their biographical trajectories, various forms of capital, and sociopolitical-institutional contexts?

3. How do leadership dispositions and capital shape the ways school leaders engage with and enact student well-being in practice across the two contexts?

Method and Methodology This study adopts a qualitative, interpretivist approach, grounded in a constructivist-relational epistemology that view leadership practices is a result of embodied dispositions formed through lived experience, social interactions, and institutional conditions (Bourdieu, 1990). Narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) is the chosen method as it provides access to how school leaders narrates their value and behaviours on student well-being within their socio-political and institutional contexts (Chase, 2005; Riessman, 2008). Data are generated through in-depth biographical narrative interviews with school leaders, including principals or senior members with formal well-being responsibilities. Participants are recruited through purposive sampling for demographic variation in backgrounds within each field. The design follows the life-history tradition within narrative inquiry (Atkinson, 2009; Goodson & Gill, 2011), which treats stories as value-laden and context sensitive articulations of identity and experience. Narrative interviews are treated as dialogic and co-constructed encounters rather than data extraction. Participants are invited to share professional trajectories, leadership development, resources available and interpretation of well-being. Particular attention will be given on critical incidents or turning points to uncover the formation and transformation of leadership dispositions (Denzin, 1989). Data will be analysed through a multi-step but iterative interpretive approach that integrates narrative analytical strategies and Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It will proceed through iterative reading of narratives to preserve temporality and context (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), followed by interpretive examination of how leadership habitus, their capital and field conditions interact to shape their practices (Clandinin, 2013). Reflexivity is also embedded from data generation to analysis, with my positionality across insider and outsider roles serving as resources for analysis, rather than a bias to be avoided (Finlay, 2002). Reflexive memos will be kept for epistemic transparency.

Expected outcomes This study is expected to offer insights into how school leaders’ socially and culturally situated dispositions are enacted in student well-being practices across contrasting educational fields. The contribution for this study is empirical and conceptual. Empirically, this study will generate data and patterns of how school leaders in Hong Kong and Finland narrate their values, interpretations, and responsibilities related to student well-being. These data are going to demonstrate how leadership dispositions are shaped through biographical trajectories and capital, and how these dispositions are reinforced or disrupted by institutional forces and policy environments that impact leadership practices relating to student well-being. Comparative analysis will surface how global concerns around youth mental health are recontextualised through different moral traditions, governance logics and sedimented historical trajectories in producing distinct forms of leadership practices. Theoretically, the finding will move beyond style-based or managerial accounts of leadership, challenging universalised assumptions about leadership by demonstrating the limits of decontextualised knowledge transfer. This study is expected to show that leadership practice on well-being is not a conscious personal choice, but is contingent upon the alignment or misalignment between leaders’ dispositions, situated within sociocultural histories, capital trajectories, and the logic of the institutional fields. By treating Hong Kong and Finland as distinct but comparable educational fields, the research resists universalism and avoids positioning either region as a normative reference society for well-being enactment. Contributing to the educational leadership literature with a decolonised and context-sensitive cross-cultural comparative study that surfaces the underlying cultural, historical and institutional forces in shaping leadership practices, without falling into essentialism (Walker & Dimmock, 2002). In conclusion, the result of this study is expected to provide insights to an urgent global challenge – student mental health, through a contextually embedded, sociologically grounded research.

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