Runs in the Family

Hong Kong-born Professor Alfred Ho Tat-kei has strong ties to the city. Following his father’s example of community service, Ho has worked tirelessly to give back to his homes here and abroad.

It was Ho’s humble beginnings that led him to his field of expertise. He grew up in a squatter village near Shau Kei Wan. “That area is long gone and is now known as Yiu Tung Estate. They chopped off that whole mountainside and then built new housing,” Ho says. His university studies in government and public administration took him to the United States in 1991 on a fellowship by Indiana University for his Master’s degree programme. What was to be a two-year track became a longer stint that morphed into Ho doing his PhD at the university. His time in the US was prolonged with one job offer after another until the opportunity came to return to Hong Kong this year.

Family Values
The US experience provided Ho many opportunities to develop his professional and academic career. After all, his work in America earned him teaching awards at all the academic institutions he has taught; a Best Paper Award by the American Review of Public Administration in 2015; and the Leslie A Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award in 2018 by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration, a key international accreditation authority of public affairs programmes around the world. The day 17 June 2010 was even declared as the “Dr Alfred Ho Day” by the City of Indianapolis for his contribution to the city’s performance management and citizen engagement efforts.

Ho’s research about budgeting systems and performance management practices while in the States also earned him an invitation to a finance forum in Guangdong in 2004. This provided Ho the opportunity to examine what Mainland China was doing in terms of budgetary reform.

“My research actually has been influenced by and connected to different parts of the world,” explains Ho. “At the time, the forum was held under a new finance director with whom I exchanged ideas on performance budgeting. He later became the Guangdong provincial governor, then got promoted to Deputy Finance Minister in Beijing to work on some of those reforms. He’s currently the Minister of Finance of China.”

“I feel very blessed to have had this career path,” Ho shares. “What attracted me to go into this field hinged on two major factors. One was, as I mentioned, I grew up in Shau Kei Wan and my father was very active in community service and in many other local village level activities. So when I looked at what he did, how he impacted the neighbourhood, the people around him, our little village and how he made a difference, I was inspired by his public service example.

“Second, when I was in my undergraduate years, I met Terry COOPER, a Fulbright professor who came from the University of Southern California. He taught an ‘Introduction to Public Administration’ course and when I took his class, it opened my eyes. I was fascinated by all the topics, from how to make decisions and manage different resources to working with citizens. It was quite a bit different from political science or politics. So I shifted my own interest and the rest was history.”

Resources for the Public Good
Ho’s work now focuses on several major areas. One is e-government, the digitisation of public service, and smart cities. “I am studying why local governments in the US and Mainland China adopt new technologies, what are the barriers, and how they can transform public service delivery with new technologies and in more effective ways.”

This work has not translated to Hong Kong yet but Ho hopes that this may soon change as he has already begun a few local projects.

“Another focus is on performance-oriented budget management,” he says. “This research is about how to make sure that limited public resources are put to the best use and deliver the results citizens want, and also to try to avoid bad gaming behaviours that can emerge when you try to incentivise certain performance outcomes.”

Though the professor has only been the new department head for a few months, Ho’s experience so far has been wonderful. “First of all, I have to say that my predecessors have built a very solid foundation for the programme. In the 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities our department ranked first in Asia and 27th in the world in public administration. Also, according to the 2021 QS World University Rankings by Subject, we ranked 39th in the world in social policy and administration. My first hope is that I can sustain that and continue their efforts to build with excellence, while pushing the research frontier more.”

Towards a Richer University Life
Given Ho’s personal experience, he also hopes to see more social impact by the department. The new head would like to encourage his colleagues to do more engaged research. “I don’t buy the idea that you just do research, teaching and service as separate circles. I try to encourage my colleagues to think in a more integrated way.”

Because of his responsibilities as department head, Ho will not be able to teach a full class during the academic year. But already, he has put his teaching skills back to work by leading a group of students in independent study during the summer of 2021.

“I initiated that because I felt that I may be too distant from students. I have been gone for so long and there are probably multiple generation or other gaps between me and young people today. I really want to learn from them and so I picked a few student leaders in my department across different years. Together this summer, we examined the purpose of competence-based education and discussed how we should re-design our department programmes with extracurricular activities to better equip students for the 21st century and offer a richer university life.”