The BEK family of flows have many important practical applications such as centrifugal pumps, steam turbines, turbo-machinery and rotor-stator devices. The Bödewadt, Ekman and von Kármán flows are particular cases within this family. The convective instability of the BEK family of rotating boundary-layer flows has been considered for generalised Newtonian fluids, power-law and Carreau fluids. A linear stability analysis is conducted using a Chebyshev collocation method in order to investigate the effect of shear-thinning and shear-thickening fluids for generalised Newtonian fluids on the convective Type I (inviscid crossflow) and Type II (viscous streamline curvature) modes of instability. The results reveal that shear-thinning power-law