Conference Agenda

The path-dependent differences among European VET systems are widely noted, attracting attention well beyond the sphere of VET and educational studies (Greinert 2005; Crouch, Finegold and Sako 1999). Less attention has been devoted until recently to the different ways in which VET has been theorised in different national contexts, and how such theory draws on foundations and paradigms developed within and outside the spaces of knowledge production that provide the intellectual foundations of VET research. Following a recent upsurge in questioning about the aims and purposes of VET, European interest in Bildung has been supplemented by contemporary attention to classical theories of VET (Sanderse 2021; Kuhlee et al. 2022; Zuurmond et al. 2023; bwp@ forthcoming). This symposium builds on the last-named Special Issue, which will explore the distinctive role of foundational VET theory in Germany and other DACH countries, sometimes described as Berufbildungstheorie. This body includes the ‘classical’ work of Kerschensteiner (1966/1904), Fischer (1967/1932) and Spranger (1923) as well as critical accounts that helped to shape modern VET systems (e.g., Siemsen 1948; Lempert 1971; Blankertz 1974) and have implications for other European countries.

Our aim in this meta-theoretical symposium is to extend this discussion, examining the continued relevance of these foundations and whether a wider range of theory can be helpful to examine the internal tensions and external forces that affect VET systems in Europe. VET has been theorised distinctively in different countries, reflecting the range of intellectual traditions, institutional formations and fields of practice across Europe. Some aspects of theorisation relate to the distinctive patterns of knowledge production, with education departments that also provide VET teacher education programmes contributing to the research base and drawing on various forms of theorisation; other university departments, research institutions and national agencies also contribute to research and, whilst in some cases this may be under-theorised, these may also use and contribute to theory. These institutional aspects together represent the social basis on which educational research has been constructed and these foundations contribute to national differences in the way education is theorised. The symposium will not only shed more light on the ways that internal contradictions of VET and VET research can be understood through theory but will also present different national perspectives on how to deal with them.

The theoretical foundations on which much research into VET builds have an international provenance. For example, VET research in English-speaking countries draws heavily on philosophers, sociologists and economists from France, who are located outside education departments, and from the USA which lacks any coherent system of VET. This field is also subject to powerful external forces in the shape of policy discourses supported by powerful international institutions with universalising prescriptions. Thus, international bodies as the European Union, UNESCO, ILO World Bank and OECD have generated a significant volume of well-resourced empirical research, although this tends to be under-theorised and sometimes explicitly seeks to reframe VET around a universalising neoliberal model.

The symposium will examine how far a reinvigorated theorisation of VET, addressing contemporary challenges, needs to draw on new theoretical approaches that can enable researchers to answer questions posed by contemporary crises of health, inequality, globalisation and technological change; or whether older concepts can also play a valuable role in reaffirming educational aims and practices within VET, and across its boundaries.

By contrast with the German ‘in-house’ foundations of VET theory described as Berufbildungstheorie, VET research elsewhere in Europe positions itself to varying degrees outside such boundaries, drawing on a wider range of disciplines and theoretical resources, especially in countries where VET itself and VET research enjoy less state support. This distinction is especially salient in the English-speaking world: here research in the field of VET emerged later than in continental Europe and has a more diversified institutional base, is liminal to the broader field of education research and competes with alternative institutional and external claims to expertise. Whilst the distinctive features of VET in these countries are widely associated with its liberal market philosophy (see e.g., Winch 2000), we ascribe these Anglophone approaches to theorising VET in an immediate sense to their more diversified institutional base (c.f. Bates 1999), which competes with alternative institutional and external claims to expertise and is liminal to a broader (but also marginalised) field of educational research (Furlong and Whitty 2017). In these countries, VET research has drawn on educational perspectives to critique VET as a marginalised and marginalising educational pathway and on theories developed in external disciplines to theorise the understandings generated by its research. In this paper we illustrate the interplay since the 1980s among the neoliberal ascendancy and its diminution of VET to the acquisition of narrowly defined occupational competences (Brockmann et al. 2008; Wolf 1995), processes of economic and educational tertiarisation, and the changing theorisation of VET in these countries. As the economic structures and forms of organisation that sustained VET in the early post-war years have given way to more service-based economies, and to academicisation and tertiarisation, its theoretical interests have also experienced diversification if not fragmentation. This work has been less influential on policies that have largely responded to an international ‘policy-making assemblage’ (Thompson et al. 2022) in which well-resourced research contributes to an international reframing of VET on neoliberal lines (e.g., OECD 2010, 2014). We conclude that this approach to theorising VET has nevertheless made important contributions to the study of VET and has continued to develop during ongoing crises of health, economy and environment. It may also usefully draw on the renewal of earlier bodies of European theory to understand of VET’s challenges and possibilities.

Bates, I., Hodkinson, P. &Unwin, L. (1999). Editorial, British Educational Research Journal, 25 (4), 419-425. Brockmann, M., Clarke, L., Méhaut, P., & Winch, C. (2008). Competence-based vocational education and training (VET): The cases of England and France in a European perspective. Vocations and Learning, 1(3), 227–244. Furlong, J. & Whitty, G. (2017). Knowledge traditions in the study of education. In: G. Whitty & J. Furlong (Eds.) Knowledge and the Study of Education: An international exploration. Oxford. OECD. (2010). Learning for jobs: Synthesis report of the OECD reviews of vocational education and training. Paris: OECD. OECD. (2014). Skills beyond school: Synthesis report: OECD Reviews of secondary vocational education and training. Paris: OECD. Thompson, G., Sellar, S. &Buchanan, I. (2022). 1996: the OECD policy-making assemblage, Journal of Education Policy, 37, (5), 685-704, Doi: 10.1080/02680939.2021.1912397 Winch, C. (2000). Education, work and social capital: Towards a new conception of vocational education. London: Routledge. Wolf, A. (1995). Competence-based assessment. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Vocational education and training (VET) systems and practices, unlike higher or general education, are considerably national in scope, which is why the field is highly fragmented (Gessler et al., 2021). Despite the fragmented architecture, international blueprints like the dual apprenticeship system à la Germany, Switzerland, or Austria (OECD, 2010, pp. 12, 27, 34–36) become increasingly important: on the one hand because they create pull factors for countries eager to reform their VET systems (e.g. Láscarez & Schmees, 2021) and on the other hand as they create push factors through international organisations (IOs) like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as they marketise these blueprints globally. Both observations can be associated with the same mechanism: As successful perceived VET policies in a particular nation are decontextualised by IOs (and sometimes national (non-)governmental organisations) in order to create international blueprints. Through an international discourse around these blueprints, a shared belief in their legitimacy and rationality unfolds. From this perspective, countries tend to implement policies more on the basis of shared beliefs than because of rational arguments (beyond the discourse). Accordingly, the discourse entails a narrative causal relationship of these blueprints (described by sociological institutionalists as a “myth”, see Koch 2009, p. 113), e.g. that implementing the dual apprenticeship system will lead to a low youth unemployment rate (see OECD 2010). Chabbott and Ramirez (2006, p. 174) conceptualised links between discourses from the global through the national, and further to the local level. National actors adopt these ideas to create reform pressure on the VET system. In doing so, these actors prove their willingness to acknowledge current problems concerning VET, as well as their willingness to implement solutions perceived to be rational (see Láscarez & Schmees, 2021). The theory of sociological institutionalism, as well as the mechanisms explained by it regarding the internationalisation of VET systems, complement existing VET theories that are functionalist in nature by explaining e.g. how “Bildung” unfolds, how skills gaps can be closed, or how literacy spreads. While these attempts are important, they need to be accompanied by theories (further developed in VET research and by VET researchers) that set these functionalist approaches and practises in a meta-theoretical perspective to explain and reflect upon the success of one over the other. In our view, sociological neo-institutionalism is able to function as a meta-theory for VET research.

Chabbott, Colette & Ramirez, Francisco O. (2006): Development and Education. In: Maureen T. Hallinan (Ed.): Handbook of the Sociology of Education, pp. 163–187. New York: Springer (Handbooks of sociology and social research). Gessler, M., Nägele, C., & Stalder, B. (2021). Scoping review on research at the boundary between learning and working: A bibliometric mapping analysis of the last decade. International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training (IJRVET), 8(4), 170-206. Koch, S. (2009). Die Bausteine neo-institutionalistischer Organisationstheorie – Begriffe und Konzepte im Laufe der Zeit. In S. Koch (Hrsg.), Neo-Institutionalismus in der Erziehungswissenschaft. Grundlegende Texte und empirische Studien (Organisation und Pädagogik,Vol. 6, pp. 110–131). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Láscarez Smith, D. & Schmees, J. K. (2021): The Costa Rican business sector’s concepts of the transfer of German dual training. Revista Actualidades Investigativas En Educación, 21 (2), pp. 1–30. URL: https://doi.org/10.15517/AIE.V21I2.46792 Meyer, John W.; Rowan, Brian (1977): Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. In: American Journal of Sociology 83 (2), 340–363. DOI: 10.2307/2778293. OECD (2010). Learning for Jobs (OECD Reviews of Vocational Education and Training). Paris: OECD. Retrieved from: https://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/Learning%20for%20Jobs%20book.pdf

For a comprehensive theoretical review of vocational training, not only the subject has to be considered, but also its environment. Such a sociological approach has already been suggested by respected representatives of vocational training science such as Kell (2010, 1995), Kutscha (1990) and Zabeck (1980). Instruments such as Luhmann’s theory of social systems (2012, 1998a, 1998b, 1986) can be used for vocational training theory. The case examined here is such a project. At its core, it deals with the systemic design of the transition system, which has been criticized again and again (see e.g., Steib 2022; Euler 2010; Münk 2010; Krekel & Ulrich 2009; Baethge, Solga & Wieck 2007). If one understands this as an apparatus with which to deal with the large number of young school leavers who could not find an apprenticeship (see e.g., Friese 2011; Kutscha 2010; Beicht 2009; Euler & Severing 2006), then its function needs to be understood in terms of social justice and the welfare state (see e.g., Luhmann 2011). The planned contribution will examine in the light of Luhmann's system theory how the transitional system is constituted in relation(s) to the educational, economic and political system of society. To do this, not only the respective network of relationships, but also the function and logic (code and medium) inherent in the transitional system must be determined. Finally, based on these findings, it will be presented what possibilities there are to solve and "educate" the transitional system from its current one, primarily to the functional context of the welfare state. Although German vocational education and training is assumed to be relatively well-founded, the transition system has historically developed into a structure that was never intended, either in itself or in terms of its quantitative and qualitative design (Steib 2020).

Baethge, M.; Solga, H. & Wieck, M. (2007). Berufsbildung im Umbruch. Signale eines überfälligen Aufbruchs. In M. Baethge, H. Solga & M. Wieck (Eds.), Berufsbildung im Umbruch. Signale eines überfälligen Aufbruchs pp. 7–111. Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Retrieved from: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/stabsabteilung/04258/studie.pdf [09.03.2014]. Beicht, U. (2009). Verbesserung der Ausbildungschancen oder sinnlose Warteschleife? Zur Bedeutung und Wirksamkeit von Bildungsgängen am Übergang Schule – Berufsausbildung. BIBB-Report, 11, 1–12. Retrieved from: http://www.bibb.de/dokumente/pdf/a12_bibbreport_2009_11.pdf [02.10.2012]. Euler, D. (2010). Einfluss der demographischen Entwicklung auf das Übergangssystem und den Berufsausbildungsmarkt. Expertise im Auftrag der Bertelsmann Stiftung. St. Gallen: Bertelsmann Stiftung. Retrieved from: http://www.jugendsozialarbeit.de/media/raw/xcms_bst_dms_32525_32526_2.pdf [20.03.2014]. Euler, D. & Severing, E. (2006). Flexible Ausbildungswege in der Berufsausbildung. Nürnberg & St. Gallen. Retrieved from: http://www.bmbf.de/pub/Studie_Flexible_Ausbildungswege_in_der_Berufsbildung.pdf [02.10.2012]. Friese, M. (2011). Das Schulberufssystem: Restkategorie oder Innovationsfaktor der beruflichen Bildung? Berufsbildung, 65(131), 2–6. Kell, A. (1995). Das Berechtigungswesen zwischen Bildungs- und Beschäftigungssystem. In H. Blankertz, J. Derbolav, A. Kell & G. Kutscha (Eds.), Sekundarstufe II – Jugendbildung zwischen Schule und Beruf. Teil 1: Handbuch pp. 289–320. Stuttgart & Dresden: Klett. [Full list available on request]