Annatina Aerne Chair

Marius R. Busemeyer Discussant

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Adapting vocational education and training to the digital economy

How are different VET-systems adapting to rapid technological change? Dual training systems have traditionally been able to respond to incremental technological change by adapting the content and structure of VET-programs to fit skill demands of employers. However, digitalization increases the speed of technological change casting doubt if incremental adaptation of VET-programs based on incumbent employers will be sufficient to meet the skills demands of the digital economy. We compare the Danish dual-training system to the Swedish school-based system.
We propose that the Danish system with a high producer group involvement has difficulties adapting to rapid technological change, whereas the Swedish system has adapted more rapidly. In Sweden, rapid adaptation is facilitated by fewer veto-points in the governance structure of VET and by the general priority to general skills. Conversely, in Denmark, the complex governance structure of VET and the priority to intermediate skills make rapid adaptation difficult.
To substantiate this proposition, we interview policy-makers, civil servants and social partners about how the shift to digital skill formation has mattered in recent VET reforms. We find that the Danish system produce more varied adaptation across programs due to high involvement of social partners, whereas the Swedish system produce uniform adaptation due to government standardization. To support the country-comparison, we use the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to show ICT-skill deficiencies of VET-workers. Contrary to our proposition, multi-level regression analysis of multiple countries shows that VET-workers in school-based systems lack ICT-skills significantly more compared to peers in dual-training systems.

Christian Ibsen

Michigan State University

Kathleen Thelen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

Globalization, privatization and collective goods provision: The redefined role of the state in Austria’s collective skill formation system

Privatization and globalization are often fundamentally intertwined. Privatization exposes companies to international competition and the pressures of international financial markets, leading to restructuring activities that can be incompatible with the provision of collective goods via public sector firms. Austria is a typical case for such developments, as participation in collective skill formation (i.e. the dual provision of vocational education and training (VET) via firm- and school-based learning) rapidly declined after the privatization of state-owned industries around the 1990s. First, this paper shows how a variety of corporatist and public actors coped with this challenge. Resulting in a fundamental shift in responsibility of VET away from employers, the state and labor representatives took over many industrial training workshops. Surprisingly, industrial enterprises have in the last years again increasingly participated in these (semi-) public workshops. Second, this research project examines the factors responsible for initial failure and abovementioned latter success of employer cooperation in the face of privatization and globalization. Why did industrial enterprises renew their interest in dual VET? I employ an inter-temporal comparison supplemented by theory-building process tracing to explore the reasons for the change from initial employer exit to later re-integration. Did public actors simply give in vis-à-vis continued pressure from this newly financialized and internationalized sector, and therefore had to orient the training workshops according to the specific needs of business in order to trigger participation, contributing to tendencies like segmentalism and dualization? Or did power relations change, therefore making more coercive re-integration into dual VET possible?

Daniel Unterweger

University of St. Gallen

 

Cooperation without partners? ICT training in collective skill formation systems

In dual training systems, public and private actors closely work together in order to ensure the supply of skilled labour needed in the economy. This requires very complex coordination processes and entails cooperation dilemmas. Decentralized cooperation is already very complex in traditional industrial sectors. It is even more difficult in sectors with no training tradition, such as in the field of information and communication technology (ICT). Cooperation in this case is difficult because there is no training tradition, the firms in this area are very heterogeneous and an intermediary association representing all (potential) training firms is missing. Nevertheless, ICT apprenticeships have been introduced in the three prototypical dual training systems, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. This paper looks at the processes that led to the implementation of these trainings. It finds that the state pushed for the introduction of these apprenticeships in order to tackle the lack of skilled labour in this field. The proactive role of the state is surprising, because dual training systems heavily rely on the self-governance of private (business) actors. However, in the case of ICT, firms were poorly organised, which prevented the involvement of business in the set-up of the new training occupation. Although the initiated reforms stayed within the institutional boundaries of the respective training system, the lack of business support resulted in serious problems concerning the attractiveness of the new apprenticeships for students and for firms.

Lina Seitzl

University of St. Gallen

 

Contestation of the social order depending on political orientation and party preference: Evidence from a survey of public opinion in Switzerland

The foundations of the social order in contemporary societies have been shown to rest on nature and reason, whereby institutional arrangements influence the perception of the prestige of occupations through the legitimization of their role in the “natural” order of things. Because of an important consistency in prestige ratings from respondents across various social groups, countries and over time, “deviant” perceptions of the social order have attracted little attention. Yet structural changes in modern economies, brought by rapid globalization and technological change, might have significantly affected the view of the social world in the last decades. In particular, resistance to these transformations at the political level could lead to a growing contestation of the social order. We contribute to this important question by analyzing a unique data set in Switzerland based on a survey of adults’ perception of the social prestige of occupations.
As our results indicate, party preference does not significantly influence one’s view of the social world. However, the closer the political belief system of respondents to either extreme of the political spectrum, the less likely they are to assign social prestige to occupations according to their educational requirements. Moreover, occupations more salient in autonomy are less valued among respondents at the far left of the political spectrum. The increasing complexity of modern societies and labour markets in knowledge economies might therefore have triggered a strong reaction from the losers and potential losers of these developments who, in turn, adopted radicalized belief systems to cope with these changes.

Aurélien Abrassart

University of Berne

Stefan C. Wolter

University of Berne

Stefan C. Wolter

University of Berne

 

The fractured relationship between education and the economy: Macro and meso perspectives

It has been assumed that education is central to returns in the labour market in human capital theory and the related, Skill Bias Technological Change Theory. Many governments have taken this assumption to be central to policies in the expansion of higher education because it has been assumed that we live in a knowledge economy. However, a critical examination of both theories and a reanalysis of data on the returns to education over the past forty five years raises severe doubts as to warrant of these theories. In turn, it is argued that we should consider knowledge capitalism, as the basis for the failure of these dominant theories. Knowledge capitalism has radically different effects from those predicted by them and by the policy adoption of the ‘knowledge economy’.

Hugh Lauder

University of Bath