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The second subsection addresses the configuration of national institutions in the economic context and has an impact on VET approaches, which are associated with the concept of the variety of capitalism. In political science, the concept of the variety of capitalism emerged in the late 1990s (e.g., Finegold & Soskice, 1988; Culpepper, 1999; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Hancké et al., 2007; Hall & Gingerich, 2009; Busemeyer, 2009). Essentially, these authors are aligned with Smith and List’s historic dogma and have identified ideal types that also provide clues as to why countries organize VET programs so differently.

The two ideal types are coordinated (CME) or liberal (LME) market economies, which are determined according to national institutional configurations. CMEs are embedded in a variety of intermediary institutions. As an example, companies coordinate among themselves; they conduct wage negotiations at the national level, and they generally tend to focus on long-term strategies. “The training systems of CMEs typically provide high skill levels and the requisite mix of company-specific and more general technical skills” (Hall & Soskice, 2001, p. 40). LMEs are based less on mediating collective institutions than on market forces to solve coordination problems and do not engage in collective wage bargaining and have little worker protection.

From the perspective of workers facing short job tenures and fluid labor markets, career success also depends on acquiring the general skills that can be used in many different firms; and most educational programs from secondary through university levels, even in business and engineering, stress ‘certification’ in general skills rather than the acquisition of more specialized competencies. (Hall & Soskice, 2001, p. 30)

Hence, such socioeconomic and sociocultural differences may have an influence on the social constructedness of VET programs.

Teuber, Backes-Gellner, and Ryan (2016) contributed with an investigation that shows the large differences in the configuration of institutions among the USA, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. The authors analyzed how companies adjust their span of control (i.e., number of employees per supervisor) to national institutional settings. The authors show that a broad control span goes hand in hand with certain national institutional conditions, namely, a solid skills foundation, skill retention, and trust. Highly qualified and trained employees need fewer supervisors to support and monitor them. Because these employees have broader education and training and more work experience, which they have gained in their VET program, they can take on more demanding jobs. This possibility leads to more motivation, which particularly has an influence on skills retention and trust. The institutional framework conditions used in the authors’ approach are summarized in the following table and show how 22 companies from the USA, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland can be classified. This table makes it clear that the Anglo-Saxon countries, the USA and the UK, belong to the LMEs, Germany to the CMEs, and Switzerland is somehow a hybrid of both concepts.

Table 1: Overview of National Level Institutions (for details see Teuber, Backes-Gellner, & Ryan, 2016)

Today, we live in a different world with many disruptive processes driven by digital transformation, the acceleration of all areas of life, and globalization. Workforce qualification requirements have changed and will change faster in the future. Reform leaders have begun to realize that their education system is not preparing people for the 21^st century. The worldwide demand for more experience and soft skills in job advertisements (Salvisberg, 2010; Trilling & Fadel, 2009; Bolli & Renold, 2017) indicates that there is a need for radical change in education, which goes beyond simple market-driven and “laissez faire” concepts, especially if a society wants to provide long-lasting career paths for its younger and older generations. As Winch (1998) summarized, due to ramifications throughout society and politics, reform leaders must develop goals and stimulate discussions about values, beliefs, and habits to inspire a common pattern of behavior to achieve robust social institutions (Renold et al., 2019).

This short summary of economic policy concepts shows that the predominant capitalist institutional structure has a decisive influence on VET approaches and education in general and therefore contributes to the social construct of the concepts in VET. However, that short summary is not sufficient to differentiate between social constructs of VET program concepts. To provide a way forward in understanding comparison issues in VET, the following section addresses definition issues, provides a classification scheme with selected criteria, and discusses forms of construction metaphors.