Читать книгу Economics and Governance of Vocational and Professional Education and Training (including Apprenticeship) (E-Book) - Uschi Backes-Gellner - Страница 9

Vocational Education and Training (VET)[2] is a global educational policy issue (OECD, 2015; UNESCO, 2015; CEDEFOP, 2018). Technological change, globalization, and social acceleration (Rosa, 2003, 2016; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019) are driving skills changes and leading to the constant adaptation of educational concepts (Autor et al., 2003). Furthermore, transferrable competencies such as problem solving, working under time and cost pressure, teamwork or independent work are becoming more important relative to hard skills (Trilling & Fadel, 2009; Salvisberg, 2010; Bolli & Renold, 2017). Reform leaders and policy-makers see their education and training system as being one-sidedly oriented by offering too many general and academic programs that are not compatible with new requirements for tomorrow’s working world. Academic education has attained a blurred meaning due to mass universities and the fact that the distinction between functions such as academic (i.e., research-oriented) activities and career-oriented education has become fuzzy (Renold, 2015). Skills mismatch, over-qualification or underemployment (ILO, 2014; Livingstone, 2009) are consequences of such developments. Direct entry into the labor market is difficult for many university graduates without several internships; they first have to acquire the competencies and work experience they lack (Stolz, 2005).

Such causes have placed VET in the focus of policy debates. Concepts such as work-oriented curricula, learning places beyond schools, and more complex institutional governance, including actors from the employment system, are seen as suitable solutions for a smoother transition from education to employment (OECD, 2010; CEDEFOP, 2018). Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Denmark act as model countries due to their high performance on the youth labor market (Renold et al., 2014). Hence, foreign delegations visiting these countries are looking for solutions to improve their own education and training system, even though most of them know that one cannot transfer a concept from one country to another. Michael Sadler concluded as early as 1900 (Bereday, 1964) that

A national system of education is a living thing, the outcome of forgotten struggles and difficulties, and “of battles long ago”. It has in it some of the secret workings of national life. It reflects, while it seeks to remedy, the failings of the national character. By instinct, it often lays special emphasis on those parts of training which the national character particularly needs (p. 310).

That said, terms used in the national educational jargon, such as VET, apprenticeship, competences, skills, or knowledge are socially constructed and reflected by national norms and habits. Brockmann et al. (2009) provided an example for England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The authors analyzed the problem of introducing the European Qualification Framework (EQF) and proved that there is a variation in the key concepts that underpin the EQF. Brockmann et al. (2009) concluded that if concepts are culturally influenced, it is indispensable that international comparisons identify “transnational categories that take into account the social construction of terms such as skills and qualifications” (p. 547).

This article provides a way forward for understanding socially constructed concepts by highlighting methodological problems in comparing countries’ education and training programs, shedding light on historically rooted concepts that may explain a certain configuration of institutions in social constructs, and explaining how readers can overcome such problems to compare apples with pears by working with classification frameworks and functional equivalents.

The chapter proceeds as follows: I continue in the second section by providing a brief explanation of what is meant by the social constructs and underline the theory with some examples. In the third section, to understand where socioeconomic and sociocultural differences may be rooted, I summarize the rival conception of VET in political economy theory and concepts of the variety of capitalism. The fourth section addresses the methodological problems of definitions, provides a classification scheme to overcome definition problems, and explains forms of construct metaphors discussed in the literature. The fifth section describes the importance of functional equivalents for comparing VET worldwide. Following Kohn (1989), a large problem in performing comparison is determining whether objects of knowledge and concepts are truly equivalent. Finally, I conclude by highlighting the importance of critically reflecting on the socially constructed concepts in reading research results from different scientific disciplines in the field of VET.