Education, skill formation, and training continue to be important areas of consideration for both public policy and research. This book examines the particular types of vocational training known as collective skill formation systems, whereby the training (often firm-based apprenticeships) is collectively organized by businesses and unions with state support and cooperation in execution, finance, and monitoring.
With contributions from leading academics, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the varying historical origins of, and recent developments in, vocational training systems, offering in-depth studies on coordinated market economies, namely Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Denmark. It also contains comparative chapters that analyse how these countries react to common challenges such as deindustrialization, labour market stratification, academic drift, gender inequalities, and Europeanization.
Whereas previous research has focused on the differences between various kinds of skill regimes, this book focuses on explaining institutional variety within the group of collective skill formation systems. The development of skill formation systems is regarded as a dynamic political process, dependent on the outcome of various political struggles regarding such matters as institutional design and transformations during critical junctures in historical development.
Industry Reviews
This volume is the major publication in the vocational training literature since Thelen's seminal How Institutions Evolve. Studies of the main 'collective actor' systems - Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands - bring the reader right up-to-date while also showing the historical evolution of the systems. In a most impressive introductory chapter, Busemeyer and Trampusch build an analytic political economic model to account for the different patterns of skill formation systems in the advanced world. And in sparkling country and comparative chapters (including by Iversen, Martin, Streeck, and Thelen) the book integrates a depth of empirical knowledge with sophisticated modern political economy. This book is a formidable achievement. * David Soskice, Research Professor of Political Science, Duke University, and Research Professor of Comparative Political Economy, Oxford University *
The contributions to this volume cover the waterfront on contemporary issues of skill formation and the politics to which it gives rise in the coordinated economies of Europe. They range from history to current challenges to debates on the concepts we use to understand skills and skill systems. Germany continues to cast a long shadow in these discussions, but this volume enriches the debate by widening it beyond the canonical German case. The editors have pulled together the contributors without losing sight of their divergent analytical contributions. A genuinely comparative volume likely to be of great use to both established scholars and new students of the political economy of skills. * Pepper D. Culpepper, Professor of Political Science, European University Institute, Italy *
In an era of revived political and societal interest for vocational education and similar systems of formation around the globe, the understanding of the history, the foundations, and the institutional subtleties and differences has become the key to understand the functions and dysfunctions of systems of collective skill formation. In this respect this book fills important gaps in the current knowledge and provides an excellent overview of the existing literature. Therefore I can only praise it as the indispensable source and base for more scholarly work on the political economy of collective skills formation in the future! * Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Wolter, University of Bern *
