Session Information
02 SES 11 B, International Perspectives on VET III: Export & Import
Paper Session
Contribution
A pressing question of current discussions in the field of vocational training is how far models of training are transferable from one national institutional context to another. This paper argues that although institutional legacies are important in shaping policy choices, significant reforms and institutional transformations are possible under specific conditions. We demonstrate this by studying the emergence of collective skill formation regimes in Liberal Market Economies. In these contexts, common wisdom would lead us to expect that collective skill formation should not be sustainable in the long term, because the market-oriented character of the political economy prevents collective approaches to human capital investment. Studying the two cases of Ireland and Britain since the 1980s, however, we find that Ireland has moved towards collective skill formation, whereas Britain has stayed on the liberal path, transforming VET from a collective skill formation institution towards an employment policy program, complemented by a training market.
This development seems to be ad odds with the conventional wisdom about collective skill formation: In Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) VET plays a large role in national skill formation with the delivery of firm- and industry-specific skills, and while the state strongly sponsors VET, only in systems of collective skill formation employers are strongly involved in the governance, financing and delivery of VET, which is typically organized on a dual apprenticeship basis (Busemeyer 2009, Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012). Conversely, Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) put little emphasis on VET for which state or employer support are largely absent, and are strongly focused on general skills that are primarily developed via academic higher education.
Our explanation for the divergent development centres on the role of partisan governments: partisan actors have preferences not only with regard to specific policies, but also with regard to how the political process should be organized and how different types of organized interests are represented in policy-making. The Thatcher government adopted a „class-war“ approach by deliberately designing policies that reduced the political influence of unions, whereas the Irish government adopted a “social partnership” approach, supporting and facilitating cross-class compromise in the reform of VET. These decisions in the critical phase of the 1980s shaped the menu of options for subsequent governments. As it turned out in the 1990s, the corporatist model proved to be more sustainable in creating collective skill formation, whereas the British system remains stuck in a „voluntarist“ system with limited employer involvement (Vossiek 2018). In conclusion, while institutional legacies matter and partly explain the limited role of VET for skill formation in LMEs, even in unlikely settings politics play a crucial role in transforming training into different directions.
Method
Our argument on the relevance of partisan governments for the emergence of collective skill formation in LMEs is based on two in-depth case studies of Ireland and England since the 1980s. This case selection follows the logic of a most similar systems design (Lijphart 1971, Gerring 2007), where the independent variables show similar characteristics at the beginning of the research period except for our main explanatory variable of government partisanship, which is used to explain the different outcomes of reforms towards collective skill formation in Ireland and continued “voluntarism” (King 1993, 1997) with little employer involvement in England. More generally, we approach the topic from the perspective of actor-centered historical institutionalism (Steinmo, et al. 1992, Hall and Taylor 1996, Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003), which is based on an ontology that gives special attention to the timing and sequencing of political decisions and to considerations how these feed back into subsequent political processes (Pierson 2000, Hall 2003, Pierson 2004, Hall 2010). In line with this research strands propositions, we engage in tracing the political processes in both countries from 1980 onwards. Here, we place the emphasis on the relationship between partisan governments, unions and employers and show how and why Ireland moved to social partnership in training reforms, while the UK followed a confrontational approach. This research logic also enables us to analyze how these different politics impacted on reforms during the 1990s and 2000s. The paper is based on a broad collection of primary and secondary sources. Additionally, between September and November 2012, we conducted interviews with 34 policy experts in Ireland and in the UK, which form the main empirical basis for our papers’ argument.
Expected Outcomes
First, we empirically show that despite broadly similar policy legacies (voluntarist training regulation, apprenticeships based on time-served and not on competences acquired, contested and decentralized industrial relations) the UK and Ireland have moved into different directions since the 1980s. The UK has used VET mostly as an employment policy, removed unions from training governance and introduced a training market on which public and private providers compete for the delivery of - lightly regulated – training. In contrast, Ireland has introduced a new apprenticeship system based on statutory regulations, which is governed and reformed on a tripartite basis and partly financed by an employer-paid levy. Second, we offer a political explanation for these developments: partisan politics matter for training even in cases where the institutional environment hampers the development of large-scale collective skill formation. Since the middle of the 1980s Irish center and center-left governments have opted for a social partnership approach in economic reforms and included the major social partners in political decision-making. As we show, this cooperation underpinned training reform, which was one of the major areas in which unions and employers were brought together by the “corporatist” approach of Irish governments. In contrast, the Conservative Thatcher government during the 1980s dismantled institutions of collective training regulation and effectively removed unions from training politics, which followed the general political logic of freeing a captive market from union hands. Finally, we demonstrate that the partisan political decisions taken in the 1980s produced feedback effects, which influenced the menu of reform options for subsequent governments. While the tripartite training institutions of Ireland remained stable until the global economic crisis, the UK had to deal with the repercussions of Thatcher’s “class-war” politics since the 1990s. Here, governments lacked the means to build up cooperation between employers and unions.
References
Busemeyer, Marius R. 2009. "Asset Specificity, Institutional Complementarities and the Varieties of Skill Regimes in Coordinated Market Economies." Socio-Economic Review 7: 375-406. Busemeyer, Marius R., and Christine Trampusch. 2012. "Introduction: The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation." In The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation, ed. Marius R./Trampusch Busemeyer, Christine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3-40. Gerring, John. 2007. Case Study Research. Principles and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Peter A. 2003. "Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Research." In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James; Rueschemeyer Mahoney, Dietrich. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. 373-404. ———. 2010. "Historical Institutionalism in Rationalist and Sociological Perspective." In Explaining Institutional Change. Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, eds. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. 204-24. Hall, Peter A., and Rosemary C. R. Taylor. 1996. "Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms." Political Studies 44: 936-57. Hall, Peter, and David Soskice. 2001. "An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism." In Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, eds. Peter Hall and David Soskice. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. 1-68. King, Desmond. 1993. "The Conservatives and Training Policy 1979-1992: From a Tripartite to a Neoliberal Regime." Political Studies 41: 214-35. ———. 1997. "Employers, Training Policy, and the Tenacity of Voluntarism in Britain." Twentieth century British history 8: 383-411. Lijphart, Arend. 1971. "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method." American Political Science Review 65: 682-93. Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierson, Paul. 2000. "Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes." American Political Development 14: 72-92. ———. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Political Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steinmo, Sven, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds. 1992. Structuring Politics: Hinstorical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vossiek, Janis 2018. Collective Skill Formation in Liberal Market Economies? The Politics of Training Reforms in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. bern: Peter Lang.
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