Building on pragmatic sociology, this paper analyses and offers a critique of how competences has been researched in the field of education. We first outline the boundaries between different conceptual frameworks on competence that, according to their scheme of interpretation, generate distinct problems. Empirically, our analysis is based on a bibliometric overview of educational research articles published in journals listed in Scopus. In particular, we formulate a critique of sociological and educational research for juxtaposing the competences of skill versus merit in relation to different kinds of educational pathways, where the former is seen to be a competence residing within vocational education, while the latter has been confined to elite education or academic pathways into higher education. Although merit has been constructed, valorised, and interrogated such that it has become an object of public debate, its relationship to the practically-oriented understanding of common vocational education and training has gone largely unnoticed. Contrary to the merit of academic tracks, research on vocational education and training emphasises skills and practical know-how. In the second part of the paper, we embark on an empirical examination, giving attention to Swedish higher vocational education participants’ articulation of their aspirations and the ambiguity around recognising merit in their experiences from training to work. We find that participants, in their pursuit of higher vocational education: (i) adjust their aspirations; (ii) adapt to what they believe the labour market requires of them; and (iii) assign value to non-merit. In sum, merit appears to matter for their trajectories in the way that it is juxtaposed. The value in paying attention to these accounts is that it opens up a space for us to examine the worth of what is/are adjacent to merit. Through this analysis, we attempt to illustrate how the concurrent salience and invisibility in sub-fields of educational research establishes a particular kind of social reality which has implications for the way that knowledge is used to shape research “problems”, policy and public sentiments around the politics of skilling and ongoing debates about merit. A critique in the way in which we examine merit (or not) in educational research is important, and is part of an important exercise for formulating meaningful ways to research what is valuable in learning and work for common actors. More importantly, it encourages greater reflexivity amongst researchers to question our own conventions.

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