By contrast with the German ‘in-house’ foundations of VET theory described as Berufbildungstheorie, VET research elsewhere in Europe positions itself to varying degrees outside such boundaries, drawing on a wider range of disciplines and theoretical resources, especially in countries where VET itself and VET research enjoy less state support. This distinction is especially salient in the English-speaking world: here research in the field of VET emerged later than in continental Europe and has a more diversified institutional base, is liminal to the broader field of education research and competes with alternative institutional and external claims to expertise. Whilst the distinctive features of VET in these countries are widely associated with its liberal market philosophy (see e.g., Winch 2000), we ascribe these Anglophone approaches to theorising VET in an immediate sense to their more diversified institutional base (c.f. Bates 1999), which competes with alternative institutional and external claims to expertise and is liminal to a broader (but also marginalised) field of educational research (Furlong and Whitty 2017). In these countries, VET research has drawn on educational perspectives to critique VET as a marginalised and marginalising educational pathway and on theories developed in external disciplines to theorise the understandings generated by its research. In this paper we illustrate the interplay since the 1980s among the neoliberal ascendancy and its diminution of VET to the acquisition of narrowly defined occupational competences (Brockmann et al. 2008; Wolf 1995), processes of economic and educational tertiarisation, and the changing theorisation of VET in these countries. As the economic structures and forms of organisation that sustained VET in the early post-war years have given way to more service-based economies, and to academicisation and tertiarisation, its theoretical interests have also experienced diversification if not fragmentation. This work has been less influential on policies that have largely responded to an international ‘policy-making assemblage’ (Thompson et al. 2022) in which well-resourced research contributes to an international reframing of VET on neoliberal lines (e.g., OECD 2010, 2014). We conclude that this approach to theorising VET has nevertheless made important contributions to the study of VET and has continued to develop during ongoing crises of health, economy and environment. It may also usefully draw on the renewal of earlier bodies of European theory to understand of VET’s challenges and possibilities.

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