The paper presents interim results of a major research project conducted by the author. The principal question concerns the relations between subsectors of society, and how they can be understood and influenced. Education and employment are taken as examples for this broader topic. In everyday discourses it seems very familiar that some kind of matching between these subsectors would and should be achieved. At the same time, we can hear many doubts about how well this kind of co-ordination actually works.

The purpose of the research is to explore the opportunities and problems in these relations more deeply at two levels, and relate these to each other: first, how do the social sciences conceptualize the relationships between such kinds of subsectors of society? second, which kinds of co-ordination practices between education and employment, and proposals for them, can we find empirically?

To the first question, we can find a very broad range of answers and approaches, lying between the extremes of the impossibility of co-ordination between subsystems of society by Luhmannian sociological systems theory on the one hand, and the concept of overarching more or less holistic regimes of skill formation postulated by institutional approaches (e.g., the variety of capitalisms, or the regulation school) on the other, with several more moderate and contingent approaches in between. Of course, different understandings of the labour market are important intermediate theories (e.g., the human capital approach and its competitors). We can see that these different theoretical understandings imply very different basic understandings of how society is constructed (e.g., systems, fields, sectors, etc.), and how agency is understood (e.g., structural-mechanistic, individualistic, or praxeological as a rather recent alternative). In sum, if we take this variety of approaches into account, we can understand that co-ordination of education and employment, what is seemingly a pragmatic problem that “only needs to be done”, is not a trivial issue.

To get to the second question, we will provide a heuristic, that combines different mechanisms or practices at different levels of society (micro, meso, macro) and takes abstract co-ordination mechanisms as point of departure: market, bureaucracy, association-community, and networks. We will show how complex a co-ordination system turns out, if we look at it as a combination of these mechanisms or practices.

Finally we will look at a set of concrete policies or policy proposals that are in place or in discourse in various countries, and relate these to the conceptual outline (e.g., apprenticeship; learning outcome orientation; professional policies; anticipation and forecasting systems, etc). We will see how prevalent different policies are, how they work, and interpret this in relation to the overall approaches. E.g, from the point of view of systems theory conflicts between education and employment can be predicted, and solutions must be found that avoid direct co-ordination; or from the point of view of skill formation complex embedded systems can be predicted which will be difficult to change, etc.

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