The shift towards a knowledge economy has intensified demand for more complex technical competencies and renewed attention to skills formation, including VET’s role in supporting productivity and economic transformation (World Economic Forum, 2016; OECD, 2021; Kovalchuk et al., 2022). Employer involvement is widely seen as key to strengthening the relevance of VET and its alignment with labour-market needs (Huddleston and Laczik, 2018; Haybi-Barak and Shoshana, 2020). Yet, while policy and institutional debates widely acknowledge the importance of employer engagement, we know less about how employers publicly justify and position their engagement, especially in contexts shaped by state steering and policy mobilisation.

This paper focuses on VET in China, where higher vocational education has been elevated within national development and education reform agendas (Xu, 2020; Xue and Li, 2022). This repositioning has unfolded alongside China’s transition towards “high-quality development” and industrial upgrading, increasing expectations for a more highly skilled technical workforce (Pan and Yang, 2024; Wang, 2024). Labour market evidence suggests persistent skills mismatch and shortages, reinforcing policy attention to strengthening skills development (Tan, 2020). At the same time, concerns persist about the responsiveness and quality of higher vocational education, often attributed to weak linkages between education providers and employers (Ma and Guo, 2018; Zhuang, 2018). National reforms have increasingly framed industry–VET partnership as a strategy for improving training relevance, graduate employability, and the contribution of VET to wider economic priorities (Xue and Li, 2022; Shi, 2024). In this setting, employers are expected to become active partners in workplace learning, curriculum alignment, and skills certification.

The paper asks: How do employers justify and position their engagement in higher vocational education in China? It further examines patterned variation across employer types. Here, “employers” refers to enterprise organisations (firms) that report their engagement with higher vocational institutions. The study aims to (1) identify recurring justificatory themes in employer-authored accounts; (2) examine how these narratives vary across employer types, using sector, region, and firm size as key comparative dimensions; and (3) relate observed justificatory logics to broader questions about how responsibilities, authority, and resources in skills formation are organised.

The analysis is guided by the political economy of skill formation, which shifts attention from whether firms are willing to invest to how skill systems allocate responsibilities for providing, financing, regulating, and certifying training across the state, education providers, enterprises, and intermediary bodies (Hall and Soskice, 2001; Busemeyer and Trampusch, 2012). Historical institutionalist accounts emphasise that skill formation arrangements are politically contested and structured around settlements over who provides training, who pays for it, and who holds authority over standards and certification (Thelen, 2004). Building on these insights, the paper reads employer narratives through PESF questions—who is presented as responsible for provision, who is portrayed as bearing costs and risks, and who is positioned as having authority over standards and certification—linking organisational justification to system-level governance debates (Busemeyer and Trampusch, 2012; Bonoli and Emmenegger, 2022). While much of this scholarship is grounded in European cases, its organising questions can be extended to contexts with different forms of state steering and employer organisation (Oliver, Yu and Buchanan, 2019).

Empirically grounded in China, the paper contributes to European and international dialogue on employer engagement in VET by extending political economy questions about responsibility allocation, legitimacy, and governance into a large, state-steered skills regime. Methodologically, it shows how large-scale employer-authored texts can be analysed systematically to examine patterns and variation in employer narratives of engagement.

At the conference, the paper will present the completed analysis, including cross-group comparisons and implications for research on employer engagement and the governance of skill formation.

This paper examines how enterprises represent their participation in higher vocational education in China through self-authored annual reports submitted to a national platform supervised by the Ministry of Education. As independently produced organisational texts, these reports are treated as organisational narratives through which enterprises justify, frame, and position their participation within a wider policy and institutional environment (Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy, 2004). The study adopts qualitative corpus analysis, combining computational tools with close reading to examine how language constructs meaning in naturally occurring organisational texts (Baker, 2006; Brezina, 2018). Rather than treating frequency patterns as endpoints, it uses corpus techniques (frequency, keyword, collocation and concordance analysis) to surface salient lexical and rhetorical patterns, which are then interpreted in context to support inductive, theme development (Baker, 2006). This approach is well suited to “big qual” datasets, enabling attention to both broader rhetorical tendencies and subtle discursive strategies in enterprise-authored reports (Ancarno, 2020). Guided by computational screening, iterative close reading supports comparison across enterprise types and links textual patterning to grounded interpretation (Gillings, Mautner and Baker, 2023; Baker and Egbert, 2016). The corpus is drawn from the Modern Higher Vocational Education Network, which has collected enterprise reports annually since 2015 as part of a national quality monitoring initiative. These reports provide enterprise-authored narrative accounts of collaboration history, resource contributions, forms of engagement, perceived outcomes and challenges, typically ranging from around 3,500 to 6,000 Chinese characters. To enable temporal comparison while maintaining analytical manageability, three reporting years are selected: 2015 (initial reporting year), 2018 (a key policy moment for industry–education integration), and 2022 (the most recent available year). Report counts for these years are 273, 1,158 and 2,283 respectively. Reports are included unless they contain predominantly promotional content or lack substantive material on enterprise participation. Python-based tools are used to preprocess and analyse the Chinese-language corpus, enabling flexible cleaning, segmentation and the construction of sub-corpora despite variation in report length, structure and formatting (McEnery and Hardie, 2012; Brezina, 2018). Sub-corpora are grouped by sector, region and firm size to examine variation in rhetorical emphasis and discursive positioning. Computational patterning guides iterative close reading and qualitative coding, supporting contextualised interpretation of organisational reasoning and policy-facing justification (Marchi and Taylor, 2018). To enhance rigour and transparency, preprocessing and analytic decisions are documented in an audit trail, and interpretive judgements are recorded through reflexive memos alongside concordance-based evidence.

This paper will present completed findings on how employers justify and position their engagement in higher vocational education in China, based on qualitative corpus analysis of enterprise-authored annual reports. The analysis will identify recurring justification themes and rhetorical strategies through which employers explain why they engage, what they contribute, and how they define the boundaries of their roles. It will also report patterned variation across employer groups (sector, region, and firm size), showing how different types of employers emphasise distinct rationales and priorities. Findings will be interpreted through political economy of skill formation questions, focusing on how narratives allocate responsibility for training provision, portray cost- and risk-sharing, and construct authority over standards and certification. The paper will highlight points of alignment and tension between market imperatives and policy-facing public goals, and will propose analytically portable “justification logics” that can inform comparative research on employer engagement in VET beyond China. Methodologically, it demonstrates how interpretive corpus analysis can generate transparent, comparable insights from large-scale employer-authored texts.

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