政治制度、产业关系与职业教育的起源与发展——基于西方国家的比较研究

Political Institutions，Industrial Relations Systems, and Origins of Vocational Training Systems ： An Empirical Study based Based on Advanced Industrialized Countries

Vocational education and training (VET) systems vary across countries in the types of skills provided (certified， portable skills versus general skills) and in their venues for training (state schools versus firm-based programs). This paper explores the origins of divergent VET systems at the dawn of the Twentieth-Century in Europe and North America， focusing particularly on the contribution of diverse political institutions and industrial relations systems. Countries with strong business and labor associations produce higher levels of vocational training than those with weakly-organized business and labor， because they unify diverse sectors of the business community around the broad collective need for skilled workers. Groups help to education their business members about the benefits of vocational training， and firms trust that others will also participate. Strong organizations often have close ties to the vocational schools and help to design curricula; therefore， firms are also more willing to pay costs for collective training because they believe in the efficacy of the programs. Strong organizations may also help facilitate the movement of workers from declining sectors into expanding ones. Countries with weakly-organized business and labor associations are more likely to rely on general skills. Vocational training systems are nevertheless under pressure in many advanced， industrialized countries. Deindustrialization has meant that fewer jobs exist for medium-skilled workers，who were best served by vocational training programs in the past， and low-skill service workers have more limited needs for training. In recent years， governments have used vocational training programs to address unemployment as well as skills needs， and this has sometimes compromised the capacities to provide adequate skills. Vocational training has also become less popular among youth and their parents， because everyone wants to participate in knowledge-intensive jobs. The reduction of vocational training programs may contribute to the growing numbers of young people who are in neither employment nor in education or training. Countries with strongly-organized business and labor associations at the national level (such as Denmark)， however， have been better able to renew their vocational training programs than those with the social partners organized at the sectoral level (such as Germany) or those with very weak organization (such as Britain). Thus the paper demonstrates that Denmark has recently revised vocational training for the new economic era; whereas Britain has had less success in this task.