A new article by Prof. Dr. Christine Trampusch and Prof. Dr. Marius Busemeyer has been published in The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training:

Busemeyer, Marius R. /Christine Trampusch (2019): The Politics of Vocational Training: Theories, Typologies, and Public Policies. In: Guile, D & Unwin, L. (eds.) The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 137-164.

Summary:

This chapter provides an overview of existing theories and approaches in comparative political economy and public policy in the study of the politics of vocational training. It argues that politics and conflicts in the economic/labor market arena as well as in the political arena affect the institutional design of vocational training systems. In the first section, we review how previous literature has conceptualized the politics of skills in the economic arena, distinguishing between efficiency theoretical accounts and literature, which highlights sociopolitical dimensions. The second section focuses more specifically on the connection between labor migration and skill formation institutions in order to illustrate how labor relations affect vocational training. Subsequently, we elaborate on conflicts in the political arena and introduce existing typologies of skill formation systems, before we discuss the literature in comparative public policy research, which demonstrates how political parties and labor market actors shape the historical and contemporary development of VET systems.