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Abstract
The paper argues that: (1) the demise of ‘occupational’ and ‘internal’ and the spread of ‘external’ labour markets in growth areas of UK economy such as the creative and cultural sector, coupled with the massification of higher education which has created a new type of post‐degree ‘vocational need’, means that the transition from education to work should be re‐thought as the development of vocational practice rather than the acquisition of qualifications; and (2) in order to re‐think transition as the development of vocational practice it is necessary to eviscerate the legacy of the ‘traditional’ conception of practice in UK educational policy. The paper reviews a number of alternative social scientific conceptions of practice, formulates more multi‐faceted conceptions of vocational practice, and discusses their implications for UK and EU educational policy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Monica Nerland for her comments on an early draft of the paper and for inviting me to present the paper at a seminar in the Faculty of Education and Social Research, University of Oslo on the 16 March, 2007, and to express my gratitude to my discussants Hans‐Christian Arnsneth and Terje Gronning for their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Michael Young, Lorna Unwin and my two peer reviewers for their comments, which helped me to further revise the paper.
Notes
1. Alexander's observation refers specifically to Bourdieu's concept of habitus, I have used his generalization to encapsulate a general trend amongst practice theorists.
2. Alexander (Citation1995, p. 144) invokes this term to highlight that Bourdieu's (1993, pp. 68–69) concept of habituated practical sense is a ‘social necessity turned into nature [and] converted into motor schemes and body automaticisms’, rather than a cultural process that develops people's ability to interpret other's sensibilities and intensions and act according to reasons.
3. Bourdieu (1996) defines his concept of field in ‘relational’ terms. He explains what is distinctive about one cultural field compared with another by focusing on competition within and between fields. My use of the term retains his relational dimension, however, in recognition of the process of ‘convergence’ occurring in the C&C sector (Florida, Citation2002; Bilton, 2007) it is less concerned with competition between fields and focuses more on intra‐and inter‐development of cultural fields.
4. Some of the writers discussed in the paper, for example Knorr Cetina, use the term professional rather than vocational when addressing the knowledge, skill and judgement associated with particular fields of practice. To avoid doing violence to their arguments I have retained their preferred terminology and endeavoured to show how their insights allowed me to develop the conception of vocational practice formulated in the paper.
5. My ideas about the role of judgement as an integral feature of the concept of vocational practice have been heavily influenced by Joseph Dunne's (Citation1993) book Back to the rough ground. Like Dunne, I accept that it is a futile exercise to disembed the knowledge and skill integral to practice and to try to encapsulate them in explicit, generalizable formulae, procedures or rules. Where we differ is that Dunne is explicitly interested in recovering Aristotle's concept of phronesis in order to articulate what is distinctive about the relationship between judgement and practice in the modern age, whereas I have a much more circumscribed aim to acknowledge that judgement is an integral aspect of any form of vocational practice.
6. Having clarified the similarity and difference between the concept of practice and ‘practical object related activity’ in Activity Theory, the discussion of Engeström uses the latter term to do justice to his position.
