Vocational education in the fourth industrial revolution

For more than half a century, we have seen successive accounts arguing that capitalism is in the process of evolving into a new stage that will radically transform or even ‘end’ work as we understand it. In all cases, these accounts have been hyperbolic. However, what if the latest version of this story was to come true? What would it mean for vocational education and training (VET) systems built, as they are, on the premise of learning for work?

This book by James Avis considers what the latest of these discourses, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), amounts to and what it means for vocational education and training. As with most of its predecessors, the 4IR rhetoric is hard to relate to empirical evidence. This is typical of the approaches of its proponents from business schools, global consultancy firms and structures of the capitalist elite such as the World Economic Forum. Getting behind the rhetoric is what Avis does here, and to great effect.

At the core of his argument is a view that the ‘linear, technicist and deterministic logic’ of the 4IR discourse is clearly flawed. Rather, he suggests, the issue is about a major contestation of education and work’s natures and purposes, with the possibility of the development of a socially just society at stake. In developing this argument, Avis contends that the 4IR argument needs to be located in the wider practices and discourses of neoliberalism. He clearly identifies that it is a ‘socio-technical imaginary’ aimed at protecting productivism and unequal capitalist relations from critique and crisis. As such, it is a discourse with material consequences.

Although 4IR is a discourse from the acolytes of capitalism, Avis reminds us that from sections of the left, too, there has been a resurgence of thinking about the ‘futures of work’. Some of these accounts also posit a techno-utopian way to reduce class conflict (cf. some of the literature of the early 1990s around Post-Fordism, particularly those associated with Marxism Today). Others believe that technology will end capitalism and herald a communist idyll of the kind seen in News from Nowhere. And there is yet another strand that reiterates longstanding feminist and anarchist critiques of work. Avis sees these struggles to control the future trajectory of advanced capitalism as the real story. A better future is possible but it needs to be fought for.

Avis is the author most associated with analysis of Northern, especially British, skills and work regimes. This is largely the terrain of this book too, although he is concerned to acknowledge that this is a particular focus and to consider, albeit more briefly, what the conflict over 4IR might mean in less developed contexts.

These debates about the futures of work and 4IR also must be placed in the context of contestations about sustainable growth and sustainable development. Here too, Avis notes the need to critique a dominant utopian discourse that pretends that growth, if greened, can go on for ever.

At a more concrete level, Avis considers what we know about the scale and impact of elements of the 4IR package, such as robotisation. His analysis is both rigorous and nuanced, showing that both deskilling and upskilling are taking place and that the impact, both positive and negative (from the point of view of workers) has been overstressed. Moreover, he reiterates the point that choices of technology and labour process are always choices, influenced by many factors, local and global, and are not simply technologically or economically determined.

Avis is concerned to consider what all this means for VET, indeed, that is his most important contribution given the quantity of writing on the wider debate and the paucity of quality writing on the implications for VET (the current literature being dominated by normative and deterministic readings of the need for VET to respond to massive changes). Just like technology, Avis insists that VET is never innocent and is always reflective of historical and contemporary contestations.

He argues that whatever the complex, situated impact is on the nature of the work, VET will need to respond in terms of some of its key elements: theories and skills and knowledge; and practices around curriculum, pedagogy and qualifications. However, he also asks what becomes of VET if some of the more radical visions do come to pass – whether this leads to an enforced worklessness under capitalism or some post-capitalist or even communist form. As he notes, debates about universal basic income make this appear to be an issue of the moment rather than the far future.

This leads him to the biggest questions facing the VET field. Can VET exist without work? Can there be a form of VET that breaks free from capitalism to focus on practical learning for a socially just society? He is not able to answer these definitively, but sees the power in asking them.

The book was begun before the pandemic but finished during it and this leads Avis to reconsider the notion of ‘really useful labour’ and whether the popular celebration of key workers will amount to anything more than an emotional moment.

The book has many strengths. Above all, though a short book, it is incredibly rich, reflecting Avis’s breadth of scholarship about VET and work. Whilst clearly positioned as driven by social justice concerns, his account is always careful to explore both the discursive and empirical elements of counternarratives. By locating the debate largely at the level of paradigms – of work organisation and VET – he provides a hugely valuable corrective to a literature that too often sits at the levels of classroom and provider practices and process to the neglect of wider questions. Moreover, he also looks to questions of VET's purpose, albeit at the level largely of pointing forward to the necessary debate.

Of course, as a reader, I am left wanting more. As already noted, Avis is very much a scholar of VET under advanced capitalism. From the perspective of someone who works more on the South, inevitably there are places where his analysis cannot go, although he does point to some of these in a way that is rare amongst VET scholars in the North. Equally, whilst sustainability issues are noted, these too are underdeveloped when related to the scale of the challenge. Nonetheless, here too my criticism is muted as, again, he goes further in this direction than most of his peers.

All in all, this is a book to be highly commended and welcomed. James Avis does important work for the field in problematising some of the current policy nonsense of a critical VET for 4IR. Beyond this, however, he highlights the huge, indeed, existential questions that face VET whatever 4IR amounts to in substance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).