Transnational skills development in post-industrial knowledge economies: the case of Luxembourg and the Greater Region

Abstract

Luxembourg exhibits strong transnational traits within its skills regime, defying any neat fit with existing educational typologies. It is characterised by its high-skill economy, cross-cultural characteristics, and central location within the European Union. As such, Luxembourg has developed a hybrid strategy of responding to labour market challenges, and by that, to skills development. Our institutionalist analysis finds that Luxembourg is involved in transnational skills development in three complementary ways: (a) employers in Luxembourg extensively recruit skilled workers at the European and global levels, but also (b) heavily rely on the distinct skills sets of cross-border commuters from the neighbouring regions of Belgium, France, and Germany (the Greater Region). Furthermore, (c) Luxembourg combines institutional elements of these neighbouring countries – representing distinct models of capitalism and welfare – within its own education system. In combining the specific strengths of different national skills regimes, institutional bricolage represents a core feature of Luxembourg’s highly stratified system of skill formation. Our analytical framework refers to two major comparative political economy perspectives, namely the welfare state and varieties of capitalism approaches, to analyse how Luxembourg has responded to deindustrialisation by creating a domestic transnational labour market.

Keywords:

• Education and skill formation
• transnationalisation
• Luxembourg
• welfare state
• varieties of capitalism

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international workshop ‘The Politics of Education’, University of Konstanz, Germany, on 1 July 2016. The authors would like to especially acknowledge Justin Powell, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Patrick Emmenegger, Marius Busemeyer, and Rebecca Tarlau for their very insightful comments.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term ‘education and skill formation’ is used to refer broadly to the whole education system. However, we are especially interested in how education and skill formation are linked to the labour market and, in turn, embedded in the respective education-economy nexus.

2. See http://www.granderegion.net/de/grande-region/index.html (accessed 1 July 2016).

3. In addition, there exists a rich literature on Europeanisation which has interesting crossing points to the WS and VoC literatures. However, it mainly concentrates on higher education (see, e.g. Dale and Robertson 2009).

4. This was often done in coalition with the smaller Democratic Party (DP) as their junior partner.

5. This is mainly due to the fact that social policies have not embraced proactive education policy until recently.

6. The small size of Luxembourg further implies that geography plays a special role (see, e.g. Wolf 2016), and that no federal structure is necessary.

7. Whereas the first generation of migrants worked mainly in the steel industry, the second generation most often works in lower level services and construction.

8. In the public sector, language becomes a major source of protectionism for well-paid service jobs for the native Luxembourgers who can master the three official languages: Luxembourgish, French and German.

9. Here, it is also relevant to mention that the overall number of those who reside in Luxembourg but who do not have Luxembourgish citizenship, and thus no voting rights, is today approaching a 50% mark (MEN 2015, 16).

10. Moreover, to again question the relevance of the nation state, it would be illuminating to analyse to what extent transnational traits in education are due to such countries’ multilingual or multicultural characteristics (as a national trait) or result, for instance, from the activities of transnational ‘global’ agencies (exemplified by the influence of the EU, the OECD, and the like).