Useful drawers or oversimplification? Realm and aptitude of the Varieties of Capitalism approach in international comparison of investment patterns in vocational adult education

ABSTRACT

In international comparative research on adult education, typologies such as the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach are applied frequently to justify country-based research designs, or to frame research results. However, the advantage of typologies in reducing institutional complexity becomes a drawback when it comes to explain variations between countries. This contribution argues that the realm of such typologies is limited in its power to explain cross-country differences in participation and the institutionalisation of adult education, due to specific mechanisms that connect the macro and micro levels.

We demonstrate this by analysing investment patterns of vocational adult education (V-AET) in seven selected countries (France, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Spain, UK). We first generate country descriptions of financial modes of V-AET from the institutional perspective using a document analysis and then analyse investment patterns in V-AET from the individual perspective by a secondary analysis with monitoring data.

Referring our results back to the Varieties-of-Capitalism-Approach and extracted country-specific information, we show that in-depth analyses of country features are necessary to ‘bridge’ between assumptions of ‘grand typologies’ and monitoring results, to answer specific research questions and guide evidence-based policy decisions on the setup of V-AET in different countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education & training
• policy issues
• comparative VET
• further education
• adult education
• management of VET

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on data from Eurostat, Adult Education Survey (AES), 2011. The responsibility for all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The CVTS covers firms with at least 10 employees (Eurostat 2019).

2. Without Denmark and Finland; exact percentages are 16.1% for enterprises with 10–49 employees, 24% for enterprises with 50–249 employees, and 33.8% for enterprises with 250 and more employees.

3. Ireland as another LME-example is excluded due to deviating data collection in the AES.

4. A possible consequence is that single labour market policy measures might also benefit employed persons, depending on the general, country-specific policy mix. While this should not limit the perception of training in the individuals’ view, our report analyses might be biased in this respect. However, we could find no such evidence for our countries.

5. The terms VET and CVET refer to an institutional perspective, to distinguish initial vocational (VET) and continuing vocational education (CVET). In the empirical analyses, vocational adult education has to be defined by individual assessment of the purpose of the educational activity. Therefore, the term V-AET is referred to primarily in this paper.

6. As such reports are not available for France and Spain, we refer to Schreiber-Barsch (2015) for France and Milolaza (2014) for Spain.

7. This version of the database refers to the period 2010 – 2013 which matches our analysis time frame. Unfortunately, there is no information available about Norway; therefore, we additionally apply Bjerkaker (2016).

8. For detailed results about the general legal and financial frameworks as well as on sources of finances, see appendix tables A1–A3.

9. Data on the UK were collected in England, only, see https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/metadata/EN/trng_aes_12m0_esqrs_uk.htm (accessed 17 January 2020).

10. With reference to the Classification of learning activities (CLA) (European Commission & Eurostat 2006) Formal Education (FED) is defined as ‘(…) institutionalised learning activities that lead to a learning achievement that can be positioned in the National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ). (…) Non-formal education (NFE) refers to institutionalised learning activities, which are not part of the NFQ.’

11. Participation rates for the four segments on the level of persons are reported in appendix table A5, available online (appendix table A5).

12. Within the AES, guided-on-the-job-training is considered to occur during work time only.