A vision too far? mapping the space for a high skills project in the UK

Abstract

Although the current Labour government is committed to developing the UK as a high skills society, there is much confusion as what such a society might look like and from where it might draw its inspiration. Some academic commentators have also expressed the need for a clearer vision of the kind of society to which the UK might choose to head for under the banner of ‘high skills’. In this paper, the authors discuss whether such a vision is needed and what, in their view, this vision might look like. The authors argue that Germany and Scandinavia offer the best ‘actually existing’ examples of high skill societies and consider whether the UK could move towards a northern European inspired high skills model. Having identified some of the obstacles currently blocking such a project, the paper discusses whether a vision is still needed and why academics must continue to debate what it means to build a high skills society in the UK.

Acknowledgement

This research project is financially supported by the ESRC Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance (SKOPE).

Notes

To clarify our position in relation to capitalism, we would accept that there are features common to all capitalist societies (such as, for example, the extraction of surplus value) but, at the same time, insist that it is important to distinguish between varieties or models of capitalism, given that they each have very different economic and social outcomes (see e.g. Coates, 2000).

From here on we use the term North European as a short‐hand for Scandinavian and German approaches. It goes without saying that there is, in any case, no single Scandinavian model (although we tend to use examples from Sweden throughout this paper), only a family of different Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish systems (for a discussion of these differences see Ferner and Hyman, 1998).

There has been little consideration of how social democratic models could be transformed into neo‐liberal economies, in terms of their ability to maintain high value‐added production or to compete in (already overcrowded) lost cost markets.

As Wickham‐Jones (2002, p 474) points out, Blair sought to distance himself from the German and Japanese models as early as 1996 in his Mais Lecture, noting: ‘This approach may sound compelling but, in fact, the relationship between finance and industry reflects a number of different and cultural factors that cannot be transposed with success. Furthermore, there are problems with this over‐simplified view of our difficulties’ (Blair, 1995, p. 16).

Unfortunately, limitations of space does not allow us to explore the benefits of other European countries, such as, for example, the Netherlands, Belgium or Ireland.