Different hands. Markets for intermediate skills in Germany, the. U.S. and the Netherlands

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes and compares how empirical markets for intermediate skills operate under different governance regimes. The central question was: how do markets for intermediate skills operate in Germany, the U.S. and the Netherlands? What options for vocational education and training (VET) exist; which rules and actors govern these options; and how does the interaction of these rules and actors help to explain the actual choices of young people and employers regarding VET? The institutional order, actors’ strategies, and their interaction, were analyzed for markets for intermediate skills in (West-) Germany, the American state of Wisconsin, and the Netherlands as they operated in the early and mid nineteen nineties. The central argument of this book is that empirical markets for intermediate skills indeed governed by multiple, interacting governance mechanisms, which constitute a particular governance regime. At the very least, an effective analysis of VET governance regimes considers at least four potentially equivalent coordinating mechanisms: market mechanisms, hierarchies, states, and associational governance. Different governance regimes result in different strategies available to actors and/or in different expected benefits to similar strategies. In this sense, institutions can help explain different behavior by similar actors in different markets. Simultaneously, actors in training markets are not just passive respondents to incentives posed by certain external rules. Actors have their own action orientation, their own conception of control on how to operate effectively in their environment to acquire the skilled workforce they need. Such conceptions of control are influenced by past and present institutional aspects of the actor’s environment (e.g. the industrial relations system in which they operate) and the incentives it implies in terms of the expected benefits of certain strategies. But conceptions of control are also interdependent: action orientations of some actors will in turn help shape those of others. Different action orientations of similar actors will result in different reactions to certain rules or reforms, and therefore help explain the relative stability of major differences between different markets. Governance regimes should thus not be interpreted exclusively as if pure and perfect stimulus-response relations would exist between external rules (institutions), the incentives they entail, and the resulting actors’ strategies. Comparing markets for intermediate skills shows the delicate balancing of the quasi-objective incentives posed by the institutional environment and actors’ own strategies in markets for intermediate skills. For states, the consequence of their lack of autonomy in unilaterally defining an effective governance regime translates into the notion that there is not one identical invisible hand that governs VET markets in a similar fashion in each and every region and sector. There are ‘different hands’ that govern, as the title of this book suggests. The hand that governs actual markets for intermediate skills is a specific combination of the four aforementioned governance mechanisms. Similar state policies can lead to distinctly different results because of differences in the role of the other governance mechanisms, and vice versa.