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Abstract
Customarily speaking, concepts of vocational and career training have been organised differently in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. Since the nineteenth century, vocation has been the "organising principle" of apprenticeship and vocational training in Germany, alongside of social security and other social forms. In Britain, however, a standardised system of vocational education and training does not exist. This paper seeks to shed light on a variety of systems for apprenticeship, vocational training, and career services in British and West German employment offices, as well as their effects on unemployment after the late 1960s.
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"[A] rich and closely argued work. He s hows convincingly how a bureaucracy could adapt to the specific interests of labor, employers, and the state itself under successive regimes to create such continuity. This study prompts one to ask whether other administrative areas with similar continuities quietly existed elsewhere as well, while providing the methodological tools to explore those continuities.". German Studies Review. "Meskill's book is well-documented, particularly its coverage of government initiatives.". Journal of Modern History. "The author has presented an informative, clearly structured book and thrown new light on an area of employment policies that had previously been neglected by scholars.". Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. "Meskill's enterprise is courageous, and the benefit of analysing concepts and institutional practices of vocational training and labour administration is evident. With such renewed approaches, it is worth revisiting some classic controversies of German historiography.". German History. During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country's human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author's account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry's evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany's domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.
The recent influence of developmental theories of occupational choice upon guidance practice in Britain is criticised. It is suggested that people do not typically ‘choose’ occupations in any meaningful sense: they simply take what is available. Moreover, the career of the typical industrial worker cannot be meaningfully understood in terms of self-actualisation and implementing a self-concept: guidance work based upon these concepts is accordingly unrealistic. An adequate theory for understanding school-leavers' transition to employment in Britain needs to be based around the concept not of ‘occupational choice’, but of ‘opportunity structure’. Guidance should concentrate not on raising unrealistic expectations, but on helping people to adjust successfully within the opportunity structures open to them.
The importance of employment exchanges in the governance of mass unemployment in the 1930s presented social researchers with a rich site for the investigation of the meaning of unemployment from a governmental perspective, or more precisely, of how that meaning is encoded into social spaces. Comparing writing from the 1930s and earlier with my own contemporary research in Jobcentres, Benefits Agencies and Jobcentre Plus offices facilitates an understanding of how that meaning, and its literally concrete means of deployment, has shifted. Observation conducted in these institutional spaces adds an empirical dimension to extant discursive analyses of the governance of unemployment. Broadly, there has been a move from an overt, gendered stigmatization of being without paid work as a moral failing deserving of penance in the 1930s employment exchange, to an attempt to discursively rearticulate unemployment with a mainstream nexus of work-consumerism in Jobcentre Plus. These changes are also indicative of broader societal shifts in the values ascribed to work and consumerism, and the ways in which a governmentally consecrated subjectivity can be achieved.
"Eine übliche Tendenz im Bildungswesen angesichts der Unsicherheit über die Entwicklung der speziellen Arbeitsanforderungen besteht in der Verbreiterung des Faktenwissens (Breitenbildung). Diese Tendenz bringt wegen der zunehmenden Unüberschaubarkeit von Fakten keinen Gewinn für eine Existenz in der Zukunft. Die Lösung liegt vielmehr eher bei der Suche nach "gemeinsamen Dritten" von Arbeits- und sonstigen Umweltanforderungen. Solche "gemeinsamen Dritten", also übergeordnete Bildungsziele und Bildungselemente, nennen wir Schlüsselqualifikationen, weil sie den Schlüssel zur raschen und reibungslosen Erschließung von wechselndem Spezialwissen bilden. Es werden vier Arten von Schlüsselqualifikationen unterschieden: - Basisqualifikationen = Qualifikationen höherer Ordnung mit einem breiten Spektrum vertikalen Transfers, - Horizontqualifikationen = Informationen über Informationen (horizonterweiternde Qualifikationen), - Breitenelemente = ubiquitäre Ausbildungselemente, - Vintage-Faktoren = generationsbedingte Lehrstoffe und Begriffssysteme. Alle bezeichenbaren Schlüsselqualifikationen bedürfen für die Bildungsplanungspraxis der Übersetzung in spezifische Lernziele. Die Praxisnähe kann durch eine entsprechende Didaktik (Projektschulung), und/oder durch Training on the Job hergestellt werden."