New forthcoming publications in the British Journal of Industrial Relations as well as the Journal of Vocational Education and Training. Below are the abstracts:
Collective Action, Business Cleavages and the Politics of Control: Segmentalism in the Swiss Skill Formation System (with Lina Seitzl, forthcoming in the British Journal of Industrial Relations)
“Collective skill formation systems have come under sustained pressure in recent years. Scholars observe a fragmentation process, which is the result of changing power relations, putting large training firms in a dominant position. However, so far the literature has examined neither the role of small firms and intermediary associations nor the source of power of the various business actors. In this case study, we ask: If business is pivotal, but divided, who prevails and why? We find that the availability of credible exit options and the ability to act collectively determines the degree of influence of the various business actors”
The Governance of Decentralised Cooperation in Collective Training Systems: A Review and Conceptualisation (with Lukas Graf and Christine Trampusch, forthcoming in the Journal of Vocational Education and Training)
“Collective training systems are based on the cooperation of multiple public and private stakeholders in order to work. However, such cooperation is not self-sustaining and depends, for instance, on public policies, capable intermediary organisations and shared logics of action. In this conceptual paper, we first review the political economy literature on cooperation in collective skill formation and find that it has given insufficient attention to the systematic comparative analysis of cooperation at the decentralised level as well as the actual social practices of cooperation. The paper then develops a multidisciplinary analytical framework that allows future research to examine decentralised cooperation at the regional, sectoral and occupational levels more systematically. This framework is grounded in a synthesis of three strands of empirical research on vocational education and training, namely the comparative political economy literature on governance, corporatism and coordination, institutional labour and societal economics as well as the educational science literature.”
Patrick Emmenegger 