ABSTRACT

The scholarly debate about cooperation between different stakeholders in Vocational Education and Training has primarily focussed on the national level, and much less on local and regional levels. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the conditions and mechanisms of decentralised cooperation in VET systems, through a comparative case study of two partnerships between local government and industry at two industrial schools in Sweden. We want to understand how and why companies and municipalities engage in this kind of co-operation, in a national structural context which provides few incentives for doing so. Our analysis is guided by two research questions. Firstly, what have these collaborations meant in terms of the involvement of firms and commitment from local government? Secondly, what factors can explain the similarities and differences between the establishment and upholding of these two collaborative arrangements? Our study shows that the partnerships can be characterised by different dynamics in relation to the scope of participation and depth of commitment of the partners. We also show that two conditions are especially important for understanding variations between the cases: the structure of local industry, and the characteristics of the relationship between local government and the industrial companies.

摘要

关于职业教育和培训中不同利益相关者之间合作的学术争论主要集中在国家层面，而很少关注地方和区域层面。本文旨在通过对瑞典两所工业学校地方政府与工业界之间的两个伙伴关系的比较案例研究，帮助我们理解 VET 系统中分散合作的条件和机制。我们想了解公司和市政当局如何以及为何在国家结构背景下进行这种合作，而这种合作几乎没有激励措施。我们的分析以两个研究问题为指导。首先，就企业的参与和地方政府的承诺而言，这些合作意味着什么？第二，哪些因素可以解释这两个合作安排的建立和维持之间的相同点和不同点？我们的研究表明，合作伙伴关系的特征在于与合作伙伴的参与范围和承诺深度相关的不同动态。我们还表明，有两个条件对于理解案例之间的差异尤为重要：地方产业的结构，以及地方政府与工业公司之间关系的特征。