Setting out for new Shores! An explorative Analysis of Agency in Youth Employment Mobility

in Journal of Education and Work (2022)

Based on biographical interviews from an intra-European youth mobility study in Luxembourg and Norway the article aims to contribute to the debate on how to understand and account for complexities of ... [more ▼]

Based on biographical interviews from an intra-European youth mobility study in Luxembourg and Norway the article aims to contribute to the debate on how to understand and account for complexities of agency in youth intra-European employment mobility. Critically reflecting and operationalising Emirbayer and Misches’s conceptualisation of agentic orientations in the field of intra-European employment mobility of young people, we a) explore the usefulness of researching agency from a relational perspective, we b) elaborate on how young mobile reflect their manoeuvring under perceived contingent moments and we c) augment our ken of the complex interlacement of habit, imagination and judgement with (contingent) employment mobility contexts and young people’s concrete employment mobility practices. Our results emphasise the importance of considering how differently agentic orientations interlace with contingent employment mobility contexts ranging from radical self-realisation, adaptive interplay of self-realisation and situational constraints and agentic orientations strongly bounded by situational constraints. In addition, the empirical analysis shows that some of the theoretical propositions of Emirbayer and Mische’s approach have to be revisited. [less ▲]

Why are Higher Education Participation Rates in Germany so Low? Institutional Barriers to Higher Education Expansion

in Journal of Education and Work (2011), 24(1), 49-68

Countries around the world have witnessed educational expansion at all levels, leading to the massification of tertiary education and training. Tertiary education has become a major factor of economic ... [more ▼]

Countries around the world have witnessed educational expansion at all levels, leading to the massification of tertiary education and training. Tertiary education has become a major factor of economic competitiveness in an increasingly science‐based global economy and a key response to shifts in national labour markets. Within the EU, the reform of skill formation systems has been advanced by the Lisbon strategy, with the Bologna and Copenhagen processes in higher education (HE) and vocational education and training (VET) articulating and diffusing overarching goals in European skill formation. If European benchmarks call for at least 40% of all 30‐ to 34‐year‐olds to hold a tertiary‐level certificate, Germany exhibits a relatively low proportion of each cohort entering HE and attaining that qualification level (28%). We analyse this ‘German exceptionalism’, locating a range of factors in the educational system: the institutional logic of segregation, the structure of secondary schooling, the division or schism between the organisational fields of VET and HE, and limited permeability throughout. Regardless of isomorphic pressures that led Germany to quickly implement undergraduate bachelor's (BA) and graduate master's (MA) courses of study, these factors limit the extent of HE expansion visible among other European countries. [less ▲]