Apprenticeship: Between theory and practice, school and workplace

Abstract

The term ‘apprenticeship’ covers a wide range of practice, from the extended periods of servitude and limited learning that featured prominently in early modern England to the high quality programmes of vocational development provided by many large European manufacturing firms nowadays.1 The institutional attributes of ‘apprenticeship’ vary considerably even among high-income countries, ranging from the transparency of the ‘coordinated’ Germanic systems to the opacity of the market-oriented English and Italian systems (Ryan et al., 2011; Snell, 1985, ch. 5; Wolter and Ryan, 2011). One way of assimilating this variety of practice is to consider specific attributes of apprenticeship. Several taxonomies have been proposed for the analysis of crossnational differences in systems of vocational education and training, focusing on such attributes as the role of employers, social partnership, employment relations, education systems and the state (e.g. Busemeyer, 2009a; Greinert, 1994; Steedman, 2010; Rauner, 2010). Although normative concerns often inform such analyses, the frameworks proposed are usually conceived in positive terms, i. e., as organising the evidence and analysing causality, but not as determining merit.