Search Results

Europeanization and the Varying Responses in Collective Skill Systems

Justin J.W. Powell and Christine Trampusch

in The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

To what extent and in which directions are Europe-wide processes affecting the collective skill formation systems analyzed in this book, namely those in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, ... More

To what extent and in which directions are Europe-wide processes affecting the collective skill formation systems analyzed in this book, namely those in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland? Europeanization elicits varying responses in collective skill systems, which are still mainly governed in national contexts and determined primarily by domestic politics. This chapter explores the impact of Europe, and the European Union in particular, on contemporary conflicts and consensus and on institutional change in vocational training regimes. We analyze the impact of the European level on national institutions responsible for skill formation and explore similar challenges posed by European initiatives and the different responses of the collective skill systems. Investigating the two levels and their interaction, we contrast countries in which conflicts over such forms of Europeanization have ensued—Germany and Switzerland—with those in which consensus has facilitated Europeanization—Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands.Less

The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

Marius R. Busemeyer and Christine Trampusch

in The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

From a historical-institutionalist and firm-centered perspective, decisions on the division of labor between firms, associations, and the state in providing and financing skills are the core factor ... More

From a historical-institutionalist and firm-centered perspective, decisions on the division of labor between firms, associations, and the state in providing and financing skills are the core factor accounting for different skill formation systems. From this it follows that, alongside the degree of firm involvement in the provision of vocational training and the degree of public commitment to vocational training, four different skill formation systems can be distinguished: the liberal, the segmentalist, the collective, and the statist. Collective skill formation systems are the result of political struggles with regard to four neuralgic points of conflict: the division of labor between the state, employers, their associations, and individuals first on the provision and then on the financing of vocational education and training (VET); the relationship between firm autonomy and public oversight in the provision of training; and the linkages between VET and the general education system.Less

Collective Skill Systems, Wage Bargaining, and Labor Market Stratification

Marius R. Busemeyer and Torben Iversen

in The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

The influential work by Goldin and Katz (2007, 2008) argues that rising levels of inequality are caused by skill-biased technological change (SBTC). This chapter, in contrast, claims that the ... More

The influential work by Goldin and Katz (2007, 2008) argues that rising levels of inequality are caused by skill-biased technological change (SBTC). This chapter, in contrast, claims that the institutional setup of the training system and the centralization of collective wage bargaining are two important factors shaping the impact of SBTC and, therefore, labor market stratification. Using a sample of OECD countries from 1980 until 2000, we find that a strong involvement of firms in vocational training, when accompanied by high levels of bargaining centralization, decreases youth unemployment. Public investments in vocational training are less effective in reducing youth unemployment, but have a diminishing impact when combined with strong bargaining centralization. Furthermore, public investments in training are more strongly associated with decreasing wage dispersion than firm involvement. We find evidence for an inverted U-shaped relationship: when bargaining centralization is at either low or high levels, public investments in VET are most effective in reducing wage inequality. The effect is smaller in magnitude when bargaining is semi-decentralized, because in this case the benefits of public investments drive up the wages of skilled workers relative to those of unskilled workers.Less

Skill and gender: navigating the theoretical terrain

Anna Boucher

in Gender, Migration and the Global Race For Talent

Chapter 1 defends the need for new indicators of ‘gender awareness’ within skilled immigration policy. It draws upon research from feminist industrial relations, sociology, economics and ... More

Chapter 1 defends the need for new indicators of ‘gender awareness’ within skilled immigration policy. It draws upon research from feminist industrial relations, sociology, economics and intersectional feminist studies, to this end. The chapter focuses upon three key areas of the scholarship: Gender mainstreaming processes and institutions, life course differences between men and women and gendered definitions of ‘skill’, bringing in feminist critiques of human capital theory that predominates within skilled immigration debates.Less

Introduction

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

The introduction looks at the broader efforts of many Americans, animated by nativism and xenophobia, to cast so called “new immigrants” from Asia and Europe as undesirable. At the end of the ... More

The introduction looks at the broader efforts of many Americans, animated by nativism and xenophobia, to cast so called “new immigrants” from Asia and Europe as undesirable. At the end of the nineteenth century, immigration laws emerged as a tool of social engineering and nation building. At first, legislators passed immigration laws that focused heavily on qualitative restriction to determine who could enter the country. Later they moved on to quantitative restriction, imposing numbers on how many immigrants could arrive. The only issues on which restrictionist legislators and Italian and Jewish anti-restrictionists could find common ground when it came to immigration reform were family reunification and skill-based immigration, which opened up opportunities for some immigrants but heavily penalized others thus contributing to create the uneven and unfair immigration system still in existence today.Less

A Thing of Shreds and Patches: Challenging Immigration Reform from Within, 1952–1960

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration ... More

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration reform to undermine the very premise of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Contrary to what the sponsors and supporters of the 1952 immigration law had envisioned, the number of immigrants entering the United States steadily went up during the rest of the decade in part thanks to many of the small legislative changes pushed by Italian and Jewish immigration reform activists. Many immigrants from Asia took advantage of the preference for family reunification and skill-based immigration and began to change the migratory flows to the United States, thus paving the way for the diversification of U.S. society usually associated with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, while these changes helped immigrants with family ties and desirable skills, they did little to help unskilled temporary migrants or to address the racialization of and violence against immigrants illegally in the country.Less

Reform at Last: A Victory for Whom?

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing ... More

Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing for immigration reform for over forty years, many of them, sensing that the window for reform was closing, realized that they had to compromise to accomplish their goal. Although Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration marginalized the voices of Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates who had long fought for immigration reform, many of these activists remained quiet as the negotiations over the final bill hinged on the imposition of a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. For many of them, in the end, their priority remained the abolition of the national origins quota system, which they regarded as marking them as undesirable, second-class citizens. As many of them had hoped, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national origins quota system and prioritized immigrants with family ties and skills, but it also imposed global quotas, including on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which created new barriers for migrants from the Americas and exacerbated the debate over illegal immigration.Less

Conjuring Imposters: The Extraordinary Illusions of Mundanity

Brian Rappert

in The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans

This chapter examines how entertainment magic and the notion of impostering can inform each other.  It does so through considering how assessments of skill and perception are constituted in ... More

This chapter examines how entertainment magic and the notion of impostering can inform each other.  It does so through considering how assessments of skill and perception are constituted in interactions between performers and audiences.  A main plank of the argument derives from a self-study of the acquisition of skill.Less

Ageing memory: ageing memories

Fergus I. M. Craik

in Inside Psychology: A science over 50 years

This chapter examimes developments in the study of ageing memory during the past fifty years. It suggests that the field of cognitive ageing was significantly influence by Donald Broadbent's ... More

This chapter examimes developments in the study of ageing memory during the past fifty years. It suggests that the field of cognitive ageing was significantly influence by Donald Broadbent's Perception and Communication and Alan Welford's Ageing and Human Skill. These books caused a shift from stimulus-response behaviourism and this paradigm shift had a strong influence on studies of age-related changes in human performance.Less

Fairness and Sports

Jay Schulkin

in Sport: A Biological, Philosophical, and Cultural Perspective

Begins with a discussion of drug abuse in sport, before moving on to consider fairness in sport and the expansion of our sense of rights and human participation; our cultural evolution through the ... More

Begins with a discussion of drug abuse in sport, before moving on to consider fairness in sport and the expansion of our sense of rights and human participation; our cultural evolution through the participation in sports. Engaging in play that turns into sport is one way we learn about fairness: following the rules, playing the game fairly. Mammalian play is at the root of the socialization process so essential for getting a foothold in the world and fairness is a feature of our cultural evolution; a feature that coexists and evolved with sports participation. Sports exist in the context of social hope and broader participation in a common context of human expression, striving to release the “better angels of our nature.”Less

The Skilled Cavalry Commander¹

in The Shorter Writings

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s OnThe Skilled Cavalry Commander. This treatise offers excellent practical advice on how to rule as well as a searching investigation of the limits ... More

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s OnThe Skilled Cavalry Commander. This treatise offers excellent practical advice on how to rule as well as a searching investigation of the limits that constrain even the best rulers, who cannot choose their enemies and cannot always choose their own troops either. So pressing are these limits that Xenophon counsels rulers about how they should seek the help of the gods. This religious education begins by emphasizing the commander’s responsibility to learn, speak, and do everything he can to rule well. If the gods actively help him to do what he should, so much the better.  Taking note of the real or apparent piety of the Commander then provides a useful foundation from which to ponder real or apparent piety of Xenophon’s Socrates.Less

On Horsemanship

in The Shorter Writings

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s On Horsemanship. Xenophon wrote On Horsemanship because he acquired special expertise during his own lengthy cavalry service. He pairs it with The ... More

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s On Horsemanship. Xenophon wrote On Horsemanship because he acquired special expertise during his own lengthy cavalry service. He pairs it with The Skilled Cavalry Commander, adding the politics of managing knights to managing horses. This treatise teaches how to buy, house and feed a horse, what the owner should require from the trainer and groom, what maneuvers to teach the horse for battle, and what offensive and defensive equipment to procure. He also teaches horse maneuvers for display, since knights are expected to ride in awe-inspiring civic processions to honor the gods. Xenophon is uniquely explicit in On Horsemanship about one of his favorite writing tactics: apparent but not exact repetition, which places a burden upon the reader to notice the difference.Less

The One Skilled at Hunting with Dogs¹

in The Shorter Writings

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s The One Skilled at Hunting with Dogs. This this treatise, Xenophon presents what one needs to know in order to track, pursue, and capture wild ... More

Translation of and Interpretive Essay on Xenophon’s The One Skilled at Hunting with Dogs. This this treatise, Xenophon presents what one needs to know in order to track, pursue, and capture wild animals. This knowledge concerns such matters as the equipment and methods employed on the hunt; the breeding, training, and leading of dogs; the natures and habits of hare, deer and boar; and the conditions under which these animals may be discovered and caught. The work opens and closes with a defense of hunting as an activity conducive to the virtue of those who take part in it and beneficial to their political communities. The introductory essay considers how the hunting of animals serves as a metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge, and thus reveals something about the philosophic life.Less

Institutional Entrepreneurs Build a Bridge: Connecting Movements and Markets Through Social Enterprise

Paul-Brian McInerney

in From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market

This chapter describes the rise of a challenger organization, called NPower, that took advantage of transformations in the Circuit Rider social movement to rise in prominence. NPower combined some of ... More

This chapter describes the rise of a challenger organization, called NPower, that took advantage of transformations in the Circuit Rider social movement to rise in prominence. NPower combined some of the Circuit Riders’ social values with market values of technology entrepreneurs into a hybrid organizational form: the social enterprise. The result attracted funding from for-profit companies such as Microsoft as well as other large for-profit technology firms. Materially, these resources allowed NPower to grow rapidly and eventually gain national prominence. Symbolically, the support of for-profit firms provided a different basis for moral legitimacy in the nonprofit technology assistance field, moving the account of worth away from the larger social good and into more narrowly defined economic goods, such as efficiency gains.Less

‘Going with the technology’: the final generation of hot-metal compositors

Jesse Adams Stein

in Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour

This chapter looks to the experience of compositors (those workers who set the type) who lost their traditional printing trade when computer typesetting technologies were introduced. The transition ... More

This chapter looks to the experience of compositors (those workers who set the type) who lost their traditional printing trade when computer typesetting technologies were introduced. The transition away from hot-metal typesetting is not a deterministic story of technological inevitability. It is part of a broader economic and political shift; the move away from a protectionist manufacturing economies, into neoliberal service economies geared towards international markets. What happened to the workers who were pulled along with this transition? And how important was the material and embodied nature of traditional typesetting in this loss of a trade? For these compositors, the introduction of computers resulted in a profound loss of control, and the only way to regain that control did not appear to be in the collective security of unions, nor in the skills built up from a life of work in printing. In the 1980s, former hot-metal compositors used individual initiative; they no longer found security in the old collective practices, craft traditions and camaraderie that had once characterised their workplace. This emerging social and economic regime profoundly changed these compositors’ identities, as well as their attitudes to technology, skill and collectivity.Less

Prototyping a Real-World Problem

Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer

in Innovating: A Doer's Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong

You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a ... More

You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.Less

Summary and Conclusions

Peter Sterling

in Principles of Neural Design

Our brain outsmarts a supercomputer while using 100,000-fold less space and energy. It succeeds by hugging the linear region of the information rate vs. cost curve. The ways to do this constitute ... More

Our brain outsmarts a supercomputer while using 100,000-fold less space and energy. It succeeds by hugging the linear region of the information rate vs. cost curve. The ways to do this constitute principles of neural design: improve S/N; reduce redundancy; sculpt messages to send only what is needed; send via parallel channels to match capacity to natural distribution of information. These strategies help to send at the lowest acceptable rate. Neurons compute cheaply using chemical diffusion and allosteric binding in irreducibly small compartments. Chemistry and local electrical signalling are analogue processes, which are efficient but noisy. Therefore, they couple to mechanisms for thresholding that remove noise and convert to pulses that travel rapidly over distance. Because pulses are costly: information is concentrated to improve bits per pulse; rates are restrained; and wire is minimized by strategic layout. By adapting/learning, the brain becomes the computer needed for the next task at lower cost than an all-purpose machine. The principle, separate computations in different areas and different hemispheres, extends to separating skill sets in different brains within a community – requiring circuits for cooperation. This strategy implies the need for flexible education to allow children with different skill sets to develop them.Less

Conflicting Masculinities? Men in Reserved Occupations in Wartime Glasgow and Clydeside and their Masculine Subjectivities

Alison Chand

in Masculinities on Clydeside: Men in Reserved Occupations During the Second World War

This chapter specifically considers the impact of being in reserved occupations during the Second World War on masculine subjectivity, exploring questions such as whether men felt emasculated as a ... More

This chapter specifically considers the impact of being in reserved occupations during the Second World War on masculine subjectivity, exploring questions such as whether men felt emasculated as a consequence of their civilian employment, whether they associated masculinity with proximity to the war effort and whether alternative masculinities, not linked to the war effort, were relevant to men in civilian employment. The chapter also considers the relationship between the temporary changes in men’s lives in wartime with the continuity of their careers, as well as links between age, skills and manliness. The chapter concludes that oral testimonies reveal a spectrum of ways in which masculinity was asserted by male civilian workers in wartime Clydeside. The chapter argues, however, that continuity and the contingencies of everyday life were more dominant features of the masculine subjectivities of male civilian workers on the Clyde than the temporary, albeit significant and influential, discourses of wartime. The notion that war did not represent a watershed for men working in reserved occupations emerges most clearly from their oral testimonies. While such men were demonstrably affected by multiple discourses, found in cultural and official sources and evident in the attitudes of other civilian men and women, these discourses shaped ‘imagined’, although not fabricated, subjectivities. The ‘lived’ subjectivities of male civilian workers on the wartime Clyde, while existing in a fluid alliance with such ‘imagined’ subjectivities, were arguably rooted in everyday life and the people surrounding them on a day-to-day basis.Less

Grafters, not shirkers: reserved men at work

Juliette Pattinson, Arthur Mcivor, and Linsey Robb

in Men in reserve: British civilian masculinites in the Second World War

This chapter reconstructs the working lives of reserved men during wartime, drawing upon a wide range of sources, including oral testimonies and autobiographies. It contrasts this with the 1930s ... More

This chapter reconstructs the working lives of reserved men during wartime, drawing upon a wide range of sources, including oral testimonies and autobiographies. It contrasts this with the 1930s Depression. Whilst work experience varied widely across reserved occupations during wartime, what comes through the evidence is a pervasive intensification of work and a deep commitment to work as patriotic endeavour, commonly expressed in what we term ‘graft and sacrifice narratives’. In critically examining the emasculation thesis through the prism of lived experience, daily working lives and personal narratives the chapter concludes that civilian male identities in wartime were complex and contested. Young reserved workers may well have felt the cultural censure and slight on their manhood which went along with not being in uniform. However, with full employment, demand for industrial skills and experience, good wages and empowered trade unions there were many ways that reserved men could maintain and reconstruct breadwinner masculinity and position themselves discursively as superior to women through their wartime work.Less

The Ford Sewing machinists’ strike, 1968, Dagenham

Jonathan Moss

in Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 1968–85

Chapter 2 provides an original account of the Ford Sewing Machinists’ fight for skill recognition in 1968. The strike is widely understood as a crucial turning point that led to the Equal Pay Act in ... More

Chapter 2 provides an original account of the Ford Sewing Machinists’ fight for skill recognition in 1968. The strike is widely understood as a crucial turning point that led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970. The strike occupies a key position in the histories of the labour movement and the WLM. The idea that the strike was a decisive victory in women’s fight for equal pay was popularised by 2010 feature film Made in Dagenham, which has been adapted into a West End musical. The subsequent publicity generated by the film has proceeded to weave the place of the dispute firmly within public memory of the strike as a turning point in societal attitudes towards women’s right to equal pay. However the triumphant narrative of the strike as a victory has served to disguise the fact that the women at Ford went on strike because they wanted the skilled nature of their work recognised. This chapter offers a new account of the strike from the perspective of the women involved. It is original because it locates the strike within participants’ life stories; it foregrounds their own understanding of why they engaged in the strike and their judgements of its outcome.Less