Employers and the Politics of Skill Formation in a Coordinated Market Economy: Collective Action and Class Conflict in Norway

John R. Bowman
Additional contact information
John R. Bowman: Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Politics & Society, 2005, vol. 33, issue 4, 567-594

Abstract: This article uses a case study of vocational training in Norway to explore the conditions under which employers will cooperate to increase the skill level of their workforce. It generates two sets of insights into the political economy of training in coordinated market economies. First, by demonstrating that cooperation among employers was a recent achievement that required the creation of specific, targeted mechanisms, it suggests that a cooperative outcome is difficult to attain, even amid the generally hospitable institutional environment characteristic of these economies. Second, it demonstrates that the employer collective action problem with respect to the initial training of apprentices differs from that posed by the additional raining of experienced workers. This means that even within a single economy, there are several varieties of training politics, each characterized by different patterns of cooperation and conflict; this further complicates the task of creating a coordinated training regime.

Keywords: employers; vocational training; coordinated market economies; varieties of capitalism; collective action (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329205280925 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:33:y:2005:i:4:p:567-594

DOI: 10.1177/0032329205280925

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().