Capacity for reform: the changing roles of apprenticeship in three Nordic countries

Torgeir Nyen and Anna Hagen Tønder
Additional contact information
Torgeir Nyen: Fafo, Oslo, Norway
Anna Hagen Tønder: Fafo, Oslo, Norway

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2020, vol. 26, issue 1, 43-56

Abstract: Despite similar societal systems that have given rise to the concept of a Nordic model, the vocational education and training (VET) systems in the Nordic countries are strikingly diverse. This article provides an analysis of why the role of apprenticeship in the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish VET systems evolved along different paths from the late 1970s until the present (2020). During this period, the most fundamental changes took place in Norway, as apprenticeship was established in most VET programmes through a major reform in 1994. Sweden took the opposite course in the 1990s and instead strengthened the statist and school-based nature of its system. In Denmark, a dual system with apprenticeship where the social partners have a decisive influence has remained largely intact. We argue that differing policy positions taken by organised labour are important in order to explain the three countries’ different trajectories over the last 40 years.

Keywords: Vocational education and training; apprenticeship; Nordic countries; historical institutionalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1024258919896903 (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:treure:v:26:y:2020:i:1:p:43-56

DOI: 10.1177/1024258919896903

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().