Internationalization of Vocational and Higher Education Systems – A Comparative - Institutional Approach

This paper sketches a comparative-institutional approach that seeks to enhance our understanding of internationalization and the resultant national dynamics of institutional change in vocational and higher education systems. Focusing on change at the nexus of general and vocational skill formation institutions, we discuss shifts in the relationship between higher education and vocational training systems. How are such national systems responding to the exogenous pressures of international diffusion and Europe-wide Bologna and Copenhagen processes more specifically? Changes in the competition between the differentially institutionalized organizational fields of general and vocational education also imply the adjustment of individual pathways, participation rates, and life chances. Three complementary studies serve to compare and contrast the transformation of Germany’s vocational and higher education systems. The comparison of Germany, Great Britain and the United States analyzes the diffusion and cross-national transfer of educational models in specific historical periods. To highlight different national responses to internationalization and Europeanization, Germany will also be compared with Switzerland and Austria as well as with France. If the first study charts primarily the origins of models to be emulated because of their global salience (cultural-cognitive dimension), then the second and third comparative studies analyze the normative and regulative dimensions, showing the consequences of institutional change processes for the on-going competition between these organizational fields.