The Roles of the State and the Social Partners in Vocational Education and Training Systems

Abstract

The historic demise of the centralized command economies of the communist world has prompted ideologists in the West to proclaim the ‘end of history’ and the secular evolutionary ascendancy of the liberal, market system as a means of organizing societies and economies (Fukuyama, 1992). However, more sustained examination of the different trajectories of the western capitalist states suggests more discriminating judgements, for while the recent Anglo-American experiments in free-market economics have proved unsustainable, and have merely consolidated the relative decline of Britain and the USA as world powers (Kennedy, 1989), the neo-corporatist, social-market policies of the continental European Union states have, in many cases, proved to be comparatively successful, providing the basis for continued economic innovation and growth through a combination of market dynamism and state regulation. Moreover, whereas advocates of the free market have often explicitly abandoned equity and fair distribution as political goals and have been prepared to see the decline of public services as a necessary cost of rejuvenating private enterprise, elsewhere social justice has remained at least on the political agenda and the effective provision of public services has been seen as a precondition of economic prosperity. The fundamental political debate in industrialized countries still appears now to revolve around the relative merits of free-market economies versus socialized mixed economies and, while this is by no means yet resolved, the case for variations on the ‘third way’ remains powerful.