ERIC Number: EJ811117
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2008-Feb
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1598-1037
EISSN: N/A
Labour Perspectives on the New Politics of Skill and Competency Formation: International Reflections
Sawchuck, Peter
Asia Pacific Education Review, v9 n1 p50-62 Feb 2008
Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding issues of instrumentality and social control, as well as the failure of skill/competency approaches to articulate a meaningful understanding of human learning capacities. In this article, these critical perspectives are clarified further by a review of contributions to understanding the skill/competence question emerging from sociology of work literature. Building from these critiques, this article outlines recent experiences with and perspectives on skill/competency frameworks amongst different national labour movements. Included in this outline is a more detailed, comparative analysis of Norway and Canada; here we see the lofty "new", "knowledge economy" rhetoric--in two countries where one might expect to see it blossom in application--brought down to earth by the realities of industrial relations, employer intransigence and intra-labour movement differences. "Skill/competence" proves to be a floating signifier that, amongst both employers and labour, stands as a proxy for "power/control" struggles. Degenerating in this way, from a labour perspective, the new politics of skill/competency formation is seen to have spiraled toward irrelevance in Norway and Canada; awaiting, in both countries, a re-invigoration through attention to changes in the participatory structure of the labour process itself. (Contains 11 notes.)
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Vocational Education, Competence, Comparative Education, Competency Based Education, Policy Analysis, Public Policy, Theory Practice Relationship, Literature Reviews, Politics of Education, Educational Sociology, Program Attitudes, Political Attitudes, Critical Theory
Education Research Institute, Seoul National University. Department of Education, 599 Kwanak-Ro, Kwanak-Gu, Seoul 151-748, South Korea. Tel: +82-2-880-5896; Fax: +82-2-889-6508; e-mail: aper2@hanmail.net; Web site: http://eri.snu.ac.kr/aper
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada; Norway
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A