Journal of Vocational Education & Training ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjve20 Decentralised cooperation between industries and local governments in a statist skill-formation system: an analysis of industrial schools in Sweden Bo Persson & Brita Hermelin To cite this article: Bo Persson & Brita Hermelin (2020): Decentralised cooperation between industries and local governments in a statist skill-formation system: an analysis of industrial schools in Sweden, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2020.1829007 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1829007 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 12 Oct 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 91 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjve20 JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1829007 Decentralised cooperation between industries and local governments in a statist skill-formation system: an analysis of industrial schools in Sweden Bo Perssona and Brita Hermelinb aDivision of Political Science, Department of Management and Engineering (IEI), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden; bCentre for Municipality Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The scholarly debate about cooperation between different Received 19 December 2019 stakeholders in Vocational Education and Training has pri­ Accepted 11 September 2020 marily focussed on the national level, and much less on local KEYWORDS and regional levels. This article aims to contribute to our Vocational education & understanding of the conditions and mechanisms of decen­ training; governance; tralised cooperation in VET systems, through a comparative cooperation; public–private case study of two partnerships between local government partnerships; local and industry at two industrial schools in Sweden. We want to government understand how and why companies and municipalities engage in this kind of co-operation, in a national structural context which provides few incentives for doing so. Our analysis is guided by two research questions. Firstly, what have these collaborations meant in terms of the involvement of firms and commitment from local government? Secondly, what factors can explain the similarities and differences between the establishment and upholding of these two collaborative arrangements? Our study shows that the part­ nerships can be characterised by different dynamics in rela­ tion to the scope of participation and depth of commitment of the partners. We also show that two conditions are espe­ cially important for understanding variations between the cases: the structure of local industry, and the characteristics of the relationship between local government and the indus­ trial companies. 1. Introduction Vocational education and training (VET) has been an important focus for research on skill-formation systems within the political economic tradition. This research has described many similarities between national VET systems in various industrial countries, as well as some major differences. The latter include variations in the involvement of the state, the industrial sector and labour- market organisations, and how these cooperate (Busemeyer 2015; Culpepper and Thelen 2008; Thelen 2004; Trampusch 2010). So-called collective formation CONTACT Bo Persson [email protected] © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc­ tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 B. PERSSON AND B. HERMELIN systems, for example, have been characterised by strongly institutionalised cooperation between labour-market organisations and the government. In so- called statist VET systems, on the other hand, public actors, primarily the national state, have taken primary responsibility for VET, and the commitment of companies and unions has been considered less important (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012; Jørgensen 2018). The scholarly debate on cooperation within VET has primarily focussed on the national level, however, and much less on local and regional levels. Several researchers have argued that there is a need for research that improves our understanding of the role of cooperation within VET at the local and regional levels (Culpepper 2003; Gessler 2017; Persson and Hermelin 2018). In a recent article by Emmenegger et al., the authors argue that too little attention has been paid to a systematic comparative analysis of ‘the causes, patterns and outcomes’ of cooperation at the decentralised level (Emmenegger, Graf, and Trampusch 2019, 22). We argue that, in many ways, decentralised cooperation for VET is especially interesting in systems where there is a low degree of institutionalised cooperation between public and private actors at the national level. In these kinds of systems, the local level might function as an alternative arena within which the involvement of industry in the VET system can be strengthened (cf. Remington 2018). In this article, we focus on initiatives to strengthen the involvement of industrial firms in VET at the local level in Sweden. The Swedish VET regime is sometimes described as representing an archetype of a state-dominated and school-based VET system (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012; Olofsson and Persson Thunqvist 2018). However, during the last few decades, a number of so- called industrial schools have been established by major Swedish industrial companies, often in collaboration with, and co-owned by, local governments. These initiatives were made possible through decentralisation and marketisa­ tion reforms of the school system in Sweden (Karlsson, Lundh Nilsson, and Nilsson 2015; Persson and Hermelin 2018). In many ways, these schools repre­ sent a deviation from the overall Swedish VET regime, since the industrial firms involved in them have a stronger commitment than is generally the case for industrial partners in the Swedish VET model. The establishment of industrial schools in Sweden addresses important issues about how to understand the conditions and motives for collaboration in VET at the local and regional levels. The incentives for industrial firms and local governments to become involved in this kind of collaboration are influenced by several dilemmas. For industrial firms in Sweden, the incentives to invest in collaboration seem to be diminished by a high degree of uncertainty (for example, risk of poaching), since VET is predominantly a public responsibility and the coordination among firms, which is assumed to limit the risks of poaching, is low (Busemeyer 2009). For local governments, strong collaboration with local industries seems to diverge from their roles and responsibilities as JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING 3 implementers of the general Swedish education policy, which stresses universal education and broad competencies, not too closely related to specific firms (Olofsson and Persson Thunqvist 2018). With reference to this, an empirical study of decentralised cooperation for VET in Sweden, where sub-national governments hold a strong position and play an important role in upper secondary education, is assumed to be a particularly relevant contribution to the field. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of the conditions and mechanisms of decentralised cooperation in VET systems, through a comparative case study of partnerships between local governments and industry in relation to two industrial schools in Sweden. We want to understand how and why firms and municipalities engage in this kind of co-operation, in a national structural context that provides few incentives for doing so. Our analysis is guided by two research questions. Firstly, what have these collabora­ tions meant in terms of the involvement of firms and commitment of local governments? Secondly, what factors can explain similarities and differences in the establishment and upholding of these collaborative arrangements? The two cases selected for analysis have similar contextual characteristics in terms of the size of the municipalities and socioeconomic conditions, but the models of partnership developed in each case are different in terms of how the relations between the partners are regulated. The comparative analysis of the cases will take its starting point in a historical institutional approach, as it is used in the political economic analysis of VET, and by literature about local and regional economic development policy. In line with this literature, we understand collaboration in VET to consist of negotiations between actors and actor coalitions that are nested within multilevel relations and local contexts and which reflect the legacies and outcomes of past struggles. The remainder of this article is organised as follows: Section 2 presents the theoretical approach of the analysis; Section 3 describes the empirical study pertaining to methodology and data; Section 4 presents the results of the study, and Section 5 summarises the main