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Journal of Vocational Education & Training

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Employers placing orders and students ascommodities: Swedish post-secondary vocationaleducation and training policy

Johanna Köpsén

To cite this article: Johanna Köpsén (2020): Employers placing orders and students ascommodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational education and training policy, Journal ofVocational Education & Training, DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by InformaUK Limited, trading as Taylor & FrancisGroup.

Published online: 23 Mar 2020.

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ARTICLE

Employers placing orders and students as commodities:Swedish post-secondary vocational education andtraining policyJohanna Köpsén

Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

ABSTRACTEstablished in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education(HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-fundedbut locally conceptualised and managed training pro-grammes. This article investigates the system, the ideas usedin policy tomandate this arrangement of vocational educationand training (VET) and the institutional relations of power andcontrol between stakeholders that it represents. FourteenSwedish educational policy documents relating to post-secondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed.The findings show that policy has placed much of the powerand control over HVE with employers and that both public andprivate education providers are dependent on employers. Thesystem does not create any institutional relations betweentrade unions and HVE. Nor does it encourage employers tocollaborate more comprehensively than locally regarding sin-gle programmes, to conceptualise them and their curricula.Hence, the qualifications and positions of HVE graduates inenterprises, unlike those of graduates from initial VET in uppersecondary education, are not negotiated by the stakeholdersin the conventional Swedishmodel, where national employers’organisations and trade unions are central actors. The findingsalso reveal that the HVE students, in policy documents, areconstrued as input material that, through training, are turnedinto products with exchange value – into commodities.

ARTICLE HISTORYReceived 26 June 2019Accepted 23 February 2020

KEYWORDSVocational education andtraining (VET); post-secondary VET; HigherVocational Education (HVE);education policy

Introduction

National vocational education and training (VET) systems vary because nationshave different political objectives involving VET and because VET is differentlyembedded within national systems of education and the labour market (Pilz2016). Systems can be said to represent different institutional relations linked todifferent conceptions of the relations between education and work andbetween public and private (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Dobbins andBusemeyer 2015; Pilz et al. 2017; Thelen 2004).

CONTACT Johanna Köpsén johanna.kopsen@liu.seThis article has been republishedwithminor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAININGhttps://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695

© 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-NoDerivativesLicense (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.

The system of higher VET investigated here is set within the Swedish context,where today most of the national education system is marketised and buildsupon the ideas of neoliberal policy discourses (Dahlstedt and Fejes 2019; Fejesand Dahlstedt 2019). The funding and provision of professional and academichigher education has not, however, been marketised in the same way as otherparts of Swedish education. Specifically, the aim of this article is to investigatethe institutional relations between education and work, and between publicand private, which the Swedish system of vocational higher education repre-sents. Paying attention to the institutional relations in VET systems has beenpresented as a key to understanding and furthering the debate on the forma-tion and reform of VET (Wheelahan 2015b). The analysis also focuses on theideas used in policy to mandate the establishment of the higher VET system.Fourteen public documents relating to Swedish post-secondary VET and theestablishment of the system of vocational higher education were analysed usinga Bernsteinian analysis, in which institutional relations are investigated as rela-tions of power and control (Bernstein 1990, 2000).

Each VET system is rooted in a specific historical, social and economic con-text, and they are incorporated within different types of welfare regimes(Dobbins and Busemeyer 2015; Pilz et al. 2017; Thelen 2004). They reflect thesocieties in which they are found, and different formations of VET may be seenas reflecting different traditions and norms for the transition of students fromeducation to work (Wheelahan 2015a). However, most contemporary VET sys-tems and their political formations, like the one explored in this article, aresituated within what can be described as a policy paradigm in which education,including initial and higher VET, is construed as pivotal to the idea of nationalprosperity in a globalised world (Avis 2012; Ball 1998). The idea of the globalcompetitiveness of nations is an essential part of the neoliberal discourses thatframe this policy paradigm, and it places great responsibility on educationalsystems to develop the human capital needed for economic growth and com-petitiveness. This paradigm is manifest in the educational policies, and VETpolicies in particular, of supranational organisations such as the OECD, theWorld Bank, the WTO and the European Union, all of which have a stronginfluence on national policy formations (e.g. Avis 2012; Ball 1998; Pettersson,Prøitz, and Forsberg 2017; Trumberg 2019). In the case of VET, these policiestoday rest on competence-based approaches to system formation and onconcepts of employability, adaptability and lifelong learning (Beach andDovemark 2011; Brockmann, Clarke, and Winch 2008). Twentieth-centurySwedish educational policies were and continue to be convergent with thoseof the supranational organisations. The permeation of the transnational neolib-eral discourse of this paradigm into a national context is, however, reflected ina particular way in the Swedish case (Beach and Dovemark 2011; Englund 2005;Lundahl 2016; Lundahl et al. 2010). This particularity is due to the speed atwhich transformations occurred during the late 1980s and 1990s, and to how

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the Swedish Social Democratic Party pushed through policies and reforms inline with ideas that they had opposed only a few years earlier, in the processdiscarding strong traditional egalitarian values of educational equality.

The changes to the Swedish national education system which were in linewith neoliberal discourse persisted into the twenty-first century and acceleratedfollowing a shift in political rule in 2006 when a Conservative-Liberal coalitiongovernment came to power (Beach and Dovemark 2011; Lundahl et al. 2010;Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman 2017; Virolainen and Persson Thunqvist 2017). Thisnew government initiated reforms in both initial and post-secondary VET. Thereform of initial VET at upper secondary level established formalised relationsbetween education and employers at both national and local levels. The newpolicy on post-secondary VET resulted in the establishment in 2009 of the higherVET system, called Higher Vocational Education (HVE). Although it is a systemunique in Sweden because of the decentralised formation of its programmesand their curricula, it has received practically no attention in research. However,it has been suggested that the creation of HVE, just like state-funded initiativesconcerning initial VET in municipal adult education, reflects the Conservative-Liberal government’s ‘work strategy’ (Andersson and Wärvik 2012) – a principlethat makes employment the one crucial bearer of social inclusion.

Below is a brief introduction to Swedish HVE. This is followed by a sectionpositioning the 2009 establishment of HVE in its national policy context, as well asrelating it to an international example. Subsequently, there is a description of themethodology employed and the studied material, followed by a presentation ofthe theoretical framework, the findings of the study and a discussion.

Swedish Higher Vocational Education

The Swedish system of HVE is clearly defined as a specific segment of thenational education system. The degrees offered are specific to that system,and credits are not transferable to the system of professional and academichigher education.

Providers of HVE are primarily privately owned education businesses, butprogrammes are also provided by public adult education and universities,among others. In 2018, there were 220 active HVE providers (National Agencyfor Higher Vocational Education 2018b). The programmes are granted fundingand permission to start following an annual call for applications from theNational Agency for HVE. The programmes are intended to be initiated locallyby employers, and decisions on educational content are made in the localcontexts of each programme (Köpsén 2019). Additionally, management is car-ried out by a local management board for each HVE programme, made upprimarily of employer representatives. The employers represented on theseboards are expected to contribute to the programme by creating and updatingcurricula, offering placements with supervisors for work-based learning and

JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING 3

continuously working on quality assurance. The HVE programmes vary in lengthfrom one semester to three years, and work-based learning on placements istypically, but not always, a quarter of the programme. Programmes can beoffered at full-time or part-time pace and can be organised as either school-based or distance learning. Students may graduate with the skills to work, forinstance, as train drivers, technicians in the waste and energy industry, procure-ment officers, administrators in healthcare, veterinary assistants, driving instruc-tors or pharmacy technicians, among many others.

Over the past two years, the number of students in HVE has stood at around50,000 (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education 2018c, 2017b). This isone-tenth of the number of students in Swedish academic and professionalhigher education (Swedish Higher Education Authority 2017). However, it isintended that, by 2022, there will be 70,000 HVE students, indicating a rapidexpansion (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education 2018a). Becausemany students enter HVE after gaining experience from several years of workinglife, the average age of an HVE student is 31 (National Agency for HigherVocational Education 2018c, 2017b). Overall, there is a gender balance amongHVE students, although the balance is heavily skewed within the different educa-tional areas relating to different sectors of business and industry (National Agencyfor Higher Vocational Education 2018b).

Neoliberal Swedish education policy and employer influence in VET

In an international context, the case of Australian VET may function as aninteresting reference for understanding Swedish HVE. Australian VET, in whichpublic Technical and Further Education providers operate alongside private for-profit providers, is organised as competency-based training based on pre-defined national training packages, which have standardised, industry-definedoutcomes (Wheelahan 2007, 2009). Just as in HVE, employers control thedefinition of outcomes, albeit at a national level, and provision is set up asa market in which providers – both public and private – compete (Pasura 2014;Wheelahan 2007). This neoliberal competitive training market is considered tohave had ‘adverse consequences for pedagogy and learning’ (Pasura 2014, 580).The debate on the organisation of Australian VET and its formation of qualifica-tions, which is highly relevant to the Swedish case, lays bare the differentstakeholders’ positions and preferences (Wheelahan 2015b). Industry bodiesargue that the purpose of VET is to provide a skilled workforce and that theinterests of educationalists undermine their influence on VET. Conversely, edu-cationalists argue that the qualifications are too tied to particular jobs and notbroad enough from an educational perspective, focusing only on narrow tasksand workplace requirements. Industry also advocates that marketisation hasadverse consequences for their influence on VET and its provision.

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An insight into national education policy and policy on initial VET is important forunderstanding the context in which the Swedish HVE system was created. Swedishinitial VET, which precedes HVE in the education system, is – and has been since the1970s – school based and part of a unified system of upper secondary educationaimed at broadening the participation of Swedish young people in this level ofeducation. Another aim was to give universal access to higher education, as quali-fications from initial VETmade people eligible for professional and academic highereducation (Virolainen and Thunqvist 2017). However, over the subsequent 40 years,the objective of initial VET has changed. Thebeginning of this changemay be tracedback to a 1991 educational reform of late tracking. The motives for this reformfocused on economic growth and securing a competitive advantage in relation toSweden’s economic and financial situation. They were not based on the egalitarianand emancipatory objectives often related to late tracking, which have historicallyheld a prominent position in Swedish education policy (Erikson 2017; Lundahl et al.2010). The change has been characterised as a shift from a discourse of ‘a school forall’ to one of ‘a school for the labour market’ (Erikson 2017). This has been visible inseveral aspects, including how ideas about students have changed and how theconcept of citizenshipwas transformed froma collective democratic construction toone of individual adaptability and flexibility (Carlbaum 2012; Terning 2016).Alongside this discursive shift, there has also been a change in the provision ofeducation. Since the 1990s, publicly funded but privately owned schools and for-profit education enterprises have accompanied public schools in the provision ofeducation throughout the Swedish education system, including adult education(Andersson and Muhrman 2019; Erixon Arreman and Holm 2011; Fejes andHolmqvist 2019; Fejes, Runesdotter, and Wärvik 2016). It may be suggested thatboth the discursive shift and the change in provision reflect the permeation ofneoliberal educational policies into the Swedish national context (Ball and Youdell2009; Carlbaum 2012). Today, after the latest reform of upper secondary education,there is a clear-cut division of tracks into either VET or higher education preparatoryprogrammes, with the former distinctively geared towards employability and mar-ket relevance (Lundahl 2016; Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman 2017). This reform alsocreated stronger relations between initial VET and the labourmarket and formalisedinput by business and industry in national and local reference groups (Virolainenand Thunqvist 2017).

Interesting parallels with the organisation of HVE may be seen in an industry-driven initiative regarding technical VET in Swedish upper secondary education.This initiative is said to have been possible because working life had been givena more influential role in initial VET and national control of upper secondaryeducation had been loosened due to decentralisation and marketisation (Perssonand Hermelin 2018). The initiative is a certification scheme to securemanual skills intechnology-based industries which runs parallel to the national regulations. It isbased on voluntary, decentralised, regional cooperation between clusters of muni-cipalities (which are responsible for the public provision of initial VET), an

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employer's organisation and a trade union. The initiative has challenged thenationally organised system with new organisational structures in which businessand industry are important partners in themanagement and development of VET. Italso applies differing criteria for the quality assurance of skills formation, which hasled to a lengthening of the national technical VET programme at certified schools,going beyond the national regulations.

Method: a theoretical thematic analysis of policy documents

Fourteen Swedish public documents relating to post-secondary VET and theestablishment of HVE were analysed. The process of selecting the materialconsisted of determining the type of documents to be studied and the relevanttime period. The outcome of this selection was a dataset consisting of twocategories of documents published between 2006 and 2017.

First, all legislative and national policy documents about Swedish post-secondaryVET published during this period were included in the material. This categoryconsists of two Government Official Reports and the directions given to the inquirybodies responsible for these reports (Ministry of Education and Research 2006a,2006b, 2007, 2008b) as well as the government bill, law and regulations thatestablished the HVE system (Ministry of Education and Research 2008a; SFS2009:128; SFS 2009:130). There is also a report from 2015 based on a review of theHVE system and a subsequent government bill (Ministry of Education and Research2015a; 2015b).

Second, instructional documents from the national agency were selected.This second category consists of the formal outlines that education providersmust follow when applying for approval and funding to run HVE programmes.Two versions of this document, published in 2010 and 2017, were included. Italso includes three documents of guidelines regarding curricula and coursesyllabi, work-based learning and management boards (National Agency forHigher Vocational Education 2010, 2011, 2015a, 2015b, 2017a).

The documents were analysed using a theoretical thematic analysis (Braunand Clarke 2006). This consisted of coding the selected documents in relation tothe theoretical framework presented in the next section. The questions of whatand how, as well as why and who, were also used to facilitate the coding. Usingan interpretative approach, the codes were collated into themes such as sys-temic organisation, employers as authority and purpose. The findings presentedin this article are based on these theoretically grounded themes. All of thematerial is in Swedish and excerpts have been translated by the author.

Theoretical framework: a pedagogic device and its discourses

Educational and sociological research often focuses on what is reproduced ineducation, i.e. gender, class and so forth (Bernstein 1990, 2000). The focus of thisarticle, however, is the systemic arrangement constituting the conditions for

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reproduction. Attention is, therefore, directed towards the institutional relationscreated in the arrangement of the Swedish HVE system. Specifically, this coversthe relations of power and control amongst the involved actors, agencies andcontexts of practice that the system creates and upholds and that regulate thepremises for reproduction, i.e. the relay of social order.

The analysis of the policy documents on post-secondary VET makes use ofBernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device, its rules and principles of recontex-tualisation in different fields and the analytical concept of pedagogic discourseas entailing models of students, teachers and pedagogic contexts in the form ofimagined pedagogic identities (Bernstein 1990, 2000; Singh, Thomas, and Harris2013). In this article, HVE and its arrangement are considered a pedagogicdevice. The pedagogic device is a theoretical model of generative principlesfor power and control. It is the basis of an analytical perspective for under-standing education as reflecting the division of power and as a relay of socialorder through reproduction (Bernstein 2000; Singh 2002; Singh, Thomas, andHarris 2013; Wheelahan 2005).

The what and how of education, the pedagogic discourse, is defined withinthe so-called recontextualising fields of the pedagogic device (Bernstein 2000).The rules of the pedagogic device, which are ideological and reflect socialorder, regulate the processes of recontextualisation, as well as the relations ofpower and control in and between recontextualising fields and agents in thesefields. There are two types of recontextualising fields in which pedagogicdiscourses are defined, i.e. given specific meaning by recontextualising agents.Official recontextualising fields (ORFs) are directly regulated by the state inlegislation and policy, as well as administratively through authorities andnational agencies. It is from this field that the documents analysed in thisarticle have been gathered. There are also pedagogic recontextualising fields(PRFs) found in proximity to education practices. The local contexts of HVEprogrammes, their management boards, the education providers and otheragents, such as supervisors for work-based learning, constitute the PRFs in thepedagogic device that is Swedish HVE. The pedagogic discourses given spe-cific meaning in these fields are not, however, discourses in their own right,but principles for recontextualisation that comprise both instructional dis-courses of specialised knowledge and a moral regulative discourse of socialorder (Bernstein 1990; Singh, Thomas, and Harris 2013). The regulative dis-course is dominant, not only in producing the order of instructional discourse –i.e. the organisation of subjects and their sequencing and pacing (the rate ofexpected acquisition) – but also in regulating the theory of instruction, thehow of pedagogic discourse, which entails models of imagined pedagogicidentities for students and teachers as well as of pedagogic contexts(Bernstein 2000). These identities are projections of the bias and focus of theprevailing order in policy struggles and thus they are discursively constructedby policy actors (Singh, Thomas, and Harris 2013). Bernstein (2000)

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differentiates possible identities as one retrospective identity shaped by reli-gious and cultural grand narratives of the past, one prospective identity alsorecontextualising the past, and two de-centred identities of autonomy. Thede-centred market identity is based on the bias towards and focus on peda-gogic practice to optimise the exchange value of its product in a market andthe autonomy that is necessary to respond directly to the market and becompetitive. The market identity represents a focus on the short term, in whatBernstein characterises as a ‘culture and context to facilitate the survival of thefittest as judged by market demands’ (2000, 69) which instals a competitiveenterprise culture within the managing and provision of education.

The theoretical framework is used to enable an investigation of the HVE system,not only as an organisational scheme but also as an investigation into its under-pinning principles and their production and re-production of positions for actors,including the National Agency for HVE, employers and education providersinvolved in processes of recontextualisation, as well as their production and re-production of identities for the students. Singh, Thomas, and Harris (2013) arguethat these Bernsteinian analytical concepts contribute to critical education policyanalyses, like the one covered in this article, because they enable an investigationof the generative principles of a pedagogic device. They do so by recognisingeducational policy discourses as producing and re-producing relations of powerand control – that is, they provide an understanding of educational policy andeducation systems as creating and upholding the institutional relations thatcreate the conditions for what education may reproduce.

Findings

The institutional relations created by the HVE system portray the rules and under-pinning principles of the pedagogic device. These regulate the recontextualisingprocess of the pedagogic discourses of HVE, such that the rules and underpinningprinciples control the what and how, and in a sense also the who, of HVE.

The ideas used to mandate the new system of post-secondary VET have beenfound to revolve around efficacy, defined as the ability and power to produce anintended result and to do this efficiently. Efficacy is to be established in the HVEsystem through competition between education providers. This promotes localinitiatives with significant employer involvement and influence in programmesthat cater to their own needs. The policy has also discursively constructeda model of the learner, a market-oriented pedagogic identity for the students,in which they are construed as input material and as commodities.

Creating efficacy in the system of post-secondary VET

The need for a post-secondary VET system that displays efficacy is used asa pivotal idea to mandate the formation of HVE. The creation of a new part of

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the Swedish national education system is supported by a depiction of existingpost-secondary VET as inefficient and unsystematic, difficult to grasp and withoverlapping forms of training governed by several different regulations andagencies. This chaotic state is to be remedied by the establishment of a systemwith the clearly determined objective of catering to the needs of business andindustry. This is a system that is also set up like a market, where the educationproviders displaying the greatest degree of association with employers whostate employment needs, and the highest level of co-funding of their pro-grammes by business and industry, are the ones that come out on top.

Having the ‘right objective’To determine what may be called the ‘right objective’, the idea of a changedworking life, which demands higher qualifications, is used as a backdrop, andthe new system is presented as an extension of the responsibilities of the publiceducation system. These extended responsibilities and the associated costs arejustified by the need for new skills in working life:

The increased knowledge content of products and production methods, as well as thenew organisation of work, require deeper and broader skills among employees. Theopportunities for students to reach these levels of skill during a three-year uppersecondary education have decreased. (Ministry of Education and Research 2008b, 16)

The need and demand for higher qualifications in an increasingly complexworking life is supposed to have created a situation in which employers cannotfind employees with the right skills. Finishing a VET programme at the uppersecondary level is believed to no longer provide the qualifications required; yet,at the same time, these needs are not met by the academic or professionalhigher education provided by universities and university colleges:

there is a demand in working life for qualified vocational expertise that is not met bythe current range of programmes and courses at universities and university colleges.[. . .] In order to meet this demand, training programmes in other forms of publiceducation and outside the public school system have emerged [. . .] Such educationand training contributes to the development of the production of goods and servicesand thus to economic growth. (Ministry of Education and Research 2008a, 14-5)

The fact that training programmes responding to the needs of employersalready have emerged, both within and independent of the public schoolsystem, is used as support for the reasoning that increased skills needs existand proof of the necessity to establish HVE. The already-existing trainingarrangements are articulated as contributing to economic growth and competi-tiveness, and mimicking the functions of these arrangements is pinpointed asthe objective of the HVE system.

From this general objective, the purpose of the HVE programmes is formu-lated more specifically as catering to employers. Both the system and theeducation providers are intended to deliver programmes that provide

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employers with the manpower they need for their enterprises to grow and becompetitive. The system is set up to ensure supply for employers, and theeducation providers are construed as suppliers delivering training programmesbased on the demands of employers. There is a distinct and prominent directinstitutional relationship of supply and demand between the government-funded HVE system and employers, i.e. between public and private:

The regulations of this act are intended to ensure, within HVE, that post-secondary VETwhich meets the needs of working life is established. (SFS 2009:128, 1 §)

The scope of HVE can thus be adapted relatively quickly to suit needs and demands.(Ministry of Education and Research 2008a, 22)

When expressions of this relationship appear in instructional documents pub-lished by the responsible national agency, rather than in policy documentsemanating from the government, they are more specific and conclusive andpresent the demand side not just as ‘business and industry’ or ‘working life’, butas specific hiring companies and organisations.

In the efforts to instil efficacy into the system, the policy has pinpointed whatthe ‘right objective’ is and presented the purpose of its programmes as cateringto the needs of employers. This pinpointed ‘right objective’ and the formulatedpurpose establish the what of pedagogic discourses in HVE. This underpinningprinciple of meeting the skills needs of employers constructs what may bedescribed as outer boundaries for the recontextualising processes, boundariesthat indicate the discourses from which the recontextualising agents in thispedagogic device may derive pedagogic discourse. And these boundaries limitthe actors to selecting discourses from the context of production of the involvedemployers, where the skills are needed. This is the way to achieve the rightobjective, to have the right what in pedagogic discourse in HVE.

In the documents relating to the establishment of HVE, educational planningto meet the right objective is based on the idea that this is best done in localcontexts, on a short-term basis and by employers:

The major technological and social changes are often difficult to predict at the macrolevel. Employers also find it difficult to assess long-term needs for recruitment, andwhat skills will be required. In the short term, the projection of current trends seems tobe the most common – and possibly the most accurate – forecast. However, theplanning of education is seldom done in the short term. [. . .] The government, likethe government official report, believes that the initiation of a new programme in HVEis mainly to be achieved in an interaction between the world of work, educationproviders and other stakeholders at the local or regional level. (Ministry of Educationand Research 2008a, 23)

National and unified planning in the ORF, at what is called a macro level, isconsidered to be inefficient because it is not accurate in meeting the hard-to-predict needs of employers. Planning, including the conceptualisation of

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programmes, is thus cut off from the national level of skills planning by thepolicy. Implementing educational planning based on these strategies insteadpositions great parts of the recontextualisation and formation of pedagogicdiscourse in PRFs and gives employers power and control over the recontex-tualising processes.

However, the strategy of short-term planning is contested in the materialoriginating from the Social Democratic–Green coalition government that cameto power in 2014:

HVE is currently focused on short-term labour-market needs [. . .] This has created uncer-tainty regarding the future of the specific programmes. From the perspective of workinglife, HVE needs to become more long term. (Ministry of Education and Research 2015a, 9)

The best strategies for planning to create efficacy in the system are a point ofcontention, and the studied policy documents vary over time in what they argueto be most strategic, from a shorter to a slightly longer perspective. However,the local and employer-driven methods of planning are not contested. They arepresented as pivotal throughout the material and indicate the underpinningprinciple, which positions power and control over the device with employers.This is one aspect of the unique institutional relations between education andwork, and public and private, in the HVE system.

Promoting local initiatives through marketised provision and tenderingIn the pursuit of efficacy, legislation has been formulated very precisely regardinghow the funds appropriated for HVE are to be distributed to the programmes:

In particular, the National Agency for HVE shall consider, in its allocation of grants orspecial funds, the degree to which a programme: 1. In qualitative and quantitativeterms, meets the needs of working life for skilled workers. (SFS 2009:130, 5 §, ch. 5)

When considering how to allocate funds, the national agency is required to first andforemost consider the extent to which an HVE programme is a response to theneeds of employers – that is, whether they aremeeting the right objective. Provisionin the system is set up like amarket, and the allocation of funds is achieved throughan annual tendering-like process, in which education providers compete with eachother and apply for approval and funding to run programmes. In their applicationdocuments, the education providers are asked to describe their collaboration withemployers and how the suggested programme responds to their needs:

A description that merely highlights a desired need in an industry, without at the sametime showing a clear employment requirement, is not sufficient as a description ofa demand. It is important that the description clearly shows a specific need for employ-ment in the coming years. [. . .] Which companies will hire and why will they hire? Towhat extent have these companies employed during the last three years? To whatextent are these companies planning to hire within the next three to five years?(National Agency for Higher Vocational Education 2017a, 17)

JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING 11

In the excerpt above, taken from the documents that frame the applicationprocess, it is clear just how concrete the questions put to the educationproviders are. Based on the underpinning principles that focus on supplyingemployers with what they need, the responses to these questions are the mostimportant factor in the selection of programmes for the allocation of funds.Second, the national agency is required to consider the extent to which employ-ers and other organisations representative of working life have pledged to co-finance the programme. In the application documents referred to above, theeducation providers must include several budget figures, which are used tocalculate a percentage that specifies the degree of co-funding of each pro-gramme. The education providers may include figures not only of monetarycontributions but also of non-monetary ones in the form of discounts on buyingor renting material for the education and training or reductions in the consult-ing fees charged by representatives of employers who contribute to theprogramme.

This line of questioning, whereby strong employer involvement in PRFs isprioritised, both promotes and is meant to ensure programmes based on localand employer-driven initiatives as winners of the competition. In this competi-tion, it is crucial for the education providers to show agents in the ORF that theprogramme complies with the rules and underpinning principles regulating thedevice in order to receive funds and legitimacy. The chosen programmes areallocated funds for between one and five cohorts; to continue runninga programme with more cohorts, the education provider must enter the com-petition again. This competition makes the education providers dependent onemployers. It clearly defines the position of power and control in the creation ofprogrammes – the recontextualising process of pedagogic discourse – withemployers. Approving or declining an application is also part of the recontex-tualising process, however, and thus also part of constructing the pedagogicdiscourse. Power and control over this lie with the officers and chiefs at thenational agency, who are agents in the ORF. However, these agents of the ORFdo not have the power to initiate or conceptualise programmes. Their control islimited to the process of selection and promotion of the initiatives that bestadhere to the underpinning principles of the device. In the organisation of thissystem, the tendering-like process for allocating funds is crucial to realising theunderpinning principle of efficacy formulated in the ORF, as well as a crucialaspect of producing and reproducing the institutional relations between actorssuch as the National Agency for HVE, employers and education providers.

Positioning students as input material and commodities

Emerging in this policy analysis is also an imagined market-oriented pedagogicidentity for HVE students. This specific model of the learner, to which the rules of

12 J. KÖPSÉN

this device give rise, construes the students as a resource in and an output fromproduction.

There are many articulations in which the students could have been posi-tioned as learning subjects. The lack of students being articulated as individualsand learning subjects is visible, for instance, in the reasoning about why HVEshould be established:

They [the HVE programmes] should be established and developed because there isa need for specific qualifications and competences for the production of goods andservices. (Ministry of Education and Research 2008a, 28)

In the excerpt above, ‘qualifications and competences’ could have referred tostudents/graduates. These capacities could have been construed as propertiesof individuals, but are not. Students as learning subjects, individuals or citizensare absent from the definition of the purpose of HVE. However, it is possible tointerpret students as an imagined pedagogic identity construed by the logic ofsupply and demand in a market. With the overarching policy on HVE being toefficiently supply output, this reasoning logically also requires a material orresource to be processed in order to produce this output. In this pedagogicdevice, students may be interpreted as input material that, through training, areturned into a product with exchange value. The education providers in HVE arethus construed as not only the suppliers but also the manufacturers of theoutput, the commodity to be supplied, i.e. graduates.

The market-oriented pedagogic identity of students as input material ora resource in production is visible in the excerpt below, in which policy givesHVE the task of using all its available resources, referring to immigrants:

HVE should also help to improve the opportunities for people with foreign back-grounds to enter the labour market. Increased diversity has great value for the devel-opment of society if we are able to use this resource. (Ministry of Education andResearch 2008a, 32)

This excerpt from the 2008 bill highlights the identity of the student as inputmaterial that, when treated in the process of an HVE programme, becomesa resource to be used in the progress and development of society. This reasoningconstrues graduates as a traded commodity rather than as individuals, and there areno links made between students as individuals and the benefits that they them-selves receive from education. Thismeans that they are not supposed to take part inVET because it is valuable for the immigrants themselves to be part of a developingsociety. Rather, it is because, if they are trained, they become a resource for businessand industry, for economic growth and competitiveness. This can be understood asa separation of knowledge and the knower in the market-oriented pedagogicidentity, where the product of education is expected to flow like money in marketsto where there is a demand. Thus, HVE students/graduates are required to flow ascommodities from the supplying education system to employers’ enterprises

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without hindrance due to personal commitments or the inner dedication of staff orstudents.

Discussion

This article has focused on investigating the relatively new system of SwedishHVE, the ideas used in policy to mandate the system and the institutionalrelations between education and work, and between public and private, thatit represents.

The HVE system has been fashioned in line with the neoliberal idea ofeducation as human capital development and as a tool for national competi-tiveness and economic growth (Avis 2012). Similarly, the market identity, basedon the bias towards and focus on pedagogic practice to generate exchangevalue for its product in a market, construes HVE as one part of an institutionalsupply-and-demand relationship between education and work, in which theproduction of skilled graduates is to be precisely calibrated to the needs of theemployers involved (Bernstein 2000). The tendering-like application process tosort out which programmes are to be approved is one crucial aspect of thecompetitive pedagogic contexts of this market identity.

Because power and control over the HVE programmes are, to a great extent,exercised locally by employers, different types of institutional relations betweenpublicly funded education, education providers, the labour market and employ-ers are created compared with elsewhere in the Swedish education system. Inthe HVE system, an employer who initiates or collaborates on an HVE pro-gramme can expect, within two or three years, to have some 20–30 graduatesto choose from when hiring – graduates who have been trained according toa curriculum meeting the employer’s specific needs (Köpsén 2019). By then, theemployer has also had the chance to try out students by offering them place-ments for the work-based learning portion of the programme. A Swedishemployer can, in a sense, place an order by initiating an HVE programme, payonly a minor part of the cost by contributing to the education and training andreceive the state-subsidised commodity when it graduates. Rather thana system offering benefits for both students and a wider labour market, whichis common, for instance, in those VET systems characterised as collective skillsregimes (e.g. Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Dobbins and Busemeyer 2015;Emmenegger, Graf, and Trampusch 2019; Thelen 2004), the underpinning prin-ciples of this device focus on the benefits for employers. The concerns raised byAustralian industry about losing influence over VET in a marketised system areextraneous in the Swedish case, as both public and private education providersare dependent on employers in the tendering-like process of applications forapproval and funding.

Nowhere in the policy tomandate the establishment of HVE is an idea presentedthat relates directly to the students. This is due to the imagined market-oriented

14 J. KÖPSÉN

pedagogic identity of HVE students (Bernstein 2000) as input material and com-modities, not as lifelong learning subjects or as workers trading their skills onmarkets. The construction of HVE students is in severe dissonance with the ideaof students as subjects defined by responsibility, adaptability and employability thatis part of educational policies based on lifelong learning discourses. For instance,the latter idea is expressed in the contemporaneous European Union VET policies(European Commission 2002, 2010). This neoliberal student subject, who is to beequipped through education and training with competencies and skills that makethem adaptable to changing labour markets, is also part of the discourse in thelatest curricular reform of Swedish upper secondary education (Carlbaum 2012;Nylund and Rosvall 2016; Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman 2017; Terning 2016). Hence,there is a distinct difference within Swedish VET policy. It may be interpreted asa representation of the differences in institutional relations between the twosystems, i.e. differences regarding which recontextualising agents hold power andcontrol (Bernstein 1990, 2000). Although no longer governed by an emancipatoryparadigm, initial VET is a structure within which collaboration on forming theprogrammes and selection of educational content is carried out at national level,with much of the power and control positioned with national agencies and policy-makers (Virolainen and Thunqvist 2017). In these collaborations, representatives oftrades also consist of the different parties on the labour market. Both unions andemployers’ organisations take part. This is also the case in the employer-driveninitiative of parallel certification regarding initial technical VET, where the union isa significant stakeholder in the scheme (Persson and Hermelin 2018). In HVE,however, the unions have no official position. This is significant because thestruggles over HVE, i.e. over the pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse, con-cern not only the education systems but also power relations in industry and thelabourmarket. The arrangement of the HVE systemdoes not create any institutionalrelations between workers’ organisations and the HVE system or its programmesbecause the policy does not position them as actors in recontextualisation(Bernstein 1990, 2000). Nor does it specifically promote any form of consolidationof employers to collaborate more comprehensively than on the managementboards of single programmes. HVE programmes and their curricula are initiatedand formed locally and align with specific positions for workers in the involvedenterprises (Köpsén 2019). Hence, the formation of qualifications and the positionsof HVE graduates are not negotiated by the stakeholders of the traditional Swedishmodel, in which national employers’ organisations and trade unions are centralactors. The policy on HVE and the arrangement of the system have thus createdrelations of power and control that are new to the Swedish context. The limitedinvolvement, by national comparison, of the state, the strong employer influenceand marketised provision are clearly divergent from the previously strong Swedishparadigm of nationally controlled VET, the legacy of which still has a stronginfluence on upper secondary education (Persson and Hermelin 2018; Virolainenand Thunqvist 2017). Policy and the system of HVE have instead, to a great extent,

JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING 15

positioned power and control over the device and its recontexualising principles –the pedagogic discourse – with the locally involved employers (Bernstein 1990,2000). Power and control have been positioned away from the national level, as wellas from the traditional bi-partisan relations of the Swedish labour market, becausethe underpinning principles of the pedagogic device of Swedish HVE assert thatemployers and their competitiveness are the entire foundation of HVE and itsobjective.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Johanna Köpsén http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3150-4853

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