In recent years, the ongoing development towards a knowledge-based society -associated with globalization, an aging population, new technologies and organizational changes -has led to a more intensive analysis of education and learning throughout life with regard to quantitative, qualitative and financial aspects. In this framework, education policy is no longer merely an affair of the nation state; on the contrary, a range of significant actors (international, supranational and nongovernmental organizations) play an important role in policy formation and construct a transnational educational space. In a research project being carried out at the University of Tübingen, the education policy initiatives of an international (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]) and supranational (European Union [EU]) organization concerning the concept of lifelong learning are being examined with emphasis on its implementation into national forms of monitoring and reporting systems. A part of the study concerns issues regarding the influence of the OECD and EU on national policy formation and their managing capacity. This article focuses on the emergence of new governance instruments used by the OECD and EU in the transnational educational space, their characteristics and their impacts, applying, as a conceptual tool, Willke's analytical distinction of regulative media into power, money and knowledge.
Recent years have witnessed an increasing scholarly interest in the study of education, training, and skill formation from a comparative political economy perspective. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the emerging field of the political economy of adult learning systems, which seeks to understand the causes and consequences of cross-national diversity in adult learning systems. The article introduces this interdisciplinary research strand by reviewing recent work and different typologies that have emerged out of the field of comparative economics and comparative politics, which are relevant to the study of adult learning systems. The empirical evidence on cross-national patterns of organized adult learning drawn on PIAAC data suggests that existing typologies are insufficient to explain the cross-national patterns. The article discusses some specific institutional features that promote adult learning participation and points out conditions and policies that support effective adult learning systems.
This study explores the relation between risk of job automation and participation in adult education and training (AET) and examines variation in that relation across welfare regimes distinguishing between situational and institutional barriers. Using microdata of PIAAC, we analyze participation in formal or nonformal AET for job-related reasons in relation to the risk of automation of the respondents’ occupation after controlling for main sociodemographic characteristics. Logistic regression models are run on respondents from 14 European countries representing different welfare regimes: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Scandinavian countries); Italy, Greece, and Spain (Southern European); Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland (Central and Eastern Europe), Belgium, France, and Germany (Continental); and United Kingdom and Ireland (Anglo-Saxon countries). Our findings confirm that workers in occupations at high risk of automation were found to be consistently less likely to participate in job-related AET, quite irrespective of welfare regime.
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