Artisan Mobility in Preindustrial Europe and Mobility Within the European Higher Education Area

Abstract

This research work performs a comparative study between the artisan mobility in the preindustrial Europe and the mobility within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), emphasizing key aspects of the EHEA associated with mobility such as employability, technological transfer, social cohesion and receptiveness to new ideas. It can be concluded that, indeed, artisan mobility in preindustrial Europe was as a precedent for mobility within the EHEA, in the context of engineering education, from the detailed study of (a) movements of skilled artisan institutionally organized by states and political authorities, (b) tramping system, whose institutional backbone shows a clear parallelism with the organizational framework that supports the mobility within the EHEA, and that also contributed to overcome problems of information asymmetry in the labour market between local employers and itinerant workers, and consequently to solve problems of journeyman unemployment, (c) journeyman mobility as a teaching program integrated into the craft guild framework, which could restrain the information asymmetry in the commodity market by giving traceability and additional validation to the artisan instruction, and (d) minority migrations, which acted as a spur for the mobility within the EHEA because they allowed Europe to be aware of the importance of tolerance and receptiveness to new ideas. Keywords: Technology transfer; Employability; Labour mobility; EHEA; Preindustrial Europe