The Politics of Institutional Change: Transformative and Self-Preserving Change in the Vocational Education and Training System in Switzerland

Abstract

On the basis of an in-depth study of the Swiss Vocational Education and Training (VET) system?an extreme case among collectivist regimes?the employers' constellation and the elites of the public education administration affect patterns of institutional change. If large firms are the dominant actors and collaborate with elites in the public education administration, institutional change follows a transformative pat tern. If small and medium firms are in a strong position and have the power to influence public elites according to their interests, self-preserving institutional change results. With reference to causal mechanism of institutional change in VET systems, developments in the international political economy and Europe are important intervening factors in pat terns of institutional change. In comparative political economy, institutional change in collectivist skill-provision sys tems has received increasing attention.1 One finding is that collectivist training regimes exhibit a high degree of stability and that radical (transformative) change is probable but less likely.2 Collectivist systems are vocational education and training regimes which show three peculiarities: employers and their associations are strongly involved in the administration and financing of training; the systems provide portable, certified occupa tional skills; and, historically, employers' interest in skills may lead to training regimes which evolve as dual schemes. Dual schemes combine school-based learning with company-based training. Collectivist skill systems have developed in Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland, but scholars focus mainly on the German case as the proto type of collectivist skill systems. An in-depth study of the Swiss training system, namely, its structural peculiarities as well as its recent patterns of change, offers fresh and in triguing insights for the analysis of institutional change in collectivist skill systems. Until the mid-1990s, the Swiss history of training reforms was a story of failed reforms and gradualistic policy, best described by the Helveticism Der Berg hat eine Maus geboren (The mountain has given birth to a mouse).3 However, since the mid 1990s several reforms have changed the Swiss training system in a self-preserving as