Useful drawers or oversimplification? Realm and aptitude of the Varieties of Capitalism approach in international comparison of investment patterns in vocational adult education

Abstract

ABSTRACT In international comparative research on adult education, typologies such as the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach are applied frequently to justify country-based research designs, or to frame research results. However, the advantage of typologies in reducing institutional complexity becomes a drawback when it comes to explain variations between countries. This contribution argues that the realm of such typologies is limited in its power to explain cross-country differences in participation and the institutionalisation of adult education, due to specific mechanisms that connect the macro and micro levels. We demonstrate this by analysing investment patterns of vocational adult education (V-AET) in seven selected countries (France, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Spain, UK). We first generate country descriptions of financial modes of V-AET from the institutional perspective using a document analysis and then analyse investment patterns in V-AET from the individual perspective by a secondary analysis with monitoring data. Referring our results back to the Varieties-of-Capitalism-Approach and extracted country-specific information, we show that in-depth analyses of country features are necessary to ‘bridge’ between assumptions of ‘grand typologies’ and monitoring results, to answer specific research questions and guide evidence-based policy decisions on the setup of V-AET in different countries.