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Transition and Constitution in School/Work Relations

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Abstract

In every industrial society, there must exist some kind of a transitional mechanism between the demand for and supply of a labour force, that is, a mechanism that facilitates the transition from school to work and from job to job both inside and outside the labour force. There are at least two main ways of organising such a school-labour network. The first way follows the pattern of a marketplace, that is, the labour market process is an extension of the existing market of commodities. In this pattern, the fundamental question in the marketplace relates to buying and selling and to pricing. The second way in which a school-labour network can be organised is based on the idea of a social guarantee, that is, a workplace and/or place of schooling should be provided to the individual in one way or another. The definition of school-labour relations as a transitional process automatically directs our attention to administrative problems, specifically to the questions of how to manage the channels between the school and prospective workplaces and how to regulate the volume, speed and direction of communication between these. We can formulate the problem in other words that introduce the interesting possibility of connecting three different conceptual levels: institutional processes (school system, labour market process and production process), production of identity (transparency of the institutions) and individual (self-)management of life (developmental tasks in adulthood). What kind of institutional terms can make social institutions transparent to a young adult, giving him or her the possibility to see through society and its way of functioning? It is not so much a question of transition from one place to another, but rather a question of social individualisation, that is, of the constitutions of institutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This book is the final report of a pan-European research project involving researchers from 16 European countries. Other publications of the project: Grootings (1983), Grootings and Stefanov (1986).

  2. 2.

    I mean the concept via which the researcher or research programme takes their own position from which to see/look at the world. Transposition is a structuralistic spotpoint: there is a process between positions (= structures).

  3. 3.

    Content originally means keeping together (the strings of a lyre).

  4. 4.

    Volanen (1989).

  5. 5.

    I use the term ‘publicity’ as a translation of the German word ‘Öffentlichkeit’ (see Negt & Kluge, 1972).

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Correspondence to Matti Vesa Volanen M.A. .

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Volanen, M.V. (2012). Transition and Constitution in School/Work Relations. In: Tynjälä, P., Stenström, ML., Saarnivaara, M. (eds) Transitions and Transformations in Learning and Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2312-2_5

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