Educational institutions, especially those facilitating vocational education and training (VET), face the challenge of combining social goals, such as the provision of quality education for a large section of the population, with rising economic utility demands. However, we know little about how VET systems institutionalize these different demands and, further, how social and economic goals are actually institutionalized in VET. Our article aims to unpack this puzzle by analysing short-track dual vocational training programmes (short-tracks) in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. These short-tracks combine on-the-job and school-based training, targeting candidates who face difficulties entering full-length dual programmes. Thus, short-tracks are prime examples of training programmes located at the nexus of economic and social demands. In our comparative institutional analysis, we bridge the political economy of collective skill formation and sociological institutionalism literatures. We find that the institutionalization of goals in VET not only differs between countries but that there is also considerable variation within national VET systems. Our analysis reveals that VET regulations, regional and sectoral standards, and the legitimization of key actors can differ greatly in their institutionalization of social and economic goals.

National political economies and their skill formation systems face increasing liberalization and deindustrialization pressures, related to factors such as growing global competition, the rise of the service sector, and rapid technological developments (Streeck 2009; Mayer and Solga 2008). The literature on institutional change discusses different reactions to such increasing pressures. While some authors identify a process of policy conversion along the lines of liberalization (Albo 2005; Baccaro and Howell 2011), others highlight the variation in how systems liberalize (Thelen 2012, 2014). For example, Thelen (2012) finds that political economies differ in the extent to which they maintain strategic employer coordination to achieve joint economic gains, on the one hand,

What leads employers to co-finance and collectively provide transferable skills? This study analyses employer cooperation in four sectors with varying levels of employer cooperation in the provision and financing of transferable (general) skills in post-secondary vocational training. It finds that employers’ associations cooperate in order to provide and finance skills when: (1) they rely on internal labour markets for recruitment, (2) there are institutional spill-over effects between employers’ cooperation in initial and continuous vocational training, (3) large firms are committed to collective training, (4) there is a tradition of collective labour agreements, (5) employers’ associations’ logic of organization building includes training policies as an important means to attract members, and (6) they do not prefer universities (of applied sciences) as an alternative and substitutive track to enhance the general skills of their employees. These findings contribute not only to the literature on employers’ collective action in vocational and further training but also to studies of business associations.