Using case studies from Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan, this text traces cross-national differences in contemporary training regimes back to the political settlement achieved among employers in skill-intensive industries, artisans and early trade unions in the 19th century

This paper argues that the German system of vocational training is undergoing subtle but significant changes from a mainly collectivist system to a more segmentalist one. To make the argument, the paper first discusses the two logics of collectivism and segmentalism, and how the German system is...