During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country's human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a...

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