Given rising skill demands on the part of business and the increasing aspirations of young people for higher skills, the relationship between vocational and academic worlds of learning has become a major policy challenge in collective skill formation systems. While the need to enhance institutional permeability between these two worlds of learning is increasingly felt by all stakeholders, the actual building of programmes that promote such permeability is highly demanding as it often requires the cooperation of actors who have been largely isolated from each other and often have diverging interests. How is permeability made possible through cooperation? While various initiatives to increase permeability have recently been launched, little is known about how actors cooperate in the establishment and implementation of these permeability-enhancing projects. This chapter develops a conceptualization combining institutional permeability and types of cooperation in collective skill formation systems. This enables exploring the intensity of cooperation between key actors from the largely separate worlds of vocational and academic learning—which contributes to understanding how actors in collective skill formation systems adapt to the demands of the knowledge economy. Based on document analysis and expert interviews, the chapter provides an in-depth study of double qualification programmes in Germany in which vocational and academic learning are systematically combined. It is shown that increasing permeability is by no means a trivial task and that a fine-grained understanding of both permeability and cooperation can help uncover how actors take a differentiated approach to enhancing institutional permeability in collective skill formation. © Oxford University Press 2022.
Author Keywords
Index Keywords
