James Avis

Verified

James verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

James verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Professor Emeritus at University of Huddersfield

Conceptualisations of the knowledge economy are highly contested. They range from descriptive accounts that associate it with a particular understanding of Post-fordism as well as with specific currents in Neoliberalism that emphasise the salience of digitalisation and immaterial labour. In the case of the latter, there is a resonance with discussi...

Conceptualisations of the knowledge economy are highly contested. They range from descriptive accounts that associate it with a particular understanding of Post-fordism as well as with specific currents in Neo-liberalism that emphasise the salience of digitalisation and immaterial labour. In the case of the latter, there is a resonance with discuss...

The paper raises important questions about the relationship between Vocational Education and Training (VET), work-based learning (WBL) and social justice. It adopts an analysis that moves beyond conceptualisations that validate WBL as an acknowledgement of the dignity of labour. It seeks to go beyond analyses that mobilise a conventional understand...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency have drawn attention to the vulnerability of our way of life and VET’s responsibilities for its foundations. At the same time, the rise of populist and far-right political currents in older industrialised countries implies that any form of education and upbringing still has to address urgent questions...

The special issue (SI) TVET race and ethnicity in the global south and north closes with a critical review of debates that address race/ethnicity and TVET'. These debates focus on the crisis of care, decolonisation and whiteness as well as the manner in which we conceptualise TVET. The paper was developed in response to the special issue but also b...

Context: The paper seeks to problematise conceptualisations of VET and its relationship to social justice. VET occupies a liminal space between postsecondary and higher education. The paper explores debates that engage with understandings of equity, social justice, VET as well as the constituencies it addresses. Substantively the paper is set in th...

The special issue (SI) TVET race and ethnicity in the global south and north closes with a critical review of debates that address race/ethnicity and TVET’. These debates focus on the crisis of care, decolonisation and whiteness as well as the manner in which we conceptualise TVET. The paper was developed in response to the special issue but also b...

The paper raises important questions about the relationship between VET, WBL and social justice. It adopts an analysis that moves beyond conceptualisations that seek to validate WBL as an acknowledgement of the dignity of labour (Billett, 2005). It seeks go beyond analyses that mobilise a conventional understanding of expansive learning (Fuller & U...

The paper brings together a range of debates on the left that address TVET’s future in current context. At the heart of these debates rest two issues. The first addresses competing views of capital and the second focuses on the contradiction between the interests of capital and workers. The paper argues that capital is not all of a piece and that d...

Prepublication version: Thinking about the Future:The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Capitalism,Waged Labour and Anti-WorkJames AvisFor Published version seeJames Avis (2022) Chapter 31 Thinking about the Future: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Capitalism, Waged Labour and Anti-Work 497-511 in Malloch et al Eds The sage handbook oflearning at work...

Thinking about HIVE: what would constitute a critical vocational education? Draft Working Paper Abstract This is an impossible question given the institutional and disciplinary diversity of HIVE. There is also the question of what constitutes the vocational in higher education. We are all aware of the reiterated claims that HE provides a route to...

This paper explores the current crises facing neo-liberal capitalism and the call by apologist of capital for a new social contract or what may be described as a political and economic settlement. It considers the significance of these debates for post-secondary education with the initial part of the paper examining three intertwined crises-those o...

VET, post-secondary education - a new settlement? in Post-16 Educator 103 17-18 available http://www.ifyoucan.org.uk/PSE/Post_16_Educator/Home_files/PSE%20103%20Avis%20only.pdf

This book examines the concept of the fourth industrial revolution and its potential impact on vocational education and training. Broadly located in a framework rooted in critical/radical theory, the book argues that the affordance of technologies surrounding the fourth industrial revolution are constrained by their location within a neoliberal, if...

The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liber...

Whither a Politics of Hope: Neoliberalism and Revolutionary reformism? in Daley, M., Orr, K., Petrie, J. (Eds) Caliban’s Dance UCL IoE press, 7-13 This chapter draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest to address three main political issues: the politics of hope, the moral high ground and finally the restitution of the status quo…

The chapter addresses arguments about Italian Workerism, post-capitalism, post-work, universal basic income and the politics of abundance. It moves beyond current conceptualisations of the fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR) to develop a politically informed analysis that can inform a critical, if not transformative praxis. Labour market analysts...

This chapter brings together the key themes of the book drawing out their significance for the development of vocational education and training and education systems committed to a socially just society. Such interventions need to go beyond the narrowly educative and engage with a broader politics committed to the transformation of society. Many of...

The introductory chapter provides an overview and signals the wide-ranging arguments the book addresses. It explores key terms, in particular Industrie 4.0 and the fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR), examining the origins of the terms and their mobilisation. The 4th IR encompasses more than a narrow focus on advanced manufacturing; consequently...

Those promulgating the fourth Industrial Revolution are simultaneously constructing and reconstituting a particular understanding of the future. This is often an iterative process with the same arguments being reproduced in policy and consultancy documents. We encounter a number of recurring themes, robotisation, artificial intelligence, digitalisa...

Many authors have argued robotisation will have a profound impact on employment leading to the replacement of routine manual jobs resulting in technological unemployment. This is set against those who draw on historical examples to suggest this assertion is mistaken. This chapter critiques these arguments which are distanced from the lived experien...

This paper engages with and reflects on the arguments developed by contributors to the special issue. These papers serve to provide a corrective to English and, on occasion, European perceptions, which often view the Nordic countries as being all of a piece and beacons of progressivism. The contributors provide analyses that not only point to the i...

This paper has set itself a number of tasks. The starting point is with Smyth and Simmons’ discussion of the affective dispositions of the working class. Rather than exploring the dispositions of members of the working class, the paper examines the attribution of these, not only to the working class but also to other groups. Research addressing the...

The International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training (IJRVET) is a double blind peer-reviewed journal for VET-related research. This journal provides full open electronic access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the science community and the public supports a greater global exchange of k...

Purpose: The paper explores the relationship between vocational education and training (VET), the labour market and social justice in the current conjuncture. Approach: The paper adopts an approach rooted in critical policy analysis. It consequently sets the discussion within the wider socio-economic and political context. Such an approach enables...

Addressing the Professional Standards for Teachers and Trainers, this textbook balances theory and practice, introducing key theories and concepts relating to learning and assessment as well as providing practical advice on teaching. Extensively revised and updated to reflect the current educational policy environment, this textbook for teaching p...

This literature review engages with a diverse and sometimes contradictory body of work, employing an analytic stance rooted in policy scholarship. It discusses rhetorical constructions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR), locating these in understandings of the economy rooted in a neo-liberalism which rests upon a capitalist terrain. The 4...

The starting point for the chapter is a critique of meritocracy. Whilst many leftist analyses seek to critique and move beyond meritocracy by implicating social structures in the reproduction of inequality, this can lead to a re-shuffling of social positions rather than a fundamental transformation of social relations. The chapter locates the argum...

The chapter sets the discussion within the broader socio-economic context in which further education teachers’ labour, one characterized by underemployment and over-qualification, precariousness and the prevalence of ‘rotten jobs’. In this context, educational workers are subject to high levels of surveillance rooted in regimes of performativity an...

Boundaries defining and shaping the field of vocational education and further training (VET). (1) Systems: Socio-culturally different VET systems have evolved along conceptual lines. The comparison of different skill formation systems and governance of VET systems are on the one hand of theoretical and on the other hand of practical importance in...

Black and minority ethnic students (BME) are a significant constituency in vocational education and training (VET) and FE in England. Despite this recent research on race and VET has become a marginal concern. Insofar as current VET research addresses social justice, race appears to be a supplementary concern. Although there is a substantial litera...

The paper places youth transitions and VET within the global policy context in which economic competiveness is hegemonic. It compares research from the 1970s/80s, which explored young peoples lived experiences of VET and youth training schemes with contemporary work on similar themes. It argues that there are continuities and discontinuities in the...

The chapter considers workplace learning, vocational pedagogy, education and knowledge and the transformation of practice. It sets the discussion within the wider socio-economic context characterised by an increasingly turbulent environment in which the old certainties surrounding industrial Fordism of jobs for life have been found wanting. This is...

Social Justice, Transformation and Knowledge: Policy, Workplace Learning and Skills examines the policy contexts in which lifelong learning, vocational education and training and skill development is set. It provides a critique of neo-liberalism and its impact on vocational education and training and lifelong learning. It interrogates potentially p...

The European Union has seen the route to competitiveness as arising from the development of a pan-European knowledge economy. It is in this context that Vocational Education and Training (VET) has an important role to play. To that end a significant body of work has addressed the manner in which European VET systems develop in young people the comp...

The paper draws on the Wolf (201584. Wolf, A. 2015. Heading for the Precipice: Can Further and Higher Education Funding Policies Be Sustained? Accessed 25 July 2015. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/policy-institute/publications/Issuesandideas-alison-wolf-digital.pdfView all references) report (Heading for the Precipice: Can Further and Higher Education F...

The paper addresses national and global questions concerned with neoliberalism, social democracy and social justice. It explores a number of themes that arise from the British Labour Party?s policy review and its rebranding as One Nation Labour (ONL). In particular it addresses ONL?s approach to the economy, localism and vocational education and tr...

Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy-makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people’s lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion, and it is feared that they will become a ‘lost generati...

The paper addresses workplace learning; vocational pedagogy, education and knowledge; and the transformation of practice. It draws upon discussions of vocationalism, vocational pedagogies as well as the constitution of vocational knowledge(s), debates which are set within particular historical and socioeconomic as well as national contexts. It poin...

This article addresses NEET (not in employment, education or training) as an ideological and discursive formation, lodging the discussion within its socio-economic context - one of increasing insecurity and precariousness. It argues that frequently quasi-political and ideological constructions of NEET can readily fold over into and articulate with...

This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting ‘organisational’ and ‘occupational’ professionalism, with discourses of ‘personal’ and ‘critical’ professionalism, to explore changing meanings and en...

The argument that post-Fordism was able to overcome the oppressions and exploitations embedded within Fordist work relations has been subject to extensive critique for its evasion of capitalist antagonisms. However, there are particular analytic currents in radical thought which assert that knowledge-based economies hold within them not only radica...

Background: The paper compares and contrasts the policy context of teacher training for vocational educators (VETT) in Scotland and England and locates this in its European setting. It explores the wider socio-economic context, one that emphasises lifelong learning, competitiveness and social justice.Purpose: In particular, it addresses the UK Coal...

Introduction: Global reconstructions of vocational education and training James Avis 1. State sector strategies: the new workforce development in the USA Richard D. Lakes 2. Liberal conservatism, vocationalism and further education in England Roy Fisher and Robin Simmons 3. The social composition of VET in New Zealand Rob Strathdee 4. Vocational ed...

The paper develops a comparative analysis of teacher education for vocational education and training in Scotland and England, which is set within a European context. A ‘home international’ intra-comparative framework is used for the study, identifying both strengths and weaknesses within both systems. A number of themes are identified and discussed...

This paper seeks to draw out the continuities and ruptures in current English education policy. In particular it considers the relationship between Coalition policy rhetoric and that of the Labour Party. Although the paper is concerned with the British and more specifically English context, it examines a range of questions that move beyond that par...

The article explores leftist ethnography and its relation to educative research. It sees educative research as tied to understandings of the reflective practitioner, and explores models of research that validate and prioritise teacherpractice. It points towards a number of tensions surrounding such a strategy. The paper suggests that whilst dialogi...

The paper examines the way in which some students in non-advanced further education (NAFE) make sense of and understand that experience. This is placed in the context of the current significance of NAFE. No general attempt is made to comprehend the total range of student orientations, but the paper‘closes in’on the experience of particular students...

This article compares and contrasts the policy context of Vocational Education Teacher Training (VETT) in Scotland and England by setting this within its wider socio‐economic context, one emphasising lifelong learning and competitiveness. This facilitates a comparison of the two nations and enables an analysis of VETT responses to globalisation and...

This article draws on a small‐scale case study of English pre‐ and in‐service Further Education (FE) trainee teachers from a northern university. It explores their understanding of notions of well‐being and health. In particular, it examines trainees’ orientation to care as well as their constructions of learners. It analyses two contradictory but...

The article analyses an innovative scheme for the re-organization of school governance that sought to enhance the voice of community members and contribute towards the improvement of educational achievement. The scheme was located in the north of England, a region characterized by high levels of social disadvantage and low participation rates in hi...

This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argu...

The article considers arguments that address the changing forms of governance within which education and in particular English further education is set, focusing on the relationship of these to professionalism. Specifically the article draws upon and critiques analyses of the changing forms of governance which are considered to carry progressive po...

The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector – changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio‐economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates thes...

The current paper draws on data derived from a small‐scale ongoing longitudinal study of further education trainee teachers. It examines their experiences during and after the completion of their training. The study was conducted at a university in the English Midlands and sets trainees' experiences within the socio‐economic and policy context. Thi...

The paper examines Engeström’s version of activity theory. It seeks to locate this within the socio‐economic and theoretical context in which notions of co‐configuration and knotworking are set. Although this theoretical approach offers radical possibilities it is limited by its neglect of the wider social context in which activity systems are loca...

This chapter explores work-based learning in the context of changes taking place in vocational education and training in England, locating these within an understanding of the economy and the way in which work-based knowledge is construed. It draws upon literature that examines the work-based experiences of young people, illustrating the tension be...

Including abstract, bibl. The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post-compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio-economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the p...

The development of professional identity amongst lecturers training to teach in further education (FE) colleges in England involves processes of adaptation. These partly take place during teaching placement in FE, as trainees navigate between their own anticipated professional identity and the identities which they feel under pressure to assume as...

This article examines Engeström’s version of activity theory, one rooted in Marxism. It is argued that whilst this approach holds progressive possibilities, its radicalism is undermined by a restricted conceptualisation of transformation and the marginalisation of a politicised notion of social antagonism. As a consequence, this approach to activit...

The article examines the constructions of learners and learning held by staff development officers working in further education colleges located in the English Midlands. In addition the article draws upon their understanding of the developmental needs of lecturers working in the sector. In the case of both learners and lecturers there is a tendency...

To examine the labour process of teachers in further education we constructed a time-log diary in which lecturers recorded time spent on various activities undertaken during a week. In this article the authors explore the development of the time log, its use, and forms of analysis that arose as they sought to make sense of the data. The authors' in...

This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post‐compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio‐economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropr...

Engagement in communities of practice has increasingly come to be seen as an important aspect of adult learning. Participation within such communities is thought to provide a dialogic space in which learning can take place. These ideas are increasingly being applied to the work of teachers, lecturers, and trainers. This reflective paper addresses a...

The article draws on the findings of a longitudinal study of an opportunistic sample of full‐time further education trainee teachers attending an English new university. The study commenced in 2002 seeking to examine the processes through which trainee teachers entered the profession. Initially the research explored the routes followed and experien...

The paper examines the relationship between research and practice. Its starting point is a consideration of the difference between policy science and scholarship. This leads to an analysis of the current importance attached by the state to evidence‐informed practice and systematic review. Such research strategies will, it is claimed, lead to enhanc...

The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of fur...

Further education colleges in England offer a wide range of post‐school education and training provision. Recently they have undergone major transformations that have resulted in considerable changes to the work of those teaching in them. In this paper we examine how cultures of learning and teaching in colleges are affected and how the nature of p...

This paper is concerned with changing constructions of teaching and learning in the further education (FE) sector in England. It explores how current changes may be affecting the development of lecturers' professional identity, drawing upon a small‐scale study of trainees on a full‐time FE teacher training programme in the academic year 2001–2002....

The article examines trainee lecturers' perceptions of teaching and learning in the sector, drawing upon a small-scale study of trainees on a full-time further education teacher-training programme at an English new university. The article explores how current changes may be affecting the development of lecturers' professional practice. It seeks to...

Incl. abstract, bib. The article explores work-based learning in the context of current changes taking place in vocational education and training in England. It seeks to locate these within an understanding of the economy and the way in which work-based knowledge is construed. The article analyses these issues, drawing upon a literature that examin...

Further education has become pivotal to English educational policy with the sector being central to strategies that seek to raise educational standards and widen participation. This article derives from a study of trainee further education (FE) teachers on a full-time, postgraduate certificate course in the Midlands. It seeks to examine trainee exp...

  This paper starts from an examination of an epistemological framework that underpins practice in particular educational contexts. It examines work-based knowledge, relating this to practitioner research and evidence informed practice. This is followed by an exploration of arguments that call for increased rigour in educational research as well as...

This article examines the experiences and understandings of a group of fulltime further education (FE) trainee teachers in a university in the English Midlands. The article places the research within its socio-economic and discursive context as well as drawing out parallels with earlier work on FE trainee teachers. The main thrust of the article is...