Long Walk to Apprenticeship: When Peripheral Byways Become the Successful Ones

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-9 - Educational Attainment and the Social Class Divide: Sociopsychological Barriers to Equality and Justice

Abstract

Objectives
In Switzerland, only one third of the students access general education at secondary level, while the other two thirds are oriented towards professional training. For the latter, the main determinant of their schooling and training orientation depends on their ability to find an apprenticeship position when they reach the end of compulsory education (formally at the age of 15 years). The match between supply and demand is a complex process that not only excludes part of the students from direct access to professional training but also forces them to make early choices (or accept the absence of choice) regarding their future sector of employment. How does one find an apprenticeship? What does the students’ description of their search of an apprenticeship reveals of the institutional determinants of social inequalities at play in the system?

Theoretical framework
Research has already shown that the organisation of recruitment processes impinges on ethnic inequalities (Imdorf, Seiterle, 2014). Analysing the contrasted experience of students in their search of an apprenticeship, we aim at discussing how the criteria that appear to be used to identify the “right apprentice” tend to (re)produce inequalities between students depending not only on their school results but also on their social and cultural skills, their ability to anticipate, and, more widely, to be an actor, or, to some extent, a “subject” (“I call subject (…) the desire to be an individual, to create a personal history, to make sense of all the experiences of individual life (…)” (Touraine, 1995, p. 29) of their recruitment search instead of an agent. Finally, research underlines the gap between a formal organisation of access to apprenticeship that values linear schooling careers and an informal process that promotes atypical ones and questions its impact on the reproduction of social inequalities.

Methods and results
A first section of the talk, based on a literature review, will picture the organisation of the school tracks with regards to the academic selection of future apprentices, and summarises what is already known about the ins and outs of access to apprenticeship with regard to social inequalities. A second section will question the methodology used to study recruitment by contrasting the discourses of apprentices with the practices of recruiters and institutions. A third section, grounded on interviews (29) carried in 2014 with apprentices (23) and recruiters (6) in the Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, and based on a comparative analysis of individual paths in education, reveals how the social configurations lying behind individual paths in education, as well as biographical events impinging on individual trajectories, interact with institutional requirements. A last section analyses the (in)adequacy between how the school system, including apprenticeship, is presented to students and the way it works in the field, to reveal the norm of autonomy of the individuals it calls for (Ehrenberg, 2010), autonomy that can be analysed as a new form of heteronomy.

Significance
This study questions the “hidden curricula” of recruitment and what it does to students depending on their position in the social space.

Authors

• Gaële Goastellec, University of Lausanne

• Guillaume Ruiz, University of Lausanne