How Universities Transform Occupations and Work in the 21st Century: The Academization of German and American Economies

• In Event: Higher education for workforce development: Pathways, systems, and challenges

Proposal

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: Universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrolments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st Century. Commissioned detailed German and U.S. case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of three selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. The cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the U.S. with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too, is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities

Authors

• David p Baker, Pennsylvania State University

• Alexander Mitterle, University of Hamburg

• Maryellen Schaub, PSU

• Yuanchih Fu, National Taipei University of Technology

• Alexander Wiseman, Texas Tech University