Although merit has been critiqued and problematised such that it has become an object of public debate, it is still deployed as an inherent feature of particular educational forms and trajectories. In this paper, we demonstrate how sociological and educational research juxtapose merit versus skill in relation to different kinds of educational pathways, where the former is seen to be a competence residing within vocational education, while the latter has been confined to academic tracks and into higher education. We then embark on an empirical case study, paying attention to how actors negotiate and justify their actions in situations where they embark on Swedish higher vocational education. The ambiguity around recognising rivalling values and conceptualisations of merit is heightened during participants’ experiences of transitioning from training to work. By paying attention to these accounts facilitated through a particular adult educational institution, a space is opened up for us to examine the worth of what is/are treated as adjacent to merit. A critique of the ways in which we examine merit and skill in social scientific research is important, if the ambition is to formulate meaningful ways for understanding what is valuable in learning and work for actors.

This introduction to the special issue, “Convention Theory in Research on Schools, Vocational Training, and Higher Education,” presents an overview of convention theory for education research, emphasizing the usefulness of convention theory applied to researching all education sectors: spanning preschool, formal schooling, vocational training, and higher education. In this editorial, we articulate how the theoretical potentials of convention theory in the field of education research lie in the bases of neo-pragmatism, the orders of worth analytical framework, and convention theory’s concepts of investments in forms and regimes of engagement. The brief theory introduction is enriched with examples using convention theory in education research. We then outline a convention theory methodology for deductive (theory-led) and inductive (theory-reflexive) social research. This is followed by a summary of the ten original articles in the special issue and their key contributions to this growing and increasingly international field of research.

In this comparative and situational analysis, we examine how nation-states use skilling as a technique of preparedness during crisis moments. By analysing two strategically selected country cases, Singapore and Sweden, during a critical phase of a global pandemic, we identify three techniques: stockpiling, forecasting, and protecting skills, and how these were enacted as a means to perform preparedness. Stockpiling skills was observed to take place as a rapid response; forecasting skills was a technique enacted with a view on the longer-term horizon and protecting skills was mobilised as a short-term future technique, where boundaries were assembled around skilling. While there are links between these techniques identified, locating them along a temporal horizon compels us to consider the differences between the diagnosis and prognosis of skills needs, and how upskilling and reskilling discourses have been applied differently to different segments of the population. Our findings contribute to the sociological literature on skills by illuminating the pluralisation of skilling techniques, as well as how varying conceptualisations of skill in unstable situations can lead to different forms of justifications and recognition of actors’ worth when valuation processes are contested and negotiated.

When comparing lifelong learning systems in Europe, Swedish vocational education has been characterised as a statist, school-based ideal type, with strong emphasis on egalitarianism and social citizenship. However, the popularisation and expansion of higher vocational education (HVE), a post-secondary training form that has a mandate to train people to meet local labour market needs, complicates these composite descriptions. Building on conventions theory and pragmatic sociology, our analysis probes the plural worlds of HVE participation, beyond simplistic understandings of human capital accumulation or universalistic welfare. Drawing on interviews with participants and archival material, we analyse forms of justifications evoked by those engaged in this transforming skilling regime. Our analysis reveals that participants do not enrol merely for getting work or getting ahead. Rather, participation is described as a response to constraints, a means to challenge difficult circumstances encountered in the labour market, or related to contingencies. Taken together, HVE emerges as a flexible mode of governing vocational knowledge to match local labour market needs, with rivalling conventions of worth. We discuss the increasing significance of projection and anticipation for individuals and organisations involved in skilling regimes, and propose a prospective convention that underscores expectancy and promise.

The relationship, effectiveness, and challenges of education to work transitions have been a preoccupation of policymakers, practitioners, sociologists and economists of education and labor markets. Once an area of study mainly confined to youth populations, these transitions have been complicated to the extent that these turning points are now observed through various phases of adult life. In grappling with the changing contours of learning and skilling for work that involve complex coordination among an assemblage of public/private, local, national and international actors, convention theory has been expedient in guiding research endeavors in this interdisciplinary area of inquisition. Moreover, transformations in learning and work trajectories brought about by crises, migratory flows, and changing demographics have signaled a need for social scientists to go beyond research techniques that have customarily focused on attributes, aspirations, backgrounds, or outcomes at the individual level, to widening the lens for scrutinizing governance and processes of (e)valuation. In doing so, the conflicting orders of worth and competing justifications inherent in transitions come into focus. This chapter presents research where economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC or convention theory) have made generative applications and contributions to the literature, namely, through emphasizing the plurality in and of transitions, coping with the uncertainty and contingencies of transitions, and bridging the social and economic dimensions of transitions. Prospects for EC/SC in the study of education to work transitions and the empirical and methodological strides that can continue to be made within this fertile area of research are discussed in conclusion.

Singapore is a pertinent case for examining the relationship between state power, talent management techniques, and educational trajectories, due to the institutionalization and longevity of pathways leading up to executive and political power. In this chapter, we focus our analysis on the gendered nature of the allocation of prestigious national scholarships for undergraduate education and into public service careers. The analysis reveals processes of policy instrumentalization, the concentration of power, and perpetuation of inequality. More specifically, examining this scholarship program and how it has been used as a long-term human capital investment tool allows us to uncover how women have been historically excluded in this process of ‘talent management’.

It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality inparticipation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. Thispaper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher VocationalEducation (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven bylabor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who hasbeen served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansionof HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rateof growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes.We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss theseresults in relation to social (in)equality in formalized HVE.

This paper considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a test that has disrupted the flow of a particular type of social and physical mobility. It takes pathways embarked upon by students from Asian countries to “prestigious” anglophone universities as its focal point of analysis, considering how the residential, consecratory experience of attending elite institutions has been disrupted when universities go virtual or as students are prevented from travelling to their university’s country destination. Building theoretically on the sociology of conventions and testing, I analyse public institutional responses at the commencement of the outbreak from elite universities in the US and the UK, which have hosted large numbers of students from Asian countries in past decades. This paper focuses on how these universities responded to international students under conditions of uncertainty, examining how they justify their role, purpose and operations, while canvassing for continued support from this student segment. The findings highlight contesting orders of worth between states and institutions, as clashes between market, civic and domestic regimes exert significant pressures on organisational efforts to coordinate and cope during this critical moment, thereby raising questions about how prevailing logics of elite transnational education have been altered in the face of a pandemic.