INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in cross-national comparisons of education and training systems. But how similar or different are national skill systems? To what extent, how, and why do they change? The public and scientific discourse about the modern “knowledge society” seems to imply that they will follow uniform trends rather than take specific pathways. Still, the attractiveness of particular national “models” may change over time, with varying success and different demands put on them. This leads to the following general questions:

1. Is there one best way of organizing vocational training systems?

2. How stable are national skill systems over time?

3. If systems are different, do relative advantages and disadvantages change over time?

4. To what extent can the systems be deliberately changed?

This chapter analyzes the questions of the reproduction and transformation of skill systems from a sociological perspective by focusing on two particular cases. As a study on contemporary changes in skill systems, it emerges from an historical comparison of the skill formation systems in Germany and Britain since World War II, with a special emphasis on developments during the 1990s. As advanced and economically competitive societies, Germany and Britain face, in principle, comparable economic challenges. When looking at these two cases more closely, however, one finds functionally equivalent solutions to similar problems as well as more specific problems and different economic strategies.

TRENDS AND CHALLENGES

Changes in the demand for skills and qualifications in the workplace have been a constant feature of economies since the onset of industrialization. Shifts of manpower among the sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services, changes in technology, increasing specialization, and growth in firm size and expansion of managerial control have also brought about changes in the vocational and professional skills required. In the twentieth century, broad social changes, such as the growing labor force participation of women and the ever-increasing level of educational enrollments, have been triggered by these varying demands for labor and have also strongly contributed to them. For a long time, the adaptation of vocational and professional training to these changes has essentially taken the form of extension (i.e., by increasing levels of participation at ever more advanced levels of general schooling) in early training periods for occupations both inside and outside the workplace and in further training. Mostly, such training concentrated in the late teens and then extended into the early if not mid-twenties. However, there was little change in that people made their longer skill investments for just one occupation and expected that these would serve them through most, if not even all, of their working lives.

In recent decades, the pressures for more and better skills have greatly intensified both in regard to the extent and kind of skill acquisition, especially in the so-called advanced societies in the West and their new Southeast Asian rivals (Bamber & Lansbury, 1998).

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS

There are many ways in which the process of skill formation can be socially organized; this process differs substantially even in advanced economies at similar levels of technological development. Many abilities and skills necessary and useful for life are learned from early childhood onward in daily interaction with parents, other adults, and peers, or through the exposition to and use of communication media. In this chapter, however, we are mainly interested in the formation of abilities and skills required to perform work tasks in jobs, and we examine the returns of qualifications in work contexts.

Whereas in psychology and education science, skills and competences are often understood as specific cognitive or other capabilities of individuals to solve particular problems and/or perform particular tasks, sociology usually has a much broader understanding of them. The sociologist's understanding is probably best captured in the concept of qualification. The latter refers to sets of skills needed to perform more or less homogeneous sets of tasks, for instance, for a particular job or profession. In most research, the conceptualization of qualifications and their measurement then refers to the successful completion of particular programs in institutions of (general) education and vocational training in a society. Thus, the sociological understanding of skills or competences in the sense of qualifications is to a large degree institutionally shaped and socially and culturally constructed.

Introduction

In the last seven years, terrorism, its consequences, and how to counteract it, have become a household discussion subject and the object of intense scrutiny by social scientists. This is the direct consequence of the attack of September 11, 2001, in the United States, the shape of the U.S. government's response in a variety of forms labeled the “war on terror,” and the continuing occurrence of extremely violent attacks in various parts of the world. In economics, the literature on terrorism has made remarkable advances since 2001, building on important work that was available. The literature has been strengthened in the range of topics analyzed, as well as the data and methodologies employed. In spite of substantial progress, though, different strands of research remain insufficiently integrated. At this stage, charting the progress made so far and suggesting fruitful avenues for additional effort are key. This chapter puts forward a broad survey of the economic literature on terrorism, organized according to seven different topics. We identify what we think we know, highlight the key issues that remain to be answered and the data that might illuminate this research effort.

Any attempt at organizing existing knowledge on a topic should circumscribe the topic and adopt a definition. Terrorism, given its variety of objectives, methods, targets, and organizational forms, is elusive as far as definitions go. The word “terror,” at least with its ominous sense of persistent and indiscriminate violence, has been traced to the Robespierre years of revolutionary France.

This chapter provides a comprehensive study of the economic determinants of transnational terrorism and the role that development plays in fostering a more peaceful world. We analyze models of conflict resolution to investigate the relative importance of economic development on domestic and transnational terrorism. We construct an original database from 1968 to 2003 for 179 countries in order to examine which economic factors influence the propensity to be affected by transnational terrorist activities. We also compare these results to a subsample from 1998 to 2003 on domestic terrorism. We find that economic development is associated with higher incidents of transnational terrorism, especially in higher income countries. However, when considering lower income countries, economic progress is actually negatively related to transnational terrorism.

Introduction

We live in the Age of Terrorism. Since the prominent incidents in high-income cities such as New York, Madrid, and London, and persistent terrorism in Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and Iraq, both academia and the media have become involved in a careful examination of the causes of terrorism. Terrorism is, however, neither new nor novel – indeed the very origin of the term dating back to the late 1700s points to a long history. Given its long history, we know surprisingly little about it. The purpose of this chapter is to begin to unravel the important linkages between economic development and the incidence of terrorism.

Introduction

Popular wisdom in the burgeoning literature on terrorism focuses on the economic motivations of terrorists. “We fight against poverty,” President George W. Bush explained in Monterrey, Mexico, on March 23, 2002, “because hope is an answer to terror.” Stern (2003) also draws a direct connection between poverty and terrorism. Though poverty is an attractive answer to the question of “why terrorism?”, the data do not lend much support for it. Macroeconomic shifts generally fail to map on to changes in terrorist activity. For example, in the late 1990s and 2000, when terrorism reached new heights against Israeli citizens, the typical Palestinian was reporting a rosier economic forecast and unemployment was declining. Using a longer time series, Berrebi (2003) finds little correlation between economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the number of terrorist incidents against Israel. An even more perplexing problem for the poverty thesis arises on the microlevel. Several studies at the individual level of analysis have failed to find any direct connection between education, poverty, and the propensity to participate in terrorism (Russell and Miller 1983; Taylor 1988; Hudson 1999; Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Berrebi 2003; Atran 2003). If anything, those who participate in terrorism tend to come from the ranks of the better off in society.

Those who claim a connection between poverty and terrorism could respond that at least on the microlevel, well-to-do citizens become terrorists out of public spiritedness for their impoverished fellow citizens, and organizations choose them to perform these tasks because of their reliability and skill.

Over the past three decades, low-skilled persons have received increasing attention by researchers on skill formation and labor markets across disciplines as well as by politicians. “In many OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries, discussions of the transition between education and employment are dominated by the problem of how to help a small minority of young people with severe and often multiple problems: who are doing badly at school; who experienced prolonged and regular unemployment; and who are extremely likely to experience a lifetime of low income, insecure employment, and relatively poor health” (OECD, 1999a: 26f). In all Western societies, we find an increasing labor market vulnerability of low-skilled persons over the past twenty-five years, although at different levels.

Disadvantages that low-skilled persons have in labor markets are studied in both microeconomics and sociology. Here, sociologists have quickly adopted microeconomic explanations. In doing so, however, they have ignored valuable sociology contributions toward explaining changes in the relationship between low education and labor market opportunities. This chapter delivers not competing but complementary sociological and microeconomic explanations for the increasing labor market vulnerability of low-skilled persons over the past three decades. These accounts are then used to explain variation in the vulnerability of low-skilled workers in developed countries.

This chapter starts with a portrayal of the dominant microeconomic explanation for the increase in labor market problems of low-skilled persons – the displacement argument – followed by a discussion of its shortcomings.

This chapter provides an original study into how democratization and globalization influence terrorism, examining the motives of terrorists and how democratic institutions and international integration influence nonstate economic actors. We employ a gravity model to investigate the relative importance of globalization and democratization on transnational terrorism. We construct an original database of more than 200,000 observations from 1968 to 2003 for 179 countries to examine the extent to which economic, political, and historical factors influence the likelihood of citizens from one country to engage in terrorist activities against another. We find that the advent of democratic institutions, high income, and more openness in a source country significantly reduce terrorism. However, the advent of these same positive developments in targeted countries actually increases terrorism. Ceteris paribus, the effect of being a democracy or participating in the WTO for a source country decreases the number of transnational terrorist strikes by about two to three per year, which is more than two standard deviations greater than the average number of strikes between any two countries in a given year.

Introduction

World foreign direct investment flows (FDI), which amounted to less than $13 billion in 1970, quadrupled every ten years, reaching $54 billion in 1980 and $209 billion in 1990. During the last half of the 1990s, however, FDI practically exploded, reaching a peak of $1.4 trillion in 2000. Worldwide trade also increased dramatically over the same time period.

Educational science and psychology put an emphasis on the development of individual competences and of individual performance when analyzing vocational and professional learning. Thus, intraindividual processes of skill formation are of utmost importance. Their psychological investigation mainly relies on information processing models and thus stresses cognitive components of competence. From an educational point of view, instructional models have been developed that aim at supporting the individual's acquisition of components of competence. Different opinions exist as to whether instructional support should mainly focus on reproducing systematically the to-be-learned domain knowledge, skills, and strategies, or whether instructional support should mainly focus on enabling learners to apply their knowledge in transfer situations. As a consequence, two rather different lines of instructional research can be distinguished: the one stressing formal learning processes, and the other stressing situated learning processes.

DISCUSSION ABOUT FORMAL AND SITUATED LEARNING

After the advent of the situated cognition movement, debates about formal learning and situated learning, as well as about the appropriate design of learning environments for skill acquisition, have been revitalized. The debates were grounded in the recognition of weaknesses that had been identified in so-called traditional formal learning settings. In particular, problems of knowledge application had been repeatedly observed in such learning settings: transfer from learning situations into application situations frequently failed. This was even true if the learners had proven to have mastered all learning requirements. Obviously, there is a substantial risk that knowledge that successfully was acquired remains inert (Renkl et al., 1996).

Introduction

Terrorism is an elusive concept. It is a violent strategy that can take place during wartime or peacetime. Terrorism is also thought of as a distinct form of violence with different causes than other forms of violence such as insurgencies or civil wars. In this chapter, I consider what linkages, if any, connect terrorism to civil war. If we consider terrorism as a strategy – a means to an end – then the links are obvious: civil wars create opportune environments for terror and terrorists. Indeed, as we shall see later, most terrorist events tend to take place in countries affected by civil war. I accept the identification of terror as a strategy, but I also consider whether near-exclusive use of this violent strategy constitutes a distinct form of violence, with separate causes than other forms. If so, then we can probe further to uncover differences and similarities between terrorism and civil war.

A way to approach the linkages between terrorism and civil war is to consider the conditions under which terrorism will lead to civil war and vice versa and to compare situations where terrorism takes place outside of the context of civil war to cases where there is civil war with or without terrorism. I provide such a comparison to illuminate the linkages between domestic terrorism and civil war. Both international and domestic terrorism can grow out of civil war or lead to it, but such a conflict transformation is more likely when terrorism is domestic.