Vocational Education as Symbolic Action: Connecting Schooling With the Workplace 1

Abstract

Policy connecting education with the workplace is usually seen as a form of instrumental action. Vocational education, therefore, is commonly justified as either providing individuals with needed skills in order to enter the workforce or as making the United States economically competitive with other nations. The efficacy of these efforts has been called in question; but whatever success vocational education may have achieved in terms of instrumental action, its effects in terms of symbolic action also need to be considered. Symbolic action works not by achieving a defined goal but by organizing allegiances, conferring status, and ratifying certain norms. Under these circumstances, it becomes especially appropriate to ask who benefits from the policy. Vocational education, for example, can be linked to the rise of professionalism, and, therefore, it may be an emerging breed of education professionals who were the primary beneficiaries of the policy. Other significant symbolic effects include the reconciling of a traditional work ethic with a modern industrial system and even the way in which we conceive of the function of schooling itself.