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It is widely believed digital technologies are transforming all aspects of economy and society, driven by scientific advances across interdisciplinary fields and innovations relating to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, etc. But what, if anything, is revolutionary about these developments and what are the implications for the neo-liberal opportunity bargain based on a market competition where 'learning equals earning'. This article outlines different interpretations of the 'fourth industrial revolution' presenting contrasting theories of labour scarcity and job scarcity, to highlight why we need to rethink education, opportunity and the future of work in a context of increasing job scarcity. This is urgent not because we are approaching the end of work, but the end of 'knowledge' work as understood in public policy, with no viable solution to how to create in a new opportunity bargain for a fair and efficient future of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental shift is taking place in the way we think about the future of work and its relationship to education, training and the labour market. Until recently, expanding higher education was widely believed to result in higher earnings, reflecting an insatiable demand for knowledge workers. In the United Kingdom, this race to higher education included a major transfer of resources from further and adult provision to higher education. This paper raises a number of issues in rethinking tertiary education in a context of digital disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy and academic circles in India put forth the argument that the country's demographic dividend puts it in an optimal position to win the race between education and technology across nations by expanding higher education opportunities. This article examines the recruitment practices of 13 leading corporations in highgrowth sectors in India. Based on detailed qualitative interviews, it explains why these corporations are unlikely to increase the demand for graduates in ways imagined by policy-makers or proponents of skills-biased technological change. Companies in India are locked into an intense 'war for talent', but only for graduates in India's top-tier universities. We argue that there is a close correspondence between India's highly elitist university system and corporate talent management strategies, creating a narrow pool of highly mobile Indian corporate elite, but resulting in limited prospects for the wider Indian workforce. In this talent market, the success of the top corporate elite rests on keeping the elitist character of higher education, rather than widening labour market opportunities. This paper also seeks to explain why top corporations in India engage in this 'war for talent' when they are not always certain their investments pay off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major focus of sociological research is on the role of the credential as a 'currency of opportunity', mediating the relationship between education and occupational destinations. However, the labour market has largely remained a 'black box' in sociological and education policy studies. This article draws on 'big data' from over 21,000,000 job adverts to explore how employers in the UK describe job requirements, with particular reference to the role of credentials. It challenges existing theories premised upon the notion that higher levels of formal education determine individual (dis)advantage in the competition for jobs. Although they have different views of the relationship between credentials, opportunity and efficiency, these theories assume that credentials largely determine occupational hiring. Our analysis suggests that formal academic credentials play a relatively minor differentiating role in the UK labour market, as the majority of employer's place greater emphasis on 'job readiness'. This raises a number of issues for sociological and policy analysis, including the future role of credentials in the (re)production of educational and labour market inequalities. Methodologically, the article highlights how the use of big data can contribute to the analysis of education, skills and the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu’s account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately account for comparative differences in the social structure of competition and ideological shifts in class (re)production in different national contexts. This analysis is based on an empirical investigation of elite students at Oxford University and Sciences Po in Paris. We investigated how they understand the competition for a livelihood and whether they see themselves as more ‘talented’ than students from non-elite universities. This investigation revealed important similarities and differences between British and French students that have significant sociological implications for the (re)production and legitimation of educational and labour market inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss several topics appearing elsewhere in the issue, including information on education and social mobility, meritocratic societies and intergenerational mobility, and life chances in emerging economies.

There has been renewed policy interest in intergenerational social mobility as a route to a fairer society, but in ignoring the sociological evidence this article will argue that the current policy agenda will fail to achieve its goal. Based on an analysis of ‘social congestion’, ‘social exclusion’, and ‘social justice’, it also argues that existing sociological research on education and social mobility needs to be extended. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the experiences of working-class and middle-class students and families are not defined by intergenerational social mobility, but by social congestion and an opportunity trap. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Practical experience of security and forensic computing is of increasing relevance for student employability. Further, courses related to these topics have increased in student popularity. Learning by doing (or experiential learning) is an effective pedagogical way to help students constructively build up their knowledge related to these courses. To improve student engagement and employability and make these courses sustainable, the paper has proposed and developed a portable unified constructivist-learning environment using virtualisation technology, and designed a wide spectrum of hands-on materials on both security and forensic computing topics to offer students a great chance to experience experiential learning. The work presented in this paper is a typical exemplar of applying constructivist learning theories into security and forensic computing education and other similar courses. It is a new way to improve and transform undergraduate STEM education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of global skill webs in transnational companies (TNCs). Based on research in seven countries, it argues that skill webs are becoming more strategic in character as companies seek competitive advantage by relocating high-skilled work to low-cost locations. The paper explores the implications of these findings for both the 'conventional' approach to international human resource management and that influenced by the 'varieties of capitalism' School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the sociology of education from the perspective of its recent history and attempts to assess the current state of the field. The authors argue that cognate disciplines such as economics and social policy have taken over some of the key questions that were once the preserve of sociology of education. This raises the question of what is lost if the sociology of education is no longer making a significant contribution, in key areas, to the major educational, social and economic issues of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talk of the rise of a global war for talent and emergence of a new global meritocracy has spread from the literature on human resource management to shape nation-state discourse on managed migration and immigration reform. This article examines the implications that the global war for talent have for education policy. Given that this talent war is a product of neoliberalism, it raises many of the same concerns for educators as neoliberalism in general: the embrace and promotion of social, economic and educational inequality; and a narrow, market-based conception of education, skill and talent. This article argues, however, that the global war for talent represents a new phase in neoliberalism, as it seeks to liberalise the global movement not just of capital and commodities, but of high skill labour as well. In this, it threatens to undercut some of the founding assumptions and goals that have shaped national education policy in OECD countries throughout the post-World War II period, and raises serious concerns for how we are to think about and pursue equality, inclusion and fairness in and through education in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach to institutional convergence, globalization, and divergence as represented by the skill formation and welfare state theory of Margarita Estevez-Abe, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice. The article explains that the VoC approach addresses business strategies, which are based on distinctive national institutional structures generated by provisional solutions to specific problems that businesses in any capitalist economy are forced to address.

This article examines the dominant view of the changing relationship between education, jobs and rewards in the global knowledge economy. This asserts that the developed economies can resolve issues of individual aspirations, economic efficiency and social justice through the creation of a high-skills, high-wage ‘magnet’ economy. Here the authors examine four of the key dimensions of this account and argue that while there has been a fundamental change in the relationship between education, economy and society, their conclusions are far removed from the assumptions that currently inform public and policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of employability. The recent policy emphasis on employability rests on the assumption that the economic welfare of individuals and the competitive advantage of nations have come to depend on the knowledge, skills and enterprise of the workforce. Those with degree-level qualifications are seen to play a particularly important role in managing the 'knowledge-driven' economy of the future. But the rhetoric that shrouds the idea of employability has been subjected to little conceptual examination. The purpose of this article is to show that the way employability is typically defined in official statements is seriously flawed because it ignores what will be called the 'duality of employability'. It also introduces 'positional conflict theory' as a way of conceptualising the changing relationship between education, employment and the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the issues, challenges and prospects offered by economic globalization, technological change and the Asian financial crisis to Singapore. Information on the economic structure of Singapore; Impact of globalization on Singapore; Issues concerning the workforce.

The rise of information technology coupled with the globalization of the economy has thrust the identity and sovereignty of the nation-state into sharp focus over the last two decades. Against this fast-changing background, the response of many countries has been to develop policies aimed at creating national information infrastructures (NII) – often with educational networking initiatives as an integral or pioneering element. Given the emerging global policyscape (Ball 1999) towards creating educational information networks this paper presents a comparative analysis of policy-making across Europe, East Asia and the USA. In analysing education networking in seven case-study countries, the paper emphasizes a political economy perspective; thus focusing attention on the role of the state and the varying relationship between education, economy and society. Having explored the varying motivations and objectives behind countries' education networking programmes the paper concludes by outlining an educational research agenda for future examination of NII policies as they continue to be implemented in developed nations over the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the features of globalization and the economics of skill formation in Great Britain. Factors determining the trade-offs on advanced economies; Essence of human capital as a determining factor of economic success; Expansion on higher education and the value of lifelong learning.

In this paper it will be argued that we are entering a 'third wave' in the socio-historical development of British education and that similar trends are also evident in the USA, Australia and, New Zealand. The 'first wave' can be characterised by the rise of mass schooling for the working classes in the late nineteenth century. The 'second wave' involved a shift from the provision of education based upon what Dewey called the "feudal dogma of social predestination" to one organised on the basis of individual merit and achievement. What is distinct about the 'third wave' is the move towards a system whereby the education a child receives must conform to the wealth and wishes of parents rather than the abilities and efforts of pupils. In other words, we have witnessed a shift away from the 'ideology of meritocracy' to what I will call the 'ideology of parentocracy'. This paper will consider the evidence to support this conclusion and examine its sociological significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the educational system in Western industrial societies should be organized to meet the social and economic challenge of the late twentieth century. In advanced industrial societies the educational system has been identified as making a major contribution to national economic prosperity. In recent decades Western societies have been experiencing a major transformation heralding a new era which can be described as post-industrial, post-modern, post-fordist or in terms of the rise of the information society. This transformation has been the result of a number of factors including the technological revolution in communications, computers and robotics; globalization; and the rising competitive force of Pacific Rim countries. So long as industrial production is distinguished by the routine tasks symbolized by the assembly line, where the majority need only to conform to the demands of the task in hand and a minority conceive and develop policy, a rigid division of labour based on bureaucratic procedures proves a reliable technology for the administration of production. The aim of education in this context is to process the raw material of human abilities into workers who are then fed into the appropriate level of the productive hierarchy. Consequently, despite the shift to a fairer system of educational selection during the twentieth century and major gains in economic efficiency, the way in which systems of education and training have been organized in industrial societies on the principles of machine bureaucracy has resulted in a massive waste of talent.

This paper critically examines two trajectories for economic development under the new global economic competition: the neo‐Fordist route of the New Right and the post‐Fordist route of centre‐left Modernizers. It is argued that both positions are unlikely to achieve economic prosperity and equality of opportunity for all, although there are elements in the Modernizers’ programme that are desirable. The Modernizers emphasize the idea of a ‘high skill, high wage economy’ in which the upgrading of educational standards is seen as central to the delivery of social justice and economic growth. However, their characterization of the relationship between national and global economies is seriously flawed. Their explanation for the economic and social polarization of these societies in terms of the global demand for skill rests on commonly held but inadequate neo‐classical economic assumptions. This leads to a paradox in the Modernizers’ position. They place education at the heart of their strategy while being unable to explain or address the problem of polarization. Yet, a polarized society will not create high standards of educational achievement for all. This paper seeks to resolve the paradox by providing a more adequate explanation for polarization and, in doing so, establishes a framework for reconciling the aims of equality of opportunity with economic prosperity under the present global economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A retrospective study of admissions to a regional secure unit over two years revealed that time spent waiting for a bed to be available was strongly correlated with the place where the patient was waiting. This is discussed against the background of regional secure unit waiting lists, and with particular reference to Special Hospital patients requiring rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]