ABSTRACT
These policy concerns, both economic and social, in turn are the manifestation, in the public sphere, of that interplay of scientific, technological and productive forces which, together with democratisation, have created the modern state. Not merely a piece of remedial action to correct certain deficiencies and imbalances in education and training, the new vocationalism is itself an aspect or dimension of that ‘rationality’ which, from Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas, has been treated as the defining characteristic of the market-based bourgeois, capitalist state. It was in the 1960s that this model of the state received its most severe challenge in the post-war era-in the form of the large-scale protest movements in Western Europe, the United States and Australasia, and in the 1970s that the marketbased societies mounted a serious ‘counter-reformation’ which included a resurgence of neo-liberal ideologies. The 1960s’ challenge, which was a crisis
that passed, was more fundamental in that the target was the capitalist system itself. The chronic condition that supervened-large-scale unemployment with attendant skills-employment mismatches — although less fundamental, in that the society itself was not a direct object of attack, was just as threatening. It suggested that the system was, for large numbers of its members and especially the young, unable to provide the conditions (work and income) that were necessary for full social participation and to enjoy the principal benefit offered by the system, namely a high and increasing standard of material well-being.
