SFB 640 I: Constructing Social Meanings from the Vantage Point of National Self-Determination: Occupation and Education in Peronist Argentina and the Indian Independence Movement (TP C 2)

<p>This project investigates the prerequisites for and forms of processes involved in the development of systems of vocational training structures in different societal contexts. It is not primarily concerned with the accepted or actual dependency of vocational training structures on the changes in technology and organisation of labour. Rather, it takes as its starting point the problems associated with developing specific areas of vocational training in the precarious situation in which different societal systems educational and economic overlap. During the European crisis discussion of the 19th century, these problems were referred to as internal organisation problems of vocational training (Lorenz von Stein). Modern theories (such as the theory of functional differentiation or the theory of symbolically generalised media of communication) enable them to be reconstructed as problems both of articulating and implementing collective obligations for a form of vocational training incorporated in the economic activity of individual businesses.</p>

<p>It is here that vocational interpretation models understood as representations accepted across society of vocational , i.e. specifically tailored and qualified, labour potential acquire their status. Representations of vocational labour potential indicate the indispensable semantic (as opposed to legal) prerequisites for successfully mastering the aforementioned problems of organisation. As the development in Germany demonstrates the German concept of vocation almost acts as an organising principle for vocational training (Harney, Deißinger) representations of vocational labour potential sanctioned across society are by no means a foregone conclusion. They are highly culture-specific, i.e. rooted in semantic traditions that go back a long way. They are also shaped by collective appropriations of social and economic processes of change.
This is where the choice of the two units for comparison, namely Latin America/Argentina and East Asia/China, acquires its status as a method of comparison and systematisation. On the one hand, it enables the development of vocation-related representations from completely different socio-historical and semantic prerequisites to be reconstructed and compared. On the other hand, through these units of comparison it becomse possible to analyse the cross-breeding or hybridisation of autochthonous interpretative traditions by successive processes of transfer in the context of colonial dependence, European expansion during the 19th century, increasing industrialisation and economic globalisation and finally international cooperation through aid programmes in the second half of the twentieth century.</p>