'Continuous meritocracy' was introduced in Singapore to redefine the concepts of talent and ability in Singapore society. This expanded meaning of meritocracy serves as another way to further support the SkillsFuture Singapore movement (Skillsfuture Singapore, 2023b), which was launched in 2016. 'Continuous meritocracy' complements Work-Integrated…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the complexities and connections between women, femme, and nonbinary (WFN) collective social entrepreneurs, social movement learning (SML), and critical participatory action research (CPAR) within the fields of adult education (AE) and human resource development (HRD). WFN collective social…

In international comparative research on adult education, typologies such as the 'Varieties of Capitalism' approach are applied frequently to justify country-based research designs, or to frame research results. However, the advantage of typologies in reducing institutional complexity becomes a drawback when it comes to explain variations between…

The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled "The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene," was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit…

This article attempts to conceptualise the relationship between the individual (professional) and the structural in a period of relatively radical changes in society. The challenging and revealing dialectic of such relations is analysed through the combination of auto-ethnographic reflections and archival documents showing the changes in the…

When the Australian Association of Adult Education (AAAE) was established in 1960, Australia was locked into a global conflict between capitalism and communism, known as the Cold War. With anticommunism at fever pitch, AAAE's founders who were fighting to retain some influence with Australian universities and with government funding authorities…

The paper brings together a range of debates on the left that address TVET's future in current context. At the heart of these debates rest two issues. The first addresses competing views of capital and the second focuses on the contradiction between the interests of capital and workers. The paper argues that capital is not all of a piece and that…

The purpose of this paper is to examine how adult education institutions have developed in close connection with the Danish welfare state and how structural reforms since the 1990s have changed the institutional structure and impacted accessibility. This involves analyses of the main functions linked to the different types of adult education…

This article develops an agentic approach to activist learning and analyzes the interplay between agency and learning. The agentic approach derives from Alheit's concept of biographical learning and Emirbayer and Mische's concept of agency. The article builds on the case study of an activist's narrative to show that the development of agency is…

The literature regarding the social organisation of 'adult' learning opportunities throughout the life course postulates different significations of policy concepts such as 'lifelong education', 'permanent education', 'recurrent education', and 'lifelong learning' in the 1970s. This paper examines policy formation processes in France during the…

In South Africa, with few exceptions, scholarship on the modern labour movement which emerged after the Durban strikes of 1973 tends to focus on trade unions that constituted the labour movement, strikes, collective bargaining, and workplace changes. While all these topics covered by labour scholars are of great importance, there is less emphasis…

The role of education in citizen training has been well mapped out in youth education. What has been less studied is how this role comes into being in adult education. By providing illustrative empirical examples from a recently completed study of adult students enrolled in adult education, this article aims to offer a theoretical response to the…

The incidence of drug-related deaths in Scotland has reached crisis proportions. Comparable only to the rust belt States in the US these figures point to the impact of the rapid scale of deindustrialisation and a global neoliberal economy, based on austerity, deepening class divisions and a return to a more naked form of capitalism. The question…

This book explores European governance and policy coordination within lifelong learning markets. Using an instruments approach, the editors and contributors examine the ways in which governance mechanisms employed by the European Union influence policy to regulate lifelong learning, and intervene in lifelong learning markets, at both European and…

Citizenship education played a crucial role in the 19th century transition from royal sovereignty to democracy in the Nordic region, with folk high schools (FHS) playing an important role. While established to empower the people ("folk") for active participation in society, the contemporary folk high schools have reoriented from their…