Wolfgang Lehmann, Choosing to Labour? School-Work Transitions and Social Class
Bibliographic record
Abstract
olfgang Lehmann's Choosing to Labour?School-Work Transitions and Social Class examines the extent to which formally structured programs designed to link schools and workplaces can overcome the reproductive effects of social class and gender in the early career experiences of German and Canadian youth.The author offers a comparative study of academic-track high school students in Bremen, Germany and students participating in an apprenticeship program (known as the Registered Apprenticeship Program, or RAP) in Alberta, Canada.Lehmann relies primarily on qualitative data drawn from interviews and focus groups with a total of 105 students, along with some generally simple quantitative analysis.Lehmann builds his analysis around the concepts of structure and agency.He presents three competing theories of the relative role of youth choice in school-to-work transitions.Rational choice theory, which leans heavily toward the agency side, is based on the cost/benefit calculations that people make as they decide between various educational and employment options.Status attainment theories, in contrast, focus on the role of ascribed characteristics, such as race and SES, in circumscribing educational aspirations and attainment.Interpretive studies highlight the centrality of agency, without insisting that the choices one makes be rational or economically goal-driven.Lehmann wants to determine if individual life courses are more responsive to broader structural constraints or to the choices that young people make about their futures.As its title suggests, Choosing to Labour? is in part a response to the questions raised decades ago by Paul Willis's Learning to Labour, and taken up more recently in the school-to-work transition literature.After a brief introductory chapter, the book proceeds straightforwardly.Chapter 1 sets out Lehmann's theoretical premises, revolving largely around the distinction between structure and agency.In Chapter 2, he provides a detailed and informative description of both the RAP and Germany's Dual System of apprenticeship and skill acquisition.This is a particularly clear statement of the social pressures currently impinging
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".