1 Changing vocational identities in Europe: reflections on how vocational identities are decomposed and reconstructed from the Czech Republic and Greece Sokratis Koniordos (University of Patras); Alan Brown (IER, University of Warwick); Olga Strietska-Ilina (Czech National Observatory of VET & Labour Market, National Training Fund); Nikitas Patiniotis (University of Patras). Email contact: alan.brown@warwick.ac.uk Paper presented at Fourth International Conference 'Vocational Education and Training Research', University of Wolverhampton, 16-18 July 2001 1. Introduction This paper is one of a series from the European FAME project that is exploring a number of issues relating to changing vocational identities. 1 The project team is adopting what has been termed an ‘identity bricolage’ perspective. 2 That related to the idea that in the contemporary period older certainties and identifications have been eroded and that many tradition-based identities are decompoing, while societal openness and individual or personal choice in contemporary western-type societies is expanding. In a sense this is not entirely new, as since the mid-1960s we have been witnessing in parts of Europe the disembeddeness of occupational communities and the emergence of a more ‘privatised’ type of worker identity in the large metropolitan urban centres (compare Lockwood, 1966). However, the expansion of the ‘privatised’ type of worker has been intensified by the broad socio-economic shifts that since the early 1970s have assumed a societal-wide character in much of the West. This period has been marked by the return of economic crises, the renewed intensification of competition, the spread of informatics, of the flexible specialisation paradigm, of flexibility and of the acceleration of globalisation, and the increasing importance of the tertiary sector in economic activities. In turn, such structural-technological shifts trigger labour market demands for greater flexibility and mobility that render redundant skilling processes that largely depended on on-the-job type of learning and were marked by temporal duration and continuity. By contrast, the newer demands necessitate and call for more formal type of education, training and skill acquisition that also involve a different, and much shorter, time horizon for learners. This, however, only highlights the fact that the identification with one's 1 ‘Identity’ refers here to a connection between the ‘social’ and the ‘personal’ and to sense of sameness with some and difference with others, a feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’. It implies an element of active engagement on the part of those that adopt a particular identity, an element of self-definition. At the same time, identity is constrained and circumscribed, and even shaped by existing social structures and processes (see Jenkins 1996; Sarup 1996). 2 According to the Carruthers & Uzzi (2000) identity ‘bricolage’, “involves the decomposition of existing identities into their constituent components and their recombination into a new identity” (p. 486).