Corporate Social Responsibility, Education, and Job Training

This chapter combines a management perspective and spatial focus to study the ways in which companies and public sector organizations engage in vocational training and apprenticeship programs. The combined theoretical and empirical perspective demonstrates how this form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) depends on the structural characteristics of companies and organizations. Additionally, it is a discussion about how involvement in apprenticeship programs depends on systems of established formal and informal rules operating on different spatial scales that are formed and played out in a regional context. From a management perspective, education–workplace collaborations may depend on the robustness of organizational capacity and the ability to be involved over a long period. Thus, it is important not only to discuss motivation and performance from the viewpoint of the individual firm but also to understand the effects of multitude of players in the way their vocational education training (VET) tasks coexist, set a standard, compete, or form collective actions. The empirical evidence is based on a recent study of workplaces’ engagement in VET in cooperation with the three senior high schools in the Nordhordland region in Western Norway. The data collection, conducted in 2018, was based on a mixed-methods approach. It combined register data on occupation, education, and apprenticeships with primary data from 93 qualitative interviews with a sample of representatives of companies and public sector institutions, as well as nine focus group interviews with representatives from schools, regional stakeholders, and local/regional administrative offices concerned with collaboration between senior high schools, businesses, and other types of workplaces.