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This book examines the concept of the fourth industrial revolution and its potential impact on vocational education and training. Broadly located in a framework rooted in critical/radical theory, the book argues that the affordance of technologies surrounding the fourth industrial revolution are constrained by their location within a neoliberal, if not capitalist, logic. Thus, the impact of this revolution will be experienced differently across European regions as well as low and middle income economies. In order to break this impasse, this book calls for a politics based on non-reformist reforms, premised on an aspiration towards a socially just society that transcends capitalism.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Vocational Education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Education and Employment in a Post-Work Age.- Chapter 2. Socio-technical Imaginaries and the fourth industrial revolution.- Chapter 3. Robotisation, artificial intelligence, employment and the fourth industrial revolution.- Chapter 4. Post-work, post-capitalism and the fourth industrial revolution.- Chapter 5. Conclusion.
About the author
James Avis is Professor of Post-Compulsory Education at the University of Derby and Professor Emeritus at the University of Huddersfield. His research interests include vocational education and training, the political economy of post-compulsory education, the labour process and education policy.
Report
"The book has many strengths. Above all, though a short book, it is incredibly rich, reflecting Avis's breadth of scholarship about VET and work. ... All in all, this is a book to be highly commended and welcomed. James Avis does important work for the field in problematizing some of the current policy nonsense of a critical VET for 4IR. Beyond this, however, he highlights the huge, indeed, existential questions that face VET whatever 4IR amounts to in substance." (Simon McGrath, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, Vol. 74 (2), 2022)
