Organizational Hindrances for Vocational Education and Training Research in Norwegian Higher Education

Norwegian research environments specializing in vocational education and training (VET) are few and small, despite more than 50% of all Norwegian youth having applied for VET education after secondary school in 2021. As a nation driven by the ideals of becoming a knowledge-based society, Norway has become stronger in many educational aspects, including a vast expansion of higher education and research in general. This article discusses how structural and organizational factors within academia favor research fields with more established recruitment channels for researchers specializing in VET. Departing from a neo-institutional perspective, we investigate recruitment and research finance systems in order to identify organizational hindrances for VET research. We find that VET research is inhibited by increasing competition within higher education, as well as by a lack of political commitment to VET research more specifically. In the discussion, we criticize how individualization and fragmentation in Norwegian higher education organizations impede the development of a VET research community.