Challenging Merit: Analysing Competences in Research on Vocational Education through Convention Theory.

Although merit has been critiqued and problematised such that it has become an object of public debate, it is still deployed as an inherent feature of particular educational forms and trajectories. In this paper, we demonstrate how sociological and educational research juxtapose merit versus skill in relation to different kinds of educational pathways, where the former is seen to be a competence residing within vocational education, while the latter has been confined to academic tracks and into higher education. We then embark on an empirical case study, paying attention to how actors negotiate and justify their actions in situations where they embark on Swedish higher vocational education. The ambiguity around recognising rivalling values and conceptualisations of merit is heightened during participants’ experiences of transitioning from training to work. By paying attention to these accounts facilitated through a particular adult educational institution, a space is opened up for us to examine the worth of what is/are treated as adjacent to merit. A critique of the ways in which we examine merit and skill in social scientific research is important, if the ambition is to formulate meaningful ways for understanding what is valuable in learning and work for actors.