The idea of Governance of Career Guidance Systems in Nordic Countries workshops is to gather scholars from four Nordic countries (Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) to tackle this gap in knowledge. The scholarly impact of the workshops will be twofold: First, the project will offer a novel empirical understanding of the prospects of guidance in globalised late-modern Nordic knowledge societies. Instead of focusing on the individual and psychological theories of career guidance, the project seeks to unravel how career guidance
systems are governed at national and local levels in the Nordic context. Second, with its new institutional approach, the project will contribute to the under-studied and emerging scholarly field of governance of career guidance systems, located at the intersection of the politics of education and social and administrative studies, by combining theories from different paradigms and participating in debates in several scholarly fields. As an outcome of the workshops, first, a special issue “National and local perspectives to
governance of career guidance systems in Nordic countries” will be published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, which will be thoroughly deliberated at the first workshop. Second, both workshops will offer a platform to prepare joint research proposals focusing on the comparison and analyses of the organisation and governance of career guidance systems at national and local levels for national and Nordic funding organisations.
To grasp the issue of governing national and local career guidance systems in a comparative manner, the interplay between continuity and change become important. Unveiling factors that 2 lead to continuity (such as the division of jurisdiction between institutions, dissimilar administrative cultures and lack of resources for cooperative work) and issues enabling change
(such as supranational trends and domestic political will to reinforce career guidance) is an essential precondition for serious and determined endeavours to develop and renew governance of Nordic career guidance systems.
The theoretical approach of the workshops will be new institutional theory, which seeks to explain the role that institutions play in the formation of social and political outcomes of career guidance systems. Hence, the institutions will not simply be seen as a product of policy processes under the given power relations in the context. Instead, new institutional analysis has the potential to explain how institutions affect the behaviour of the actors: how do actors behave, what do institutions do, and why do institutions persist or change over time the way
they do? (Hall & Taylor 1996).