From The Perspective Of Correspondence Principle: Vocational Education And Production Of New Chinese Industrial Workers

The conception of studying peasant workers is associated with the specificindustrialization process in China, and the production of workers is combined withdifferent management systems and factory regimes of production relations. Thetransformation of Chinese peasant workers to new industrial workers occurs against aspecial social context, although it is similar with the industrialization processes of othermajor countries in the world in that it also complies with the objective law that theindustrialization process raises both quantitative and qualitative demands for labor forces.Since the Industrial Revolution, factory regime, as a means of capital accumulation andorganization of labor production, has been subjected to changes under the combinedeffects of state intervention, market forces and labor process. Its fundamental purpose isto control the stability of economic system and the reproduction of social class structure.Bowles and Gintis, who summarized the changes of factory regime and its interactionwith the reform of education system in the American history, suggested“Correspondence Principle” that combined the educational process with the laborprocess.“Correspondence Principle”, in a narrow sense, refers to the correspondenceof social relations between school education and factory labor, while in a broad sense itmeans how the state integrates potential labor forces into social-economic structurethrough school education. The secondary vocational schools in China are educationalinstitutions that train industrial workers for the goal of industrialization. In recent years,rural students have been the mainstream in vocational education and also the key components in enterprises after graduation. Given the relation between educationallevel and professional level in industrial society, however, secondary vocationaleducation has always under the debate over “reproduction of social classes orenhancement of labor forces”. Both schools and factories have become cradles thatbreed industrial workers. Applying the operating mechanism of “CorrespondencePrinciple”, this paper analyzes the education that vocational school graduates inHangzhou Economic and Technological Development Area (HEDA) receive fromvocational schools and manufacturing factories in three aspects, namely, knowledgetechnology, personality traits, and strata consciousness. The application mechanism of“Correspondence Principle” is employed to identify the process in which thesepotential labor forces become industrial workers and reflect the state ideology and thecompelling and agreement factors of factory regime.Under the impetus of industrialization, the transformation of labor is mainlyreflected in the transition from rural surplus labor to modern industrial labor. However,before the reform and opening up, rural labor forces were mainly confined in rural areasunder the Chinese industrial system, and it was not until the construction of a socialistmarket economy and the development of labor market that they were transformed intoindustrial workers. As a similar case in this period of history, only a small number ofelite children from rural households were admitted into the secondary vocationaleducation in China. The general rural population did not have this educational chanceuntil1992, and they no longer enjoyed the job arrangement and residence registration policies as their predecessors did. Secondary vocational education has become a survivaleducation. The internal industrial production system is diverse as the positions arehierarchical even in manufacturing factories. The relation between education andoccupation is essentially the same in all industrial societies and it is strong. Theapplication mechanism of “Correspondence Principle” is assigning potential laborforces with different social identities to hierarchical educational structure and laborstructure. China has established different levels of educational institutions thatcorrespond to different possibilities of professional development, and has assigned theseresources through educational streaming. Due to limited capital, children from ruralhouseholds usually end up in secondary vocational schools in annually increasingnumbers and the professions they are engaged in after graduation are deteriorating. Thisinevitably leads to the debate of educational reproduction. Another similar effectbrought by industrialization is the relation of market labor, or capital-labor relationbetween enterprises and workers. In the field of international division of labor, China islocated in the posterior segment of the industrial chain. The international capitalemphasizes flexible accumulation which is reflected in the temporariness and instabilityof the work of low-level workers in the labor field. The manufacturing industry inChina needs to grow in competition, and improving the human capital of industrialworkers is key to transformation. This raises higher requirements for vocational schoolstudents.Modern factories often exert complicated control over enterprises through division of labor and hierarchical system. The ruling class pursues two objectives when designingeducation policies: reproduction of labor and reproduction of production relations. Theoperating mechanism of “Correspondence Principle” at the school level plays it rolein secondary vocational schools in China: in terms of the education of knowledgetechnology, vocational school students tend to choose different professions due to theirdifferences in gender, family economic conditions, personal preferences and otherfactors, and these different choices influence the production positions they assume whenthey enter into manufacturing factories; in terms of personality traits, vocational schoolstudents are particularly subjected to discipline and internalized norms, which actuallycorrespond to their future work; in terms of strata consciousness, secondary vocationaleducation advocates blue-collar culture and shapes students’ values through hiddencurriculum. Under such education, vocational school students are divided into twogroups: positive manufacturing group and passive manufacturing group. After enteringthe factory, the vast majority of vocational school graduates (especially those workingon the assembly line) are arranged in the low level of labor hierarchy. Because factoriesraise more defined requirements on knowledge technology and personal traits for thehierarchical division of labor, vocational school graduates have to receive re-educationof factories and in this case vocational education plays its role again. Compared with therelative fairness of school education, the education in factories is more technical andmore inclined to bureaucratic control. With the structural limitation, some motivatedvocational school graduates seek vocational education resources outside the factory and try to meet the conditions necessary to boost their professional level throughimprovement of human capital.The material basis of factory regime is the capital ownership of means ofproduction and control of labor processes. Compared with the changed factory regimein developed countries, the manufacturing factories in the coastal zone of China areconvergent in division of labor, management systems, and segmentation of labor market,although they still have their own characteristics. The manufacturing industry in HEDAincludes four sectors and the types of production work in each sector can be basicallyclassified into general workers and technicians. The application mechanism of“Correspondence Principle” embraced new content during the process whenvocational school graduates are assigned to the eastern coastal zone, and these graduates,who are distant from manufacturing profession, are employed as ordinary operatingworkers in factories through labor dispatching. Regional differences become the basisfor working in the manufacturing sectors in different places. In the market environment,coercion alone is not enough to transform labor forces into labor in factories. Onlythrough combination and integration can effective production be achieved. Technicaland bureaucratic control become a widely used method prevailing in the manufacturingfactories in Xiasha and this method is legitimate because of theTechnocratic-Meritocratic School, a theory that is generally applicable in industrialsocieties. Factories would re-integrate the vocational school graduates who takedifferent positions in the hierarchical division of labor and urge them to develop strata consciousness associated with their work. The integration process is also a division one,and the vocational school graduates actually maintain the interests of the factory whilethey are taking the initiative to pursue their personal interests. As the pyramid structureof positions in enterprises is fixed, vocational school graduates finally end up as themainstream of production and part of them make it to be technicians or juniormanagers over time, thus realizing the objectives of secondary vocational education andreproduction of hierarchical division of labor that the “Correspondence Principle”reflects.To be real industrial workers, vocational school graduates from rural householdsneed the guarantee of a series of stability factors. Influenced by Gramscianism, Bowlesand Burawoy explored the functional mechanism of strata structure stabilization fromtwo aspects of educational process and labor process, and they emphasized that stateintervention was the cause of hegemony. Integrating young people into thesocio-economic structure is the function of the application mechanism of“Correspondence Principle”, and this function is closely associated with the changes infactory regime. The factory regime in HEDA is undergoing reconstruction, and its casereflects respective changes in government, employers, and workers. Generally speaking,the factory regime in HEDA is changing toward better, although a number of issuesinevitably arise during this development process. Profession is the main basis for socialstratification in industrial societies. Education profession class is the logic ofstratification and mobility. Survey data showed that vocational school graduates have been a preliminarily stable professional group in the manufacturing sector in HEDA,which marks their further transformation to industrial workers and further demonstratesthe effectiveness of secondary vocational education. The entire industrial society istrying to change their workers into industrial citizens that have both rights andobligations, rather than into class members. However,“Correspondence Principle”eventually reveals the social phenomenon that “a majority of production means arecontrolled by only a few people while most people remain labor forces”. To understandthis social phenomenon requires revisit to Marx.