A Collaborative Study on the School-Enterprise Cooperation System in Vocational Education : An Analysis Based on Scott's Three-Pillar Theory

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Industry-school cooperation in vocational education plays a crucial role in connecting school training with industry needs. With the continuous development of various cooperative models such as industry-education integration, modern apprenticeship, customized training programs, and industry-university collaboration, industry-university cooperation has gradually expanded beyond agreement signing, base establishment, and internship arrangements to encompass the entire training process, including professional development, curriculum adjustment, practical teaching, faculty collaboration, and quality evaluation. However, the diversification of cooperation models has not automatically led to stable institutional synergy. In practice, training objectives and job requirements are difficult to consistently align; there are translation costs between curriculum content and real-world work tasks; there is a lack of common standards between enterprise investment and school evaluation; and there remains a gap between policy advocacy and daily implementation. These phenomena are not merely due to insufficient implementation in a single (link/stage), but rather represent institutional barriers exposed as industry-university cooperation deepens.
This study revolves around two core questions: What institutional barriers exist in vocational education industry-university cooperation, and in what forms do these barriers manifest themselves? After these barriers have been identified, why do they arise and persist? To answer these questions, the study uses Scott's three-pillar theory of institutions as the sole analytical framework, distinguishing institutional forces into regulatory, normative, and cultural cognitive dimensions. It identifies talent cultivation, interests and evaluation, and policy guarantees as three institutional elements that reveal institutional barriers, establishing a research path of "barrier representation—institutional causal explanation." This path focuses not only on the specific manifestations in cooperative operations but also on how formal rules, role expectations, and shared understanding collectively influence the cooperative order.
In terms of research methodology, this paper employs a combination of case analysis and semi-structured interviews. The case analysis section selects three vocational education school-enterprise cooperation cases with different cooperation platforms and organizational contexts, coded as Case A, Case B, and Case C, respectively. Case A is a cooperation case between a public higher vocational college and a large local state-owned enterprise; Case B is a cooperation case between a private higher vocational college and a private enterprise; and Case C is a cooperation case between an enterprise group and multiple secondary vocational schools around customized training programs. Case A has relatively complete interview materials, cooperation documents, and project operation information, serving as the main case study. Cases B and C mainly rely on publicly available documents, project materials, and institutional texts, serving as supplementary comparisons. The interview section focuses on Case A, conducting semi-structured interviews with six managers and organizational participants directly involved in the cooperation between School A and Enterprise A. The interview texts were anonymized, transcribed verbatim, manually coded, thematically merged, and cross-verified. The study also incorporates policy documents, publicly available case materials, training programs, course texts, cooperation agreements, and related institutional texts, forming a mutually supportive chain of evidence consisting of "documents, case materials, and interview materials."
In terms of material processing, the study anonymized case names, organization names, and specific cities, while retaining information on school type, enterprise type, cooperation platform, and provincial/regional background to maintain the clarity of case boundaries. Interview materials underwent anonymization, text processing, three-level coding, and cross-verification before analysis, primarily using short citations, coding chains, and mechanism explanations to serve the research questions.
Research reveals that the main problem in vocational education industry-university cooperation is not the lack of cooperation formats, nor the complete lack of willingness to cooperate between schools and enterprises. Rather, while cooperation has been deepening at the levels of projects, platforms, classes, and industry colleges, a stable institutional collaborative structure has yet to be formed. This manifests superficially in the gaps between three institutional elements. In the talent cultivation stage, the school's training logic and the enterprise's job logic have not yet formed a truly consistent educational chain. There is still continuous translation and repeated coordination between curriculum transformation, practical arrangements, dual-mentor collaboration, and competency evaluation. In the benefit and evaluation stage, schools and enterprises do not have consistent standards for judging the benefits and effectiveness of cooperation. Evaluation results primarily serve as proof of results and demonstration of effectiveness, and have not yet formed a stable and sustainable feedback loop. In the policy guarantee stage, although there are policy advocacy, organizational carriers, and institutional documents for cooperation, there are still significant gaps between the boundaries of rules, the implementation chain, and daily mechanisms. The order of cooperation still largely depends on project promotion, platform mobilization, meeting coordination, and key personnel.
At the causal explanation level, the study further found that the aforementioned gaps are not independent of each other, but rather a result of the lack of stable synergy among the three pillars of the Scott system. From the perspective of the regulatory pillar, unclear division of responsibilities among rules, gaps between institutional provisions and the implementation chain, and reliance on project-driven initiatives rather than stable institutions for cooperation guarantees are the direct basis for the gaps. From the perspective of the normative pillar, schools and enterprises do not have consistent standards for judging what constitutes effective cooperation, reasonable investment, and successful training; responsibility and evaluation incentives are also not fully aligned. This makes it easy for cooperation to continue to misalign in terms of effectiveness judgment and expectation of responsibility, even as it deepens in form. From the perspective of the cultural and cognitive pillar, there are still significant differences in whether enterprise participation in talent cultivation is generally understood as a normalized responsibility, and whether vocational education cooperation is truly recognized as a normalized institutional practice rather than a phased project. This instability at the cognitive level further weakens rule enforcement and normative coordination.
The theoretical significance of this study is mainly reflected in three aspects. First, it elevates the description of problems in vocational education school-enterprise cooperation from "insufficient cooperation" to the analytical level of "insufficient institutional synergy," reorganizing practical difficulties scattered across different stages into institutional phenomena that can be uniformly explained. Second, it uses Scott's three-pillar theory of institutions to connect the research questions, methodological design, and results analysis, establishing cross-analytic relationships between the three institutional elements of talent cultivation, interests and evaluation, and policy guarantees, and the three institutional dimensions of regulation, normativity, and cultural cognition, thus enhancing the structural consistency of the entire paper. Third, through the presentation of materials using "anonymous interview citations, a three-level coding chain, and institutional explanation," a clear traceability chain is formed between interview materials, analytical tasks, and theoretical explanations, improving the transparency of the qualitative analysis process.
The practical significance of this study lies in providing an institutional perspective for local governments, vocational schools, and enterprises to re-understand the common difficulties in current school-enterprise cooperation. The research shows that deepening cooperation cannot be simply equated with an increase in platforms, projects, or enterprise participation; rather, it should be understood as whether the rules are clearer, the evaluation more coordinated, and the understanding more normalized. Only when schools and enterprises have more complete interfaces in formal rules, form more coordinated common standards in responsibility and evaluation, and truly regard joint education as a normalized arrangement in vocational education in terms of cultural understanding, can school-enterprise cooperation move from "promotion-driven cooperation" to "normalized collaboration."
This study also has certain limitations. The scope of cases remains limited. Although the three cases present different cooperation mechanisms and organizational contexts under varying degrees of evidence strength, they are insufficient to cover all types of school-enterprise cooperation in vocational education. Interviewees are mainly concentrated in Case A, while Cases B and C rely more on publicly available materials and textual data for supplementary comparative analysis. Therefore, there is still room for further expansion of the depth of cross-case interpretation. Furthermore, some case analyses are based on materials from different stages, and cannot exhaustively explain certain dynamic changes in the operation of cooperation. Future research could expand the types of cases and interviewees to a wider range, and further combine the macro-institutional environment, meso-level organizational governance, and micro-level actor experiences to form a more comprehensive explanatory picture. This paper hopes to provide a relatively unified and sustainable explanatory framework for research and practice in school-enterprise cooperation in vocational education through an institutional synergy analysis path based on Scott's three-pillar theory of institutions.
Furthermore, the case region, number of respondents, interview duration, and material intensity all constitute the explanatory boundaries of this study. This paper limits the relevant conclusions to case explanation and mechanism analysis, and does not use the interviews with the six managers as a basis for statistical generalization.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1
• 1.1 Necessity and Purpose of the Study 1
• 1.1.1 Necessity of Research 2
• 1.1.2 Research Objectives 5
• 1.2 Research Questions 7
• CHAPTER 2. Theoretical Background 10
• 2.1 Definition of Concepts 10
• 2.1.1 Vocational Education 11
• 2.1.2 Industry-University Cooperation 15
• 2.1.3 Institutional Coordination 21
• 2.2 Literature Review 24
• 2.2.1 Common Issues and Focus of Discussion in Industry-University Collaborative Research 25
• 2.2.2 Explanatory Path from the Perspective of Policy Implementation and Governance Safeguards 27
• 2.2.3 Institutional Explanation of Enterprise Participation Motivation and Cooperation Sustainability 29
• 2.2.4 International experience, institutional framework, and shortcomings and implications of existing research 31
• 2.3 Theoretical Basis 33
• 2.3.1 The significance of Scott's three-pillar theory of institutions 34
• 2.3.2 The connection between the three pillars of the system and the three institutional elements 36
• 2.3.3 Theoretical Analysis Framework of this Study 38
• CHAPTER 3. Methodology 41
• 3.1 Research Design and Methodology Selection 41
• 3.1.1 Research Design 41
• 3.1.2 Criteria for Case Study Selection and Its Application in the Research 43
• 3.1.3 Selection criteria for semi-structured interviews and their application in the research 45
• 3.2 Research Subjects and Material Sources 47
• 3.2.1 Case Study Subjects 47
• 3.2.2 Interview subjects 50
• 3.2.3 Scope and Sources of Documents and Materials 53
• 3.3 Research Implementation Process 55
• 3.3.1 Preparation for organizing and analyzing case materials 55
• 3.3.2 Interview Implementation and Text Compilation Process 57
• 3.3.3 Data Coding, Classification, and Cross-verification Methods 59
• 3.4 Record of Interview Material Preprocessing and Coding Process 62
• 3.5 Researcher Reflection and Research Ethical Control 67
• CHAPTER 4. Manifestations of Institutional Barriers in SchoolEnterprise Cooperation in Vocational Education 69
• 4.1 Manifestations of gaps in talent development 71
• 4.1.1 Difficulties in translating training objectives into job requirements 72
• 4.1.2 Insufficient connection between course content and real work tasks 74
• 4.1.3 Conflict between practical teaching arrangements and enterprise production rhythm 76
• 4.1.4 The dual-mentor collaboration and on-site guidance mechanism is unstable 78
• 4.1.5 Inconsistent competency assessment standards 79
• 4.2 Manifestations of the Gap Between Interests and Evaluation 82
• 4.2.1 Enterprise input costs are not visible 83
• 4.2.2 The evaluation of school achievements is biased towards project-based and material-based approaches. 84
• 4.2.3 Long return cycle and unstable retention expectations for enterprises 86
• 4.2.4 Inconsistency between school employment evaluation and enterprise recruitment evaluation 87
• 4.2.5 The evaluation results are difficult to use to improve the cultivation process 89
• 4.3 Manifestations of gaps in policy support 91
• 4.3.1 There is a disconnect between policy advocacy and implementation rules 92
• 4.3.2 The terms of the cooperation agreement are too general and lack operability 93
• 4.3.3 Unclear Boundaries of Responsibility Sharing Between Schools and Enterprises 94
• 4.3.4 Insufficient incentive fulfillment affects the company's continued investment 96
• 4.3.5 Collaborative operation relies on key individuals and project promotion 97
• CHAPTER 5. An Analysis of the Barrier Formation Mechanism from the Perspective of Scott's Three Pillars of Institutions 100
• 5.1 Regulatory Pillars: Rules exist but are difficult to internalize into a stable execution chain 100
• 5.2 Normative Pillars: Different Standards for Effective Cooperation Lead to Misalignment of Responsibility and Evaluation 106
• 5.3 Cultural Cognitive Pillars: Collaborative Education Has Not Yet Become a Fully Accepted Daily Understanding 112
• 5.4 Mechanisms for Persistence of Barriers Under the Intertwining of Three Pillars 117
• CHAPTER 6. Discussion and Conclusion 123
• 6.1 Comprehensive Discussion of Research Findings 123
• 6.2 Significance of the Research 130
• 6.3 Innovations and Limitations of the Research 137
• 6.3.1 Research Innovation Points 137
• 6.3.2 Research Limitations and Prospects 139
• 6.4 Conclusion 143
• References 147
• Appendix 151