Abstract:

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the country’s labor education policy has undergone four stages of change:incremental change, disruptive change,integrative change,and substantive change. The macro-level factors influencing the changes in China’s labor education policy include the centralization of political control over the policy direction,the transformation of the economic system promoting changes in the policy content,and the formation of mainstream labor cultural values providing the soil for the survival of labor education policies. The path dependence of labor education policy in China is influenced by actors’learning effects,policy coordination effects,and actors’adaptive expectations. The driving force behind the changes in labor education policy comes from the state’s leadership and the labor education practice experience of local governments and schools. To optimize the path of labor education policy,feasible strategies include leveraging the guiding and promoting role of the “deep structure” in policy change,rationally examining the “path dependence” of labor education policies,and constructing a decision-making mechanism for labor education policy that is “government-led with multi-stakeholder participation”.

Key words: labor education, policy change, historical institutionalism