ABSTRACT
Indicators of ‘successful’ transitions between education and work, such as youth employment rates, vary widely across countries. So do other processes and outcomes of transition such as the duration of transitions, the speed with which new entrants converge towards adult labour-market patterns, the association between education and employment outcomes and social, gender and ethnic inequalities. These variations are not all due to compositional factors such as the different educational distributions of young people in each country. Nor can they all be attributed to the macroeconomic context, such as different national employment rates. At least some of the variation in countries’ transition processes and outcomes reflects what researchers have variously called ‘institutional arrangements’ (Kerckhoff 1995), ‘institutional effects’ (Shavit and Müller 1998), ‘transition systems’ (Rosenbaum et al. 1990), ‘coordination regimes’ (Hillmert 2002) and ‘institutional filters’ (Blossfeld et al., 2005). Here I use the term ‘transition system’ to describe ‘the relatively enduring features of a country’s institutional and structural arrangements which shape transition processes and outcomes’ (Smyth et al. 2001: 19). In this chapter, I describe some of the main ideas and achievements of research on transition systems, drawing especially on analyses of longitudinal transition surveys.
