ABSTRACT
It was ideology and politics rather than a desire to improve training which explains the complicated organizational metamorphoses which occurred between 1987 and 1990 in the British training market. In brief, the change from Manpower Services to Training Commission was motivated by the political consideration of removing the Employment Service back into the Department of Employment, and the change from TC to TA in 1988 resulted from the government’s impatience with what it perceived as growing trade union obstructionism on the MSC. It is necessary to examine the period because training programmes and initiatives continued, and it is valuable to analyse the political forces which underpinned the unusual organizational discontinuities. So far as training programmes are concerned, the period is dominated by the Employment Training (ET) controversy. It was the controversy about ET which led directly to the decision to remove the Commission and to change the organization’s title to the Training Agency. If the period from 1981-9 was marked by governmental experimentation with supply-side economics, through a state-led initiative to address the national skills shortage problem, the apparent failure to solve the problem produced an ideological reaction in favour of an employer-led free-market approach.
