ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a simple model for analysing how tensions between the academic and vocational elements are present as well as produced, handled as well as transcended, in the education and training of professions. It offers a brief historical sketch of how different generations of professions were incorporated into the Swedish university system. The chapter distinguishes three different modes of aligning vocational and academic elements in professional training, providing a context for discussion and findings from research on a number of academic vocational programmes, social work, police, coaching and sports management, human resource management, at a new university in Sweden. Among the three principal modes of alignment, the sequential model, with its temporal and institutional separation of academic and vocational training, is the first to emerge in the university setting and the historical tendency is that it is supplemented by other forms.
