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Yu Sun, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongAbstract
Vocational education in China occupies a paradoxical position: officially promoted as a driver for industrial upgrading, yet deeply stigmatized as a second-tier educational track. Existing scholarship has largely focused on how macro-structural forces reproduce social inequalities or, more recently, on individual student-level resistance. However, there is limited understanding of how vocational schools themselves, as complex organizations, exercise agency. To address this meso-level gap, this study employs a multi-layered institutional agency framework. Based on an 8-month ethnography in a Chengdu vocational college, the research investigates how institutional agency is distributed and negotiated across school leadership, departmental governance, and teacher groups. Analysis reveals that institutional agency is enacted contradictorily. On one hand, school leaders collaborate with non-formal actors to initiate transformative, humanistic practices aimed at student empowerment. However, these initiatives are systematically undermined by the persistent reproductive logics of departmental governance. We find the critical mechanism is not ideological resistance, but the organizational force of performativity. This constrains teacher autonomy, compelling them to prioritize measurable structural demands of the labor market and performance metrics over the ambitious humanistic reforms. The study thus argues that this schooling process generates isolated spaces of hope that remain institutionally decoupled from the mechanisms of social reproduction dominating daily practice. By unpacking this processual and multi-layered agency, this research moves beyond structural determinism and offers critical, practical insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to foster genuine and inclusive innovation in China’s vocational education system.
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