Social Hierarchy and Group Solidarity: The Meanings of Work and Vocation/Profession in the Chinese Context and their Implications for Vocational Education

摘要

The Chinese characters for culture, education, profession/vocation and work provide important information on the socio-historical background of the concepts represented by them. Particularly the concepts of work and education have profound implications for the idea of vocational education. Based on an etymological and semantic analysis of the characters, and through the introduction of a typical example of Chinese work organisation, the work unit or danwei, this paper shows correspondences between the past and the present organisation of work. It also shows that semantic analyses, when ignoring the socio-cultural context, may lead to a distorted picture of the society concerned. This is demonstrated by the example of the concepts of "order" and "harmony".