Rebecca YeSenior lecturer
About me
Rebecca's research takes place at the intersection of education and labour worlds, and pays special attention to vocations, transitions, trajectories and temporality. Understanding how social processes reduce or generate (un)equal outcomes in and around educational organisations, and especially in situations of uncertainty, has been a focal point in her research. Through these endeavours, she has been afforded opportunities to analyse education-to-work pathways that are institutionalised as well as pathways that are emerging and anticipatory. Her research spans educational processes and organisations with long histories (*elite institutions), newer educational forms (*higher vocational education), and processes that are undergoing change (*transnational education strategies, skilling regimes, educational transitions).
Rebecca is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education and Researcher at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (SCORE), Stockholm University. In previous years, she has been a visiting academic at the Nanyang Technological University and the UCL Institute of Education. Before life in academia, Rebecca worked in the foreign service as well as conducted research for policy and practice at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Institute for Adult Learning in Singapore. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Stockholm University and Master of Science in Sociology at the University of Oxford.
Research projects at the crossroads of the sociology of education and work:
In the past decade, one of the core areas of Rebecca's research has been examining the coordination and valuation of short-cycle accelerated education and training for problem-solving long, societal challenges and transformations. In a project funded by the Swedish Research Council, Rebecca and her team drew on register data, interview data and archival material, to examine the expansion of higher vocational education (yrkeshögskolan) in Sweden. The project combines approaches from sociology, demography and education to examine processes of differentiation and selection in participation, how changes in participation are taking place alongside expansion and population changes, and how justifications for higher vocational education participation are enacted within local labour markets.
Rebecca has also researched on the traversal of education to work transitions into weak-form occupations, as well as how skilling is enacted as a technique for performing preparedness in times of crises. In Autumn of 2025, she will launch CYCLE, a project that examines how short-cycle accelerated education and training is mobilised for the green transition.
In a second stream of research, Rebecca revisited the notion of "sponsored mobility" by examining a specific type of education to work trajectory: one where students are selected early and sponsored to study abroad in elite universities, with the obligation to return to their home country to take on a vocation in the public service. The project analyses institutional stability and change in a national scholarship programme and identifies the kinds of modification in the valorisation of knowledge acquired by future governing elites over time.
Rebecca is part of a six-year multidisciplinary research environment project, PLACES, funded by the Swedish Research Council, that examines how educational transitions are shaped by boundaries and places for first-generation migrant children and youth.
At SCORE, Rebecca has been working on a strategic inititative, "Organizing Education", and will continue developing this research agenda over the years 2025-2028. She has served on several advisory and editorial boards such as the International Studies in Sociology of Education, Stockholm Centre for Global Asia, and Springer Lifelong Learning Book Series, been part of and chaired expert panels for research funding, and has also served as a reader and on grading committees for PhD projects.
More on Rebecca's ongoing research and publications can be found here.
Teaching
Rebecca is course leader for Theory of Science, a mandatory course on the international masters programme, that interrogates how we know what we know - in the context of comparative and educational research.
Her teaching engagements span the undergraduate to PhD levels. She has led in a course where educational planning is critically examined and reflected on, been part of teaching teams involved in methods training (introductory and in-depth), specialised literature, education and development, courses on educational policy, international perspectives and comparative education, and being a researcher in society.
Earlier at SU's Department of Sociology, Rebecca taught on Sociological Theory, methods and sociological analyses courses, as well as on the cross-departmental masters programme in human relations on sociological perspectives on organizations.
Rebecca has supervised undergraduate theses and master theses, and is main and co-supervisor for a range of PhD research projects at Stockholm University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology that cover topics from student movements and collective action to national scholarship programmes and the internationalisation of higher education.
Research
Selected publications
Ye, Rebecca and Yasmin Y. Ortiga. (2025). Stockpiling, forecasting and protecting skills: Skilling as technique of preparedness in times of crises. Current Sociology, online first https://doi.org/10.1177/001139212513476
Ye, Rebecca and Erik Nylander (Forthcoming). Challenging Merit: Analysing competences in research on vocational education through convention theory. Historical Social Research.
Ye, Rebecca. (Forthcoming). “Vocationalism at higher levels of education”. In Sidhu, R., Waters, J. and Cheng, Y-E. (Eds.) Elgar International Encyclopedia of Sociology of Education. Edward Elgar.
Imdorf, Christian; Böker, Arne; Normand, Romuald; Schnejiderberg, Christian & Ye, Rebecca. (Forthcoming). “Education and Conventions: Potentials, Empirical Findings, Challenges and Desiderata of Convention Theory in Education”. Historical Social Research.
Ye, Rebecca and Erik Nylander (2024). Conventions of skilling: The plural and prospective worlds of higher vocational education. European Educational Research Journal, 23(5), 709-727.
Ye, Rebecca. (2024). “Convention theory and education to work transitions”. In Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions, ed. Rainer Diaz-Bone and Guillemette de Larquier. Springer.
Ye, Rebecca. (2024). "The transformation of anticipatory governance in skilling regimes". Keynote Address at the 13th Researching Work & Learning Conference.
Ye, Rebecca, and Erik Nylander. (2023). “The Scholars: Talent management techniques and gender inequality in state-sponsored scholarships”. In Tayeb, A., Metro, R. & Brehm, W. (Eds.) Education and Power in Contemporary Southeast Asia. Routledge.
Chudnovskaya, Margarita, Erik Nylander, and Rebecca Ye. (2023). “Skills and adult educational choice: Gender (in)equality in a new form of Swedish vocational education”. In Tåhlin, M. (Ed.) A Research Agenda for Skills and Inequality. Edward Elgar.
Ye, Rebecca, Chudnovskaya, Margarita and Erik Nylander (2022). Right competence at the right time -- but for whom? Social recruitment of participants in an expanding higher vocational education segment in Sweden (2005-2019). Adult Education Quarterly, 72(4), 380-400.
Ye, Rebecca (2022). Testing elite transnational education and contesting orders of worth in the face of a pandemic. Educational Review, 74(3), 704-719.
Ye, Rebecca. (2021). Schooling for government: institutionalised sponsored mobility and trajectories of public service scholarship recipients in Singapore (1979-2018). Journal of Education and Work, 34(4), 518-532.
Ye, Rebecca. (2021). Rituals of vocational socialisation: faith-building in higher vocational education for weak-form occupational pathways. Vocations and Learning, 14(2), 353-368.
Ye, Rebecca and Erik Nylander. (2021). Deservedness, humbleness and chance: conceptualisations of luck and academic success among Singaporean elite students. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 30(4), 401-421.
Ye, Rebecca. (2020). Reality tests: navigating education to work transitions into weak-form occupations. Journal of Education and Work, 33(3), 242–253.
Ye, Rebecca. (2018). The Aspirants: How Faith is built in Emerging Occupations. Stockholm Studies in Sociology, New Series no. 73. (Doctoral dissertation, monograph).
Ye, Rebecca. (2016). Transnational Higher Education Strategies into and out of Singapore: Commodification and Consecration. Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 4(1), 85-108.
Ye, Rebecca, and Erik Nylander. (2015). The transnational track: state sponsorship and Singapore’s Oxbridge elite. British Journal of Sociology of Education 36(1), 11-33.*
*This article was awarded the best early career researcher paper in BJSE and has subsequently been included as a chapter in the following books:
Elites in Education: Major Themes in Education, edited by Agnes van Zaten (2018)
New Sociologies of Elite Schooling, edited by Jane Kenway and Aaron Koh (2017)
Selected public scholarship pieces
Ye, Rebecca (2021). Lucky in a meritocracy? Examining conceptualisations of luck and academic success in Singapore. AcademiaSG.
Ye, Rebecca (2020). Student migration during a global health pandemic. Discover Society.
Research projects
Sociologist of education and work