This dissertation analyzes and compares how empirical markets for intermediate skills operate under different governance regimes. The central question was: how do markets for intermediate skills operate in Germany, the U.S. and the Netherlands? What options for vocational education and training (VET) exist; which rules and actors govern these options; and how does the interaction of these rules and actors help to explain the actual choices of young people and employers regarding VET? The institutional order, actors’ strategies, and their interaction, were analyzed for markets for intermediate skills in (West-) Germany, the American state of Wisconsin, and the Netherlands as they operated in the early and mid nineteen nineties. The central argument of this book is that empirical markets for intermediate skills indeed governed by multiple, interacting governance mechanisms, which constitute a particular governance regime. At the very least, an effective analysis of VET governance regimes considers at least four potentially equivalent coordinating mechanisms: market mechanisms, hierarchies, states, and associational governance. Different governance regimes result in different strategies available to actors and/or in different expected benefits to similar strategies. In this sense, institutions can help explain different behavior by similar actors in different markets. Simultaneously, actors in training markets are not just passive respondents to incentives posed by certain external rules. Actors have their own action orientation, their own conception of control on how to operate effectively in their environment to acquire the skilled workforce they need. Such conceptions of control are influenced by past and present institutional aspects of the actor’s environment (e.g. the industrial relations system in which they operate) and the incentives it implies in terms of the expected benefits of certain strategies. But conceptions of control are also interdependent: action orientations of some actors will in turn help ...