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The term 'transition system' describes features of a country's institutional arrangements which shape young people's education-work transitions. It explains why national differences in transition processes and outcomes persist despite apparent pressures for convergence. This paper asks how the concept of transition system has been conceptualised and operationalised by researchers, especially quantitative researchers analysing comparative survey data. It uses a four-level conceptual framework which is implicit in much of this research. Micro-level transition processes and outcomes (Level 1) may be aggregated or summarised to show national transition patterns (Level 2), which may be explained in terms of dimensions of national institutional variation (Level 3) or typologies of transition systems (Level 4). Research into transition systems can boast of empirical, theoretical and policy-related achievements, but it has been constrained by data limitations and theoretical eclecticism. It needs to develop theoretical frameworks to explain how transition systems themselves change and to move beyond a view of nation-states as homogeneous and independent units of analysis.