Career Development

A Life-span Developmental Approach

Fred W. Vondracek, Richard M. Lerner, John E. Schulenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317739302
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

This book places career development into the mainstream of human development research and theory. The result is a powerful synthesis of vocational psychology and the most recent advances in lifespan developmental psychology, thus offering a developmental-contextual framework for guiding theory and research in career development. Its chapters demonstrate the utility of this framework for the study of women's career development, health and careers, career intervention, and the selection and application of appropriate research methodologies. Scholars as well as intervention specialists should find this volume to be of great value. The adaption of this developmental-contextual framework for career development theory, research, and intervention may represent an important future for vocational psychology and the study of career development.

1	Vocational Behavior and Career Development: An Introduction

Industrialized Western societies have been built on a foundation represented by the work and productivity of their populations. The success of industrialized nations in producing great wealth and economic rewards for their citizens was possible only because these same citizens—for whatever reasons—accepted work as their central occupation in life. Today, work is viewed as an imperative not only for socioeconomic well-being but also for physical and psychological well-being. Moreover, recent statistics suggest that in the United States individuals tend to make a more permanent commitment to their work than to their first marital partner. Havighurst (1982) commenting on the meaning and importance of work, put it this way:

The job … orients and controls the behavior of those persons who participate in it. It sets a goal for the worker, determines the manner in which the goal may be attained and the reward offered for its achievement, and affects the whole range of his/her participation in the society of which s/he is a member. Its influences extend even beyond the actual work life of the individual. We also find that the part of his/her adult life not spent in work is, nonetheless, affected.… In short the job in our society exerts an influence which pervades the whole of the adult life span. (p. 780)

Not surprisingly, then, there is a growing interest among social and behavioral scientists, business and industry, and policymakers at all levels of government to develop a more thorough understanding of the processes that govern individuals’ selection of occupations as well as their subsequent performance in those occupations. There also is great interest in how and why people change occupations, and how they eventually disengage from their occupation to—at least in some cases—develop a leisure career or other means of benefiting from the fruits of their work life. There is growing concern about the consequences of working in one occupation or another for the general well-being of the individual. Finally, there is great interest in how vocational and career development proceeds as part of the process of life-span human development in general.

All of these issues and concerns can and have been addressed from a number of different perspectives. They cut across social, psychological, and biological levels of analysis. Ultimately, they can be understood fully only when studied within a model that recognizes the interaction of multiple relevant characteristics of individuality with multiple contexts and environments across the life-span of the individual. Clearly, this represents a most comprehensive and extremely complex requirement, one that inevitably must lead to the conclusions that the study of vocational and career development must not be isolated from the study of other domains of human functioning and must take place from an interdisciplinary perspective.

A number of different disciplines have, in fact, made major contributions to our understanding of vocational and career development. Crites (1969) defines vocational psychology as “the study of vocational behavior and development” (p. 16), but goes on to note that vocational psychology overlaps significantly with (a) industrial psychology, which focuses on solving work-related problems in order to achieve efficiency and productivity; (b) occupational sociology, which sees the occupation as a social institution and uses it as its unit of analysis; and (c) vocational guidance, which facilitates and assists the individual in choosing and adjusting to an occupation (pp. 19–23). Other emphases, especially within psychology, have been concerned with vocational and career development. For example, Bandura’s (1969) social learning theory became the basis of a social learning approach to career development, proposed by Krumboltz and his associates (Mitchell, Jones, & Krumboltz, 1979). In turn, developmental psychology represented the most important knowledge base for the influential theories of Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951), Tiedeman and O’Hara (1963), and Super (1953, 1957), whereas various types of personality theory provided the bases for Roe’s (1956) theory of career choice and Holland’s typology theory of vocational behavior (Holland, 1959, 1973).

None of these theories have succeeded in integrating completely current knowledge on vocational and career development. Many have concerned themselves primarily with occupational choice rather than career development (Super, 1980), and most have been unable to present a theory sensitive to the historically and ontogenetically changing contexts of life, as well as to the multidimensional nature of the individual’s vocational and career development (Markham, 1983; Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1983a).

More specific criticisms of the major, current career theories recently have been summarized by Sonnenfeld and Kotter (1982). First, although acknowledging that occupational sociologists have made an important contribution in demonstrating the relationship between parental occupation, status, and wealth, on the one hand, and the income attained by their children, on the other, they note that researchers in this area often have neglected to take into account important changes over time in the social status of occupations, in the distribution of the population in different occupations, and in individuals themselves. Second, Sonnenfeld and Kotter, in reviewing trait/type career theories indicate that researchers in this area, most notably Holland (1959, 1973), have succeeded “somewhat” in establishing relationships between individuals’ personality traits and the occupations they chose. Nevertheless, they point out that at the same time trait/type researchers are unlikely to take account of the fact that traits and the demands of the workplace change. They also note that trait/type researchers tend to utilize “unrealistically simple and static” conceptualizations of the occupational environment. Third, regarding career stage theories, Sonnenfeld and Kotter decry the lack of attention to the “dynamic interaction” between the work and nonwork aspects of life and to the individual’s prior life history. Focusing on the work of Super (Super, Crites, Hummel, Moser, Overstreet, & Warnath, 1957) and Schein (1971), they acknowledge that these stage theories reflect more dynamic formulations than those of the occupational sociologists and the trait/type researchers; nevertheless Sonnenfeld and Kotter indicate that these stage theorists still fall short in the sense that they view the individual as rather passive.

The final category of career theory reviewed by Sonnenfeld and Kotter is described as a life-cycle approach. It is the most recent addition to the career theory field, and the position most akin to the one we take in this book. The main features of life-cycle approaches include concern with almost the entire life-span and a more comprehensive focus on what Sonnenfeld and Kotter (1982) call “the three major aspects of life: Work, family, and the individual” (p. 30). Interestingly, this approach, much more than any other, has focused on adult vocational behavior rather than on the focus of most other research, that is, vocational choice. Key studies by Gould (1972), Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, and McKee (1974), and Vaillant (1977), all focusing on adults, have been credited with being instrumental in the development of the life-cycle approach. The main criticism leveled at this approach by Sonnenfeld and Kotter is that it has not fully realized its potential. Thus, although this approach acknowledges that a large and complex set of factors interact dynamically in determining the course of careers, empirical studies have been too limited in scope, have suffered from sample limitations, have frequently ignored nonwork behaviors, have focused on male subjects only, and have used longitudinal time frames that are too short to appraise the full, life course patterning of career development.

These criticisms of life-cycle approaches raise the issue of whether it is necessary or even desirable to approach vocational and career development in its full complexity. One answer to that question has recently emerged in a number of articles that represent an innovative approach in the field of vocational psychology. For example, Markham (1983) has recently called for more complex models, noting that the simpler, typically normative models, such as that of Holland (1973), are unable to cope with idiographic variation or with what Markham calls the social milieu. He also points out that the popularity of simpler models may well be due to the fact that they lend themselves to simpler research designs or easy approaches to measurement.

The most eloquent advocacy of a comprehensive, “life-span, life-space approach to career development” has come from Super (1980) in the form of a major expansion of his conception of career development. Although not a detailed revision of his self-concept stage theory of career development, Super’s (1980) more recent statements (see also Super & Knasel, 1981) have been made “in the hope that [they] … will lead to theories which are more comprehensive than the segmental theories which now dominate the field” (p. 283). In another paper Super (1981) states that:

Theorists still tend to focus, perhaps legitimately in view of the size of their problem, on segmental theories. Each is thus generally considered to neglect other aspects of theory, other aspects of career development, and career behavior. Those who do seek to encompass more suffer from the appearance of superficiality. But some day global theories of career development will be made up of refined, validated, and well assembled segments, cemented together by some synthesizing theory to constitute a whole that will be more powerful than the sum of its parts, (p. 39)

Consistent with Super’s endorsement of comprehensiveness and complexity, Sonnenfeld and Kotter (1982) have presented, in outline form, a model of career development that accounts for the life space of the individual by recognizing both the individual/personal space (ontogenetic development) and the work and nonwork contexts within which the individual functions. They state emphatically that more attempts need to be made to account for the entire life space of the individual, with all its complex interrelationships, and that more needs to be done to integrate findings and concepts from all existing theories of career development. (In Chapter 4 another version of just such a model, originally developed by Lerner and Lerner, 1983, is presented.)

The present authors (Vondracek & Lerner, 1982; Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1983a, 1983b) also have proposed that a new conceptual view of vocational and career development is needed. Specifically, we have urged the development of a conceptual model that recognizes and incorporates important advances in our understanding of the concept of life-span development. Furthermore, we have urged the inclusion of a developmental contextual perspective that recognizes the changing character of the individual’s social, physical, and cultural milieus. Thus, we have argued that vocational and career development can be fully understood only from a relational perspective that focuses on the dynamic interaction between a changing (developing) individual in a changing context.

In sum, recently numerous authors have stressed a number of themes that, in our view, may indeed presage what Sonnenfeld and Kotter (1982) have called the maturation of career theory. First, there appears to be a growing recognition that vocational and career development is a life-span phenomenon. This is probably due in part to the emergence of life-span developmental psychology as a subspecialty of psychology and its emergence as a prominent influence within the broader multidisciplinary field of human development (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980). In part, however, it is very likely also due to the fact that changes in Western society have produced conditions that focus attention on adult career development, such as late career commencement in women with older children, mid-life career changes, and the career contingencies and decisions faced by older people. In other words, the career decisions of youth are viewed as only early, and perhaps not even the initial ones, in a series of career decisions made during a lifetime. As a consequence there is a growing recognition that vocational and career development need to be understood within the framework of a life-long developmental phenomenon, characterized by both continuity and discontinuity. Just as life-span developmental psychology has deemphasized the study of development in segmented (usually age-determined) periods, such as infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and has articulated the need to study processes in a time-extended fashion, so must vocational psychology progress toward conceptualizations of time-related change in vocational behavior across the life-span.

A second theme that appears to be emerging is that vocational and career developments are properly studied from a multidisciplinary perspective. For example, Garbin and Stover (1980) state that “the complexities of vocational behavior are of such enormity that fuller understanding is more likely if interdisciplinary studies are undertaken” (p. 124). Osipow (1983) has noted that “fruitful career development theory will take shape within the larger context of human development …” (p. 324; which itself is a multidisciplinary field). This emerging shift toward a multidisciplinary approach to vocational and career development may well be a function of a more general paradigm shift in the scientific community toward synthesis and integration (Schwartz, 1982). Writing specifically about issues in the study of health and illness, Schwartz notes that single-category, single-cause, single-effect models are being replaced by multicategory, multicause, multieffect models. The same appears to be true in the career development field, as evidenced by recent attempts to formulate complex multivariate conceptual perspectives (Markham, 1983; Sonnenfeld & Kotter, 1982; Super, 1980; Vondracek & Lerner, 1982; Vondracek et al., 1983a).

The move toward a life-span perspective also underscores the necessity for the integration of multidisciplinary approaches into a unified interdisciplinary theory. Lerner and Hultsch (1983) have noted that such integration requires merging ideas from within those disciplines that focus primarily on the individual (e.g., molecular biology/genetics, physiology, and psychology) with those that focus primarily on the group (social psychology, sociology, and anthropology). Osipow (1983) sees such integration as occurring as part of an emerging “systems view of career behavior” (p. 314). More specifically, he noted that such a systems view:

explicitly recognizes that various situational and individual factors operate to influence career behavior in a broad way. With a highly sophisticated systems approach to career development, questions about the role of the biological, social, and situational factors in occupational behavior would become more explicit and … understandings of the interactions between these views would be more likely to emerge, (p. 314)

The ultimate result of embracing an interdisciplinary, systems theory-type view of career development will be a shift from simplicity to complexity, from relatively simple models (e.g., Holland, 1973; Super, 1953) to more complex ones (e.g., Holland & Gottfredson, 1981; Super, 1980). Of course, as Markham (1983) notes, complex models do not lend themselves to simple research designs or easy approaches to measurement. In our view they are not inherently better than simple models unless they can be shown to lead to empirically unique and more useful information. Nevertheless, there appears to have been a tendency in the field of vocational behavior in recent years to favor those approaches that have operationalized concepts via the introduction of measurement instruments. This may be cause for concern if it inhibits the development of theories that are more rather than less complex. Theory ought to lead to the development of measures, and one’s theorizing ought not to be limited by the well-known difficulties involved in operationalizing and measuring complex concepts, nor should theory be confined to using concepts for which well-designed measurement instruments happen to be available.

A third theme that has been emerging rather strongly during the last few years is a contextual perspective, which is now viewed as essential for gaining an understanding of vocational and career development. Thus, in their review of vocational behavior and career development, Fretz and Leong (1982) conclude by observing that “understanding both the unique and interactive contributions of environmental and organizational, as well as organismic, variables to the development and implementation of careers may well be a challenge we can meet in the 1980s” (p. 152).

Fretz and Leong’s optimism may well be justified by recent work in the field. For example, Super (1980) has proposed that career development be conceptualized as taking place as the individual chooses and shapes a variety of work and nonwork related roles in essentially four theaters (environments): the home, the community, the school, and the workplace. Moreover, he recognizes that situational determinants may play an important part alongside personal determinants in shaping the individual’s life career. Among the situational determinants Super differentiates between those he classifies as remote determinants (i.e., social structure and economic conditions) and those he classifies as intermediate determinants (i.e., community, family). This explicit attention to the impact of the environment on career development represents a major (and from our perspective welcome) expansion of Super’s original conceptualizations.

Sonnenfeld and Kotter (1982) have recognized the impact of the environment by constructing a model of the individual’s life space, made up of Work/Occupational Space (Educational Environment, Work History, and Current Work Situation) and Nonwork/Family Space (Childhood Family Environment, Adult Family/Nonwork History, Current Family/Nonwork Situations). In their model, these two sets of environments represent the context for the Individual/Personal Space that includes all of the person’s characteristics of individuality, including genetic factors, personality, adult development history, and current perspectives. Moreover, Sonnenfeld and Kotter have gone to considerable length in suggesting the various kinds of interactions that occur among the various individual and contextual factors.

Finally, Vondracek and Lerner (1982) have urged that the social (including political and economic), physical, and cultural milieu must be considered in studying vocational and career development. Vondracek and Lerner (1982) stress that:

this contextual focus also needs to be developmental … in order to discern the altering character of the context in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Vocational Behavior and Career Development: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Concept of Development
• Chapter 3 The Context of Career Development
• Chapter 4 A Life-Span Developmental Approach to Career Development
• Chapter 5 Career Development: The Sample Case of Adolescence
• Chapter 6 Toward a Methodological Agenda for the Study of Vocational Behavior and Career Development
• Chapter 7 The Career Development of Women
• Chapter 8 Career Development and Health
• Chapter 9 Intervention in Vocational Behavior and Career Development
• Author Index
• Subject Index