Career Construction Theory and Life Writing

Narrative and Autobiographical Thinking across the Professions

Hywel Dix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367550967
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000197105
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume applies the insight and methods of career construction theory to explore how autobiographical writing is used in different professional careers, from fiction and journalism to education and medicine. It draws attention to the fact that a career is a particular kind of artefact with distinctive properties and features that can be analysed and compared, and puts forward a new theory of the relationship between narrative methodology and the vocation of writing.

Career construction theory emerged in the late twentieth century, when changes to the patterns of our working lives caused large numbers of people to seek new forms of vocational guidance to navigate those changes. It employs a narrative paradigm in which periods of uncertainty are treated as experiences akin to 'writer's block', experiences which can be overcome first by imagining new character arcs, then by narrating them and finally by performing them. By encouraging clients to see their careers as stories of which they are both the metaphorical authors and the main protagonists, career construction counsellors enable them to envisage the next chapter in those stories. But despite the authorial metaphor, career construction theory has not been widely applied to analysis of professional careers in writing. The chapters in this volume remedy that gap and in various ways apply the insights of career construction theory to analyse the relationship between writing and professional life in diverse careers where writing is used.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Life Writing.

OPEN ACCESS

From Writer's Block to Extended Plot: Career Construction Theory and Lives in Writing

Hywel Dix

ABSTRACT

Although intangible, authorial careers are nevertheless material entities that have to be constructed in order to exist and that can be analysed to generate critical understanding of the creative works produced within them. Yet until recently, very little research or scholarly attention had been devoted to the concept of the authorial career as such. This paper argues that the body of work known as career construction theory, which originated in social psychology at the end of the twentieth century, can be used to discuss authorial careers in order to illuminate the relationship between life stages and writing practice in new ways. This is because career construction posits individuals as metaphorical ‘authors’ of their own life stories, with career counsellors acting as co-authors of the next chapter in an individual’s career narrative during times of career uncertainty or vocational change. By identifying certain life themes – or macro-narratives – that transcend the concerns or issues that preoccupy authors at precise stages in their careers (or micro-narratives), it draws attention to a complex dual time frame on which authorial careers are based, emphasising a combination of sameness and difference over time.

In a recent study of modern literary careers Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans (2015, 3) suggest that among the different sub-branches of literary study, research into authorial careers remains underdeveloped. This underdevelopment implies a relative neglect of the concept of an authorial career as a discernible artefact that, although intangible in a physical sense, nevertheless has certain material properties and characteristics that can be identified and analysed in order to generate new understanding of the writing process. Over the long term such neglect was partly a result of the dominance of Anglo-American New Criticism during the mid-twentieth century; the key position occupied by Barthes’s commitmentto the ‘death’ of theauthor within French theory; and even Foucault’s treatment of the author as a ‘function’of wider networks. Although critical attention has subsequently ‘returned’ to the figure of the author in a variety of ways(Burke 2008,89), the materiality of the authorial career as such remains under-conceptualised.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

This paper argues that the body of work broadly referred to as career construction theory provides a rich, flexible and potentially auspicious set of critical resources for generating a better understanding of a writer’s career. A short first section charts the evolution of career construction as a practice that emerged out of earlier forms of vocational guidance in the early and mid twentieth century in response to the altered economic and cultural conditions of the turn of the century and since. As will become clear in subsequent sections, the transition from a quantitative counselling practice based on numerical scores and psychometric profiles towards a narrative practice that is more qualitative in nature parallels the transition that has taken place within literary scholarship away from a conception of the author as somehow immune to critical consideration towards new forms of engagement, emphasising both dialogism and connectedness. This parallel is highly suggestive of a potentially fruitful intersection between career construction theory and authorship research, a potential that becomes even greater given the literary metaphors that pervade career construction theory. For example, one of the leading exponents of career construction theory, Mark Savickas, summarises it in the following way:

When individuals seek career counseling they have stories to tell about their working lives. The stories usually tell how they have been dislocated from an occupational plot that they had been pursuing or about how they have completed a chapter in their career stories and need to turn a new page. Clients seek assistance from employment counselors to overcome the writer’s block or narrative confusion that they experience as they move into the next chapter of their career story. (Savickas 2011b, 179)

Career construction practitioners liken periods of change and uncertainty within their clients’ careers to forms of writer’s block. The career counselling relationship then posits counsellors and their clients as joint authors of new chapters in a gradually unfolding story, of which the client is simultaneously the reader and the protagonist. This means thatthe literary component of career constructionism is not merely a suggestive metaphor for identifying different outlines of potential careers but is rather a fundamental aspect of the narrative method by which career counsellors and their clients conceptualise different career stages in a manner that was not possible using the methods of earlier forms of vocational guidance.

Beyond the suggestive parallel histories of vocational guidance and authorial research mentioned above, and beyond also the preponderance of metaphors of authorship within career construction theory, there is also a third basis on which career construction has the potential to be used to conceptualise life writing in new and innovative ways. Career construction treats clients seeking employment guidance as so many authors seeking to identify and develop new plot lines and hence produce a new form of narrative. In the case of life writing, though, this comparison is neither purely metaphoric nor abstractly conceptual because it is already material instantiated in the precise career in question. In other words, as the final section of the paper will argue, when career construction theory is brought into the domain of life writing research, it has the potential to emerge as a new way of thinking about the relationship between lived experience and writing practice. As will become clear, the term career in career construction theory should be interpreted widely – it is not simply about selecting jobs, roles or professional fields. It refers to people’s vocational and ethical choices much more generally, including the roles they play and decisions they make outside their immediate working environment. It also creates opportunities for identifying thematic interests and the relationship between work and life during particular life stages. Before exploring this possibility in detail it is necessary to discuss the historical emergence of career constructionism and its major components.

Background and contexts

Like any discipline, career counselling is a field with a discernible material history. According to Kobus Maree, the first ‘helping model’available to people in their working lives was that of so-called ‘friendly volunteers’ (Maree 2013, 18). During the period 1850–1910, an increasing number of agricultural workers in Western societies left the farms and estates on which they had worked to seek other forms of urban employment and were advised on an ad hoc basis by people whom they perceived to have a greater level of prior experience in the new environments. That this period also coincided in time with the emergence of the work of Sigmund Freud is also noted by Maree, who sees in this coincidence possible evidence of a growing turn towards the psychological dimension of modern counselling (although he also notes certain limitations of the Freudian model). Maree suggests that vocational guidance as such was invented by Frank Parsons in 1908 in response to the needs of a changing population and workforce two generations after the Industrial Revolution. A third ‘wave’ in the history of the field came about after the Second World War, with the growth of international corporations characterised by new ‘bureaucratic hierarchies’ that often left people uncertain about their place and role in a given organisation so that ‘vocational guidance personnel’ became re-created as ‘career counsellors’ (Maree 2013, 19).

Of most importance to the emergence of career construction theory is Maree’s fourth wave. Thisis a phase within the historyof careers education corresponding to a new stage in the history of industrial society and hencein social relationships. It is a stage that Mark Savickas (1993, 205)has referred to as the ‘postmodern economy’ of the last decadeof the twentieth century, a time when many of the working conditions and career assumptions that characterised the earlier periods had either vanished or been fundamentally transformed so that the expectation of steady employment in a single industry had been replaced by a greater prevalence of flexibility and change. Accordingly, career theories that emphasise stability and continuity are unlikely to be of use to clients seeking career guidance, especially when compared with approaches that emphasise the management of a changing career. According to Mary McMahon and Mark Watson (2011, 148), the development of career construction theory was accelerated following the publication of Larry Cochran’s Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach in 1997 in order to meet this new need. Maree (2013, v) suggests that the new practice was then developed to a higher degree of elaboration in the work of Savickas, ‘career counselling’s most eminent scholar’, as a direct contrast to the forms of counselling that typified the earlier periods.

Savickas characterises the original form of vocational guidance as one that sought to adopt a falsely objective perspective on individual differences, and hence treated clients as actors who could be scored on one or more personality and aptitude tests in order to match them to occupations employing people with similar scores. The career education of mid century, in contrast, attempted to take a more subjective approach to individual development and treated clients as ‘agents who may be characterised by their degree of readiness to engage developmental tasks appropriate to their life stages’ and who may be ‘helped to implement new attitudes, beliefs and competencies that further their careers’ (Savickas 2011a, 8). This means that its practitioners moved away from the generalising approach of their predecessors, but still remained trapped within a somewhat diagnostic model of career development.

The practice of career counselling that emerged during the postmodern economy was different again, since it treats the career as an artefact that has to be actively constructed rather than as a given, and hence as something that can and frequently does undergo significant change. Evaluating the meaning of that change to the individual in question is then more important that simply assigning him or her a new role so that the qualitative aspect of vocation has attracted more theoretical attention than it did during the earlier periods. This means that a ‘vocation’ need not simply refer to a job or career as such, and reveals the full extent of available vocational desires. In turn, the qualitative worth of thosedesires and aspirations isexpressed throughdialogue and narrative. A career construction counsellor engages a client in a series of interviews in which he or she maintains at all times an un-knowing stance, thereby posing a series of questions to the client and elucidating from him or her an unfolding realisation of what matters most in his or her life. This commitment to raising questions reveals the common origin of contemporary counselling in Freudian psychology where a similar practice arises. The difference is that, for the career counsellor, unlike the psychotherapist, the goal is to listen to the client’s revelations and then convert them into a career narrative based on the client’s own words and including a potential new chapter in that narrative. Or as Savickas (2011a, 8) puts it, when comparing career construction with both vocational guidance and career education, ‘career counselling, from the project perspective of individual design, views clients as authors who may be characterised by autobiographical stories and who may be helped to reflect on life themes with which to construct their careers’.

In fact, the relationship between counsellor and client in career construction practice is one of co-authorship, or co-construction. Through dialogue, the client supplies the narrative raw material that the counsellor converts into a narrative of self and of career across different roles and periods. In this way, the new paradigm that career construction brings forward addresses what can otherwise be a troubling sense of the individual’s non-self identity with prior incarnations of himself/herself over time. It moves away from notions of the self that are essentialist and unchanging, and embraces a sense of the self as always coming into being through social construction and interaction. This transition of course is mirrored by different ways of understanding both the career itself and the physical locations in which the work of that career takes place. Like definitions of the self that have emerged as a result of post-structural linguistics and psychology, neither a career nor a workplace can be assumed to remain static within the postmodern economy since the fundamental characteristics of that economy are variation and evolution. Indeed, the mutually constitutive relationship that exists between a sense of self, a place of work and a professional status is one of the key insights of career construction theory. As a role changes, or a transition is made from one profession to another, or from one location to another, the relationships in which the individual is involved change and that person’s sense of self accordingly changes. Narrating the changing sense of selfhood arising out of those changes, while also keeping sight of what remains consistent across them, is in large part the purpose of career construction theory.

Recurring components

Perhaps befitting its status as a relatively new field of research, there is no precise consensus among practitioners of career construction theory over its primary components. Cochran’s early work provided a critical vocabulary and hence a set of linguistic resources for use among practitioners in the field by elaborating a series of subtly nuanced distinctions between seemingly related concepts. Since clients typically enter career counselling at a time of uncertainty or troubling change, the career narratives that they develop must be finely attuned to the difference between ideal new career chapters on the one hand and what is both actual and possible on the other. This distinction is important because it is rarely possible for the career counsellor to promise clients seeking or needing a new working environment that they can do absolutely anything. There are a range of external limitations on what can be achieved, ranging from educational level and subject specific expertise to family circumstances, degree of potential mobility and so on. Peter McIlveen refers to these considerations as exo-themes because they are outside the control of the individual, who must therefore attempt a meaningful compromise with them in the development of a new career narrative that incorporates the ideal with the possible (McIlveen and Patton 2007, 74).

This sense of meaningful compromise should not suggest that the client is simply a passive experiencer of external fate. A second distinction adumbrated by Cochran is that between the script of a patient (or even a victim) and that of an active agent. In his account, creating a new sense of self requires bridging the gap between actual and ideal (or possible) subject positions. In turn, this bridging is enabled in and through narrative: Cochran emphasises that a person can only become what he or she has the capacity to imagine and hence narrate. Thus creating a new narrative of self also implies the crossing of another gap in the individual’s self-concept, from spectator to narrator and hence to active participant in the story being told: ‘a spectator is impotent without a participant, and a participant is vacuous without a spectator. The two modes of being work together to make up a person’ Cochran (1997, 25). Cochran identifies these two modes of being as significant elements in the making of new vocational decisions.

In fact, the decision-making process itself is thethirdmajor elementof career construction theory as Cochran describes it. Following his distinctions between actual/ideal/possible narratives, and between patient-victim/agent/participant scripts, the third conceptual distinction he makes is between so-called first-order evaluation mechanisms and second-order evaluative processes. In effect, first-order evaluation mechanisms are the analytical tools that were developed during earlier stages in the history of career counselling and aimed at quantifying how effectively a role or environment might satisfy a client’s vocational aspirations. Although these mechanisms are not of no value at all, Cochran suggests that they are inflexible in addressing either altered personal circumstances or changing aspirations across a lifetime. Second-order evaluation is therefore less about how effectively certain desires are met, and more deeply about the qualitative worth of the desires one has in order to determine which ones should be prioritised: ‘The question of efficacy is subordinate to the question of priority’ Cochran (1997, 18).

This final ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Career Construction Theory and Life Writing
• 1 From Writer’s Block to Extended Plot: Career Construction Theory and Lives in Writing
• 2 Undisguised alter ego: Mary McCarthy’s autofictional career
• 3 The Poetics of the Hypercycle in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid
• 4 Academic career construction: personnel documents as personal documents
• 5 The Auto/Biographical Journalist and Stories of Lived Experience
• 6 Career Construction in volatile settings: seeking congruence in a journalist's world today
• 7 Narrative Medicine in China: how doctors write to understand the profession
• 8 Writing the Self and Bereavement: Dialogical Means and Markers of Moving Through Grief
• Index