Brown S.D., Lent R. (Editors). Career development and counseling: putting theory and research to work

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I then depicted her life theme as fighting powerful creatures who are trying to

steal her mind or, in this particular instance, her career. She is rebelling by sitting

still and refusing to decide in their favor while she marshals personal resources

and social support to make her own choice. I paused to get her reaction and revi-

sions. We explored her feelings about the portrait, because affect helps to create

meaning. We also looked at her strengths, especially the personal characteristics

of which she was most proud. We then discussed how the problems she currently

faced were really the best solutions that she could come up with so far. For exam-

ple, I helped Elaine to reconstruct her indecision from being a problem to being

the best solution she has found for trying to fight off the creatures who are steal-

ing her career by making her sit still for what they want. In this way, I attempted

to help her use language, especially her own favorite metaphors and verbs, as a

means of controlling the situation and increasing feelings of agency.

Having thus addressed Elaine’s first concern—understanding why she cannot

make a decision about her academic major—we moved to her second question—

how well a career in medicine would suit her. To address this question, we con-

sidered her vocational personality and interests, especially how she proposed to

use the world to become more whole. Following career construction theory, I

sought to create and confirm interests, not diagnose them, by concentrating on

the inner means and outer ways that she could use to position herself in society.

We discussed the interests she had formed as being solutions to her problems in

growing up. She wants to be independent and on the go, use logic to solve prob-

lems, and work as a part of a team. I presented the two success formula varia-

tions that I drafted for her. She revised them until she felt pleased with the

following success formula: I feel happy and successful when I am part of a team that

uses logic to help people by providing advice about how to solve their problems in an or-

ganized way. Medicine does not seem to fit her plot as well as some other fields.

Medicine has a Holland code of ISR, and she does not strongly resemble the So-

cial or the Realistic types. Certainly, she could do medicine, but it may not fully

incorporate her self-concept.

We then conversed about her desire for a career in which she could use logic to

solve structured problems and be part of a team (IC), not solve the ambiguous,

physical problems that patients routinely present to their physicians. I commented

that if she were to become a physician, she would probably be attracted to a spe-

cialty such as radiology. We also talked about whether the Realistic colleagues and

aspects of engineering jobs really appeal to her. We talked about exploring majors

in computer science, mathematics, and finance. Next we looked in the Dictionary

of Holland Occupational Code (Gottfredson & Holland, 1996) to identify occupations

that fit her code and found two listed under ICS (immunohematologist and pack-

ing engineer) and eight listed under CIS (computer security coordinator, com-

puter security specialist, data processing auditor, foreign clerk, ophthalmic

photographer, ophthalmic technician, polygraph examiner, and stress test techni-

cian). Most of all, we talked about discovering a way in which she could flourish

and places where self-definition and self-determination would be possible.

Having addressed, to her satisfaction, the issue of how well medicine suited

her and which other fields merit exploration, we addressed her third question,

which was how to move forward toward choosing a major. We discussed ways for-

ward from where she now sits, including alternative resolutions and possible

selves. Her indecision is not a weakness; it reflects a potential strength that must

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The Theory and Practice of Career Construction 67

blossom, in her case, probably into a talent for solving problems and a lifelong de-

cisiveness. That life must be full of movement, not sitting. I explained that devel-

opment arises from activity and overcoming difficulties met in the world. We

then engaged in a conversation about self-construction activities that might make

her feel more whole and move her closer to being the person she wanted to be,

such as working at a summer job away from home, living in a college dormitory,

taking a workshop on assertiveness, and meeting with a counselor to discuss

family issues. She was encouraged by our conversation and felt that looking back

over her life had given her the ability to move forward and the resolve to do so.

We ag reed to talk on the phone in the middle of the next semester and meet again

during the summer.

When she visited again, the next summer, Elaine reported that she had taken a

continuing education course in assertiveness, worked with a college counselor for

five sessions to improve her relationship with her parents and reduce her perfec-

tionism, lived away from home while working a summer job as a ticket-taker at an

amusement park, and completed elective courses in computer science and ac-

counting. She was leaning toward declaring a major in computer science but won-

dered if engineering would be a better fit for her. Thinking that she would prefer

to explore this ambivalence in an organized way, I invited her to complete the In-

corporation Worksheet (Savickas, 1980). The worksheet lists 12 adjectives, two for

each of the six RIASEC types. A client rates three elements, from one to seven, on

each of the 12 adjectives. The first two elements are two different occupations

being considered, and the third element is the self. As we sat together, Elaine rated

on a seven-point scale how well the 12 adjectives describe first a computer special-

ist, then an engineer, and finally herself. The ratings show her construction of the

three elements. Although her perceptions may be inaccurate when compared to

objective occupational information and personality inventories, they reflect the

conceptions that guide her behavior. If the ratings had seemed grossly inaccurate,

we would have discussed them.

In examining her ratings, we first determined a RIASEC code for each of the

three elements: ICA for computer specialist, IRC for engineer, and ICS for her-

self. In terms of RIASEC types, there was a better fit between her and computing

than between her and engineering. We then examined how well each occupation

incorporated her self-concept by calculating and summing differences between

the rating for the two comparisons. The difference between self and computing

was 18; the difference between self and engineering was 26. Obviously, Elaine

perceived computer science as better incorporating her self-concept. She enjoyed

this exercise and felt good about the conclusion she had drawn—to major in com-

puter science.

I next saw Elaine after she graduated with a major in computer science. She

told me how much she had enjoyed her courses but detested the sexism exhibited

by many of her instructors. To combat their bias, she had organized a club for fe-

males who were majoring in computer science. She was proud of what they had

achieved in combating sexism. She was even more proud of the occupational posi-

tion that she had recently secured. In two weeks she would begin a job as a com-

puter systems analyst in a position that required traveling with a team of

colleagues throughout the United States to regional branches of a national firm

where she would solve their computer problems. Furthermore, Elaine told me that

she and her mother were now “friends” and that her mother was proud of her

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complishments and pleased with her prospects. Elaine looked forward to now

becoming a woman on the go, one encouraged by a mother who tells her not to sit

still. She glowed as she told me how she had used the things that we had talked

about to help her roommates and friends make career choices.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, I have tried to convey the excitement that attends helping people

construct their careers. Counselors are privileged to be able to invite clients into a

safe space wherein they can examine their vocational personalities, career adapt-

ability, and life themes and then edit their narratives to be more livable and to

open new avenues of movement. The modern dichotomies between personal and

career counseling and between self and society have become integrated in post-

modern conceptions of a self that is formed, maintained, and revised through in-

terpersonal relationships and work roles, and which evolves during a life course of

contribution to and cooperation with a community. Occupations offer a way for-

ward for individuals who live in a postindustrial society that abjures stable moral

meanings and fragments identities. Career offers individuals a way to construct,

test, and implement a stable self by choosing disciplined activities and accepting

their obligations. Counseling for career construction encourages individuals to

use work and other life roles to become who they are and live the lives they have

imagined. In so doing, they will become people that they themselves like and that

others cherish.

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CHAPTER 4

Applying Gottfredson’s Theory of

Circumscription and Compromise in

Career Guidance and Counseling

Linda S. Gottfredson

T THE BEGINNING

of the twentieth century, 36% of workers were employed

in farming, fishing, forestry, and other agricultural work, and only 4% in

professional services (United States Census Office, 1902). By the begin-

ning of the twenty-first century, only 2% of the workforce remained in agricul-

ture, with 16% now in the professions and another 15% in management (U.S.

Census Bureau, 2002). New technologies in transportation and communication

have led to the proliferation of new kinds of work and made it easier for people

and jobs to migrate around the nation, even the world.

The full menu of occupations and lifestyles that the modern world offers

most individuals is thus far larger than it was a mere 100 years ago. At the same

time, American society has tried to make opportunities more equally available

to all individuals, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or class. While barriers re-

main, many have fallen in the past half-century. Both the wider variety of occu-

pations and more equal access to them bespeak vastly expanded vocational

options for young people.

But this expanded choice is a challenge, even a burden, for young people. The

opportunity to choose is also the responsibility to choose and to choose wisely.

Moreover, the occupation an individual holds is increasingly seen as the measure

of who he or she is in society. It is no wonder that so many youngsters procrasti-

nate or seem paralyzed by anxiety when required to make vocational decisions.

Many just drift or settle for any job that comes their way.

The Theory of Circumscription and Compromise focuses on how young people

gradually come to recognize and deal with, or fail to deal with, the array of voca-

tional choices their society provides. After summarizing the theory, I use it to

outline a career guidance and counseling system for facilitating growth and re-

ducing risk during the school years. Although not elaborated here, the system can

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also be used to diagnose and remediate common vocational problems in adoles-

cence and aid adults who wish to revisit their career choices.

THE THEORETICAL CHALLENGE

Imagine 1,000 newborns in their cribs. They know virtually nothing of either the

outside world or of themselves, probably not even that the two are distinct. Ten

years later, all will know a great deal about both. Within 20 years, all will have

made many life-shaping decisions, often without realizing it. At 30, the 1,000 will

have spread across a great variety of occupations and social landscapes.

Chance will have played a part in who ends up where, but the pattern of out-

comes will hardly be random—or novel. Regardless of their own social origins,

all 1,000 newborns will develop essentially the same view of occupations by ado-

lescence. Like adults, they will distinguish occupations primarily along two di-

mensions—their masculinity-femininity and their overall social desirability

(prestige level). They will also share common stereotypes about the personalities

of different kinds of workers—accountants versus artists, engineers versus teach-

ers, and so on. Despite their similar perceptions, their occupational aspirations

will nonetheless reproduce most of the class and gender differences of the parent

generation: Girls will aspire mostly to “women’s” work, boys to “men’s” work,

and lower class youngsters to lower level jobs than their higher social class peers.

And yet, not even siblings will be peas in a pod, because their preferred voca-

tional selves and life paths tend to differ, sometimes dramatically (Dunn &

Plomin, 1990). As adolescents, perhaps all 1,000 newborns will report wanting

jobs in which they can perform the kinds of tasks that interest them, but many

will not be able to articulate just what their interests are. Few will know what

workers actually do on the job, even in the occupations to which they aspire.

Some will be forced to take jobs that are not consistent with their interests, but

many will do so by choice.

What explains this somewhat puzzling pattern of aspirations, of knowledge

and ignorance, at the threshold of adulthood? The circumscription and compro-

mise theory suggests that four developmental processes are key to understanding

it. Each presents different risks that, as discussed later, can be minimized to en-

hance career development.

THE THEORY: KEY DEVELOPMENTAL

PROCESSES, PRODUCTS, AND STAGES

Most vocational theories, including this one, view vocational choice as a matching

process, that is, as individuals seeking occupations that satisfy their interests and

goals and for which they possess the skills, abilities, and temperament. This pro-

cess requires that young people first learn the relevant attributes of different oc-

cupations and of their own developing selves and then discern which occupations

have rewards and requirements that match their still-evolving interests, abilities,

values, and goals. Implementing a choice then requires that they identify avail-

able options, weigh the alternatives, and find means of entry.

The circumscription and compromise theory suggests that four developmental

processes are especially important in the matching process: age-related growth in

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Applying Gottfredson’s Theory of Circumscription and Compromise 73

cognitive ability (cognitive growth), increasingly self-directed development of self

(self-creation), progressive elimination of least favored vocational alternatives (cir-

cumscription), and recognition of and accommodation to external constraints on

vocational choice (compromise).

OGNITIVE

ROWTH

The matching process is cognitively demanding. The tasks it involves span all six

levels of Bloom’s (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) widely used taxonomy of cogni-

tive tasks in teaching and learning: for example, learning isolated facts (remember,

Bloom’s lowest level), spotting and understanding similarities and differences

(understand), drawing inferences from and assessing the relevance of information

(apply), integrating information to assess the pros and cons of a decision or course

of action (analyze), applying one or more criteria to judge which choices are better

than others (evaluate), and developing a plan to meet a goal (create, Bloom’s high-

est level).

Not surprisingly, the vocational assessment and counseling profession is de-

voted primarily to helping adolescents and adults improve such knowledge and

decision making. Counselees’ competent engagement in the process is often la-

beled vocational maturity. However, our 1,000 newborns will begin narrowing their

preferences and making other vocationally relevant decisions long before they

are cognitively proficient or aware that they are making such decisions. Under-

standing the impact of preadolescent cognition on vocational development is,

therefore, essential for facilitating vocational growth in adolescence and beyond.

Children’s capacity for learning and reasoning (their mental age) increases with

chronological age from birth through adolescence. Children progress from think-

ing intuitively in the preschool years, to concretely in the elementary years, to

abstractly in adolescence; from being able to make only simple distinctions to

multidimensional ones. They recognize more similarities and differences, and in-

creasingly abstract ones, which they use to make sense of the diverse phenomena

in their lives. In short, with age, children become able to take in, understand, and

analyze ever-larger bodies of information of increasing subtlety and complexity.

They gradually notice and figure out more aspects of the many-layered world

around them.

Same-age children also differ considerably among themselves in the general

learning and reasoning ability required to do this. At any given chronological age,

some are far above or below their peers in mental age (that is, higher or lower in

general intelligence). The brighter the child, the more information he or she under-

stands and extracts from his or her surrounds and from direct instruction.

Children’s steady growth in mental competence affects their behavior and

lives in many ways. In the vocational realm, its two major products are the cogni-

tive map of occupations and the self-concept. Both are incomplete but organized un-

derstandings of the occupational world and of the self that children develop and

elaborate with age. Although our 1,000 newborns will all construct essentially

the same cognitive map of occupations, they will develop increasingly individual-

ized self-concepts. As we shall see, children’s conceptions of people and occupa-

tions develop in parallel as they perceive, one, then, two, then more dimensions

of difference. The first distinctions that young children draw among both people

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and jobs involve their most concrete, visible attributes. As detailed later, chil-

dren’s views of both become more complex and nuanced as they become capable

of making multidimensional comparisons, inferring internal states, and discern-

ing patterns in behavior.

This progression is so natural and universal that it is seldom perceived as vo-

cationally relevant, if noticed at all. Vocational understanding and decision mak-

ing tends to garner attention only when its demands crescendo, that is, when

adolescents simultaneously realize the full complexity of making life decisions

and the imminent need to do so.

ELF

-C

REATION

A preexisting occupational world awaits us at our birth. That world is large,

evolving, and complex. However simplified and incomplete children’s early cog-

nitive maps of it are, it is there to be observed and explored. Children also con-

struct self-concepts, but none is born with an already developed self to observe.

Where does that self—the self they will seek to know and implement—come

from? Is it fixed in their genes? Is it stamped in by the environments that happen-

stance thrusts on them? Or, are their selves perhaps just incidental by-products

a contest between the two forces?

The self is none of these things because we are not passive products of either

nature or nurture, but active agents in our own creation. Counseling psychol-

ogy’s insight that individuals are both unique and agenic is confirmed by what

might seem an unlikely source, behavior genetics. We are unique individuals be-

cause we are products of unique genotypes (unless identical twins) and unique

experiences. Biologically related individuals who are reared together tend to be

similar for both genetic and environmental reasons, but behavior geneticists have

been surprised to discover how few and temporary the effects of shared environ-

ments are in Western populations studied (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin,

2001; Rowe, 1994). For instance, the circumstances we share with siblings,

such as

our parents’ education, income, interests, and childrearing style, have little or no

impact on our basic (Big Five) personality traits at any age, and their impact

on in-

tellectual abilities wanes and, for general intelligence, dissipates altogether by

adolescence (Loehlin, 1992; Plomin & Petrill, 1997).

More culture-specific personal attributes such as interests, attitudes, and partic-

ular skills are more influenced by shared environments (e.g., Betsworth et al., 1994;

Tesser, 1993). Vocational interests are fairly general products of the close partner-

ship between nature and nurture, but their emergence is more culturally contin-

gent and experience-dependent than are the basic personality traits and abilities.

In fact, they appear to represent particular constellations or intersections of those

fundamental human traits that cultures mobilize for specified ends, such as man-

aging accounts or repairing machines (cf. Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997). These

constellations seem to be assembled, like standard toolkits, to accomplish a cul-

ture’s recurring tasks. The experiences that would activate, exercise, and consoli-

date them as distinct vocational interests (e.g., in working with numbers versus

machines) are not available to people of all ages or in all locales, precisely because

they involve specialized realms of cultural activity (e.g., clerical, artistic, scientific,

political). Many adolescents, therefore, lack sufficient experience to bring out or

verify their more culturally targeted interests, abilities, and values.

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To the extent that the slings and arrows of fortune have a lasting influence on

our highly general traits, it is mostly the arrows that strike us one at a time (called

nonshared effects), not family by family (shared effects; Jensen, 1997). Even biologi-

cal siblings reared together become less alike in general ability and personality as

shared environmental effects wane relative to nonshared ones. Thus, while both

genes and environments make us similar to people with whom we share genes and

environments, the unique aspects of both our nature and nurture guarantee that

we will be distinct as individuals and become increasingly so with age.

Behavior genetic research also confirms that we help to construct ourselves and

determine the form we take. First, we become who we are through experience,

that

is, by engaging the world around us. Only through repeated experience, for ex-

ample, do our genetically based temperaments become consolidated (traited) as

enduring personality traits. For attributes to become traited does not mean that

they become fixed in stone, but only that they are now relatively stable manifesta-

tions of our individuality across different situations; for example, shy John avoids

crowds, cocktail parties, and working in teams, but gregarious Jane loves them all.

Second, we do not just implement a nascent self by stepping out into the swirl

of life, as if flipping a switch that initiates a preprogrammed sequence of events.

We also affect the direction of our development by exposing ourselves to some

formative experiences rather than others. Behavior geneticists first realized that

development might become more self-directed with age when they discovered

that phenotypic (observed) differences in IQ become increasingly heritable with

age. For example, with age, adopted children become less like their adoptive fam-

ily members but more like the biological relatives they have never met (Plomin

et al., 2001).

To explain this startling discovery, since confirmed for academic achievement,

too, behavior geneticists have proposed a genes-drives-experience theory (Bouchard,

Lykken, Tellegen, & McGue, 1996). As children mature, they take an increasingly

active and independent role in selecting, shaping, and interpreting their environ-

ments. Moreover, when given the opportunity, they select experiences more in

line with their genetic proclivities. Each comes into the world with a different in-

ternal genetic compass, which causes them to be attracted to or repelled by dif-

ferent kinds of people, activities, and settings. The anxiety-prone will more often

avoid anxiety-provoking situations, the emotionally stable will perceive the

world as more benign than will the neurotic, and the musically gifted will more

often seek opportunities to develop their talent (called active gene-environment cor-

relation). People also create different environments for themselves by evoking dif-

ferent reactions from the people around them. The obnoxious evoke more hostile

social environments for themselves than do the amiable, and parents appropri-

ately provide different kinds of toys, support, and developmental opportunities

to their children when they differ in needs, interests, and talents (called evoca-

tive or reactive gene-environment correlation). In addition, people differ genetically

in their sensitivity to given external influences, such as particular pathogens or

kinds of instruction (gene-environment interaction).

Therefore, even if we were all provided identical parents, classrooms, and neigh-

borhoods, our personal proclivities would constantly incline us to perceive, pro-

voke, and exploit them differently. As a result, we would eventually come to

inhabit different worlds. When and where people are free to do so, genetically

unique individuals refashion common environments in ways that reflect, rein

force,

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