Career counseling for human development: an international perspective. (Articles).

Important changes in career guidance practices that occurred during the 20th century can be partly explained by evolution of the contexts (notably, forms of work organization) in which these practices took place. What are the ultimate goals of today's practices? It seems unlikely that the individual development model, prevalent in guidance for several decades, could stand up to ethical questioning of its presumptions. The author suggests another model--that of human development founded on the following basic principle: to help individuals achieve their own humanity by helping others to achieve theirs, fully and each in their own way.

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Three main traits characterize the current concept of career development interventions in the postmodern era. First, career interventions are conceived as being applied over the life span (Super, 1980). Second, the career development process is viewed as including all the transitions that an individual experiences: school, job, and personal (Schlossberg, 1984). Third, clients are considered to be "actors" in their own career development. The goal is to help them to be the subject of their own existence. Such concepts are a major change from earlier career guidance practices that were created almost a century ago in industrialized countries. At that time, career guidance took the form of relatively directive advice given by an expert (based on a psychological approach) to adolescents (generally boys of modest circumstances) who were leaving school and beginning a job apprenticeship (Huteau, 2002; Parsons, 1909).

Why this evolution? The first part of this article deals with this question. It stresses that career counseling practices are answers to questions determined by the contexts in which they are asked. Among these contexts, those relative to the organization of work and the structure of the school system play a determinant role. Emerging contexts give rise to new questions and the need for updated career development interventions. In today's contexts, four types of career counseling practices seem to represent the current approach to career development interventions: counseling interaction, career education, experiential learning, and collective development activities. These practices are discussed briefly. The final section of this article addresses various potential goals for career development interventions with questions such as the following: Should career interventions lead clients to build a realistic view of work and the job market? Should they contribute to lessening social inequalities? Should their ai m be to form citizens? Should they focus on the optimal development of each individual? To conclude, I expand on the following thesis: The model of individual development, which forms the very heart of career interventions, today seems insufficient at a time when the three basic references of career counseling--school, work, and subjective identity--are in crisis. In the current world context, career practitioners and theoreticians cannot avoid reflecting on the "good" and the "common good." This should lead them to place concern for the development of others at the core of career interventions. This model of development of the human person goes hand in hand with a durable concept of social and economic development.

The Role of Contexts in Determining Career Counseling Questions

If career interventions are aimed at certain ends, it is fundamentally because they try to answer social questions that arise from defined social contexts. Some of these contexts are shared by all wealthy counties. This is the case, for example, with a certain philosophical concept of individuals, their responsibility, and their subjectivity. As Schlanger (1997) has shown, the current societal view is that individuals must "find" their vocation and achieve their potential through it. This vocation, or calling, is more an occupational or professional one than a personal one. Such a philosophy is obviously one of the very foundations of our concept of career guidance practices.

However, the contexts in which career counseling questions are formulated are also those of the globalization of the economy and work and of the dominant forms of the organization of production. These phenomena give rise to dilemmas that are similar from one country to another (e.g., problems related to the existence of segmented job markets, personal and occupational transitions). Career interventions that emerge from such a common background can, thus, be very similar. However, some contexts are specific to one country (e.g., the structure of the educational system and procedures for the distribution of students into different study programs). Certain career interventions seem to make sense only in a given country because of these specific features.

Career counseling can also vary according to the scientific models used to formulate career-related questions (e.g., differential psychology, developmental psychology, and social interactionism). Although these questions are determined by the social contexts in which they emerge, they may be expounded in different ways according to the scientific models in which they are constructed.

Forms of Work Organization and Career Guidance Issues

The link between forms of work organization and career counseling issues is stronger than counselors generally think. In 1955, the sociologist Alain Touraine published an article describing the three main work systems that developed during the twentieth century. His article remains a major reference today, because he anticipated very precisely the consequences that the development of automation would have on work organization. Touraine's findings showed that each of the work systems he identified coincided with a specific conceptualization of qualifications. It can also be seen that each of these concepts of qualifications coincides with a specific concept of career counseling (Guichard, 2001c). It can thus be shown that the concept of occupational qualification that is specific to the "professional work system," which dominated at the beginning of the twentieth century, leads to a focus on the notion of aptitudes (on which career guidance practices were mainly based at the beginning of the twentieth century) .

During the 1930s, a "Taylorist" work organization was much in vogue (Friedmann, 1964; Taylor, 1911). It was at that time that Edward Strong (1931) conceived a career counseling model that converged with the concept of the qualifications that were characteristic of production-line work. In this concept of work organization, the occupational identity of the operator is based on social representations shared with other members of the same work group. It is precisely this proximity of interests, shared by an individual with those groups of people involved in different occupations, that is measured by Strong's Interest Inventory (Harmon, Hansen, Borgen, & Hammer, 1994).

More recently, Donald Super's (1980) life-span, life-space career development theory is consistent with the model of competencies specific to the technical work system. This system is typified by automation and the organization of work in small groups that are responsible for results. In this context, workers must develop new operational know-how and also new competencies (e.g., the capacity to show initiative, to take responsibilities, to cooperate, to be rigorous; Zarifian, 2001). Career counseling is then a method both to formalize operational know-how and competencies and to help with occupational (or professional) and personal development.

Most recently, globalization of the economy and work has notably led to an increase in employment in the secondary job market. This is known to involve relatively unskilled and precarious occupations that are often performed under difficult conditions. Workers in this market have little chance of one day entering the primary job market. To use the expression of Paugham (2000), they are "precarious employees," workers whose occupational existence does not constitute a career. In such a context, guidance seems to be helpful primarily during occupational and personal transitions (e.g., from one job to another, from a job to further education, from one location to another).

School Structure and Student Distribution Procedures

Because forms of work organization that influence career issues are similar in all industrialized countries, these career issues are somewhat universal. In contrast, forms of school organization are determined locally. This is why certain career guidance practices vary according to school organization structures and according to procedures used to distribute students between different training tracks.

This point can be briefly illustrated by mentioning two very different models of education: the German and the French. In Germany, there are three types of middle schools (die Hauptschule, die Realschule, and das Gymnasium). Die Hauptschule is a sort of continuation of elementary school. Die Realschule is similar to a junior high school. Both Realschule and Hauptschule lead most of their students to an apprenticeship. Das Gymnasium is a sort of integrated junior and senior (traditional) high school, which mainly leads its students to the university. Technical and vocational training is essentially completed through working apprenticeships. In France, there is only one type of middle school, le college (junior high school), followed by le lycee (senior high school). Although technical and vocational training form part of the French school system, this training takes place in lycees.

The problems dealt with by career counselors clearly differ between such different types of school organization. German career counselors intervene at the time of transition from general school to vocational training at work. They help this transition to run smoothly by ensuring that choices are rational. They must clearly take into account the demands of the employer regarding skills and attitudes. In France, this transition to vocational training occurs within the very heart of the school system and academic evaluations prevail: grades in disciplines considered to be more important (e.g., math, French language) are the main criteria used to channel students to one or another specific occupational or technological program or to a more general program. Thus, teacher evaluations are of fundamental importance, and the role of counselors in this student distribution process is relatively minor. At best, counselors might support the adolescents, and their opinion may or may not be taken into account by those in a position to decide.

The Role of Scientific Models in the Construction of Career Counseling Questions

Although career counseling questions fundamentally relate to society, they take on a specific form depending on the scientific models on which they are based. From the outset, psychology has played a major role in the construction of career counseling questions. Concepts such as those of aptitudes, values, and interests constituted (and still constitute) baseline categories in vocational psychology. Such analyses denote a relatively essentialist concept of the human individual, this individual being characterized by a certain number of stable dimensions, which explains why it may be incorporated, with varying degrees of satisfaction, into one or another vocational or training context. For individuals, finding their future career path implies determining the vocational context, with fundamental dimensions that correspond to essential traits that typify a person's own individuality.

Recently, social sciences have emphasized a notably different viewpoint of human development in which behavior and attitudes are linked to the contexts in which people live, the positions they occupy, and the interactions in which they engage. Such a concept is clearly not radically new. Its origins can be found, in particular, in The Principles of Psychology by James (1890). What seems to be new, however, is the current predominance of this concept. This is seen in authors as different as Bakhtin (1981), Becker (1973), Foucault (1986, 1988), Gergen (1991), Giddens (1991), Hayrynen (1995), Holstein and Gubrium (1999), Ricoeur(1992), and others. Ideas such as narrative identities or narrative self now seem fundamental. Strangely, most of the tools (e.g., vocational typologies, most career guidance software) used in career interventions seem to refer to an essentialist concept of the individual (e.g., Holland's theory, 1966, 1992). This indicates a gap between current issues in social sciences and certain caree r interventions. Might it be that current scientific models of the human individual could lead to questioning these career development practices?

Three Prototype Forms of Career Development Practices

Three types of career development practices seem to be prototypes of today's career interventions: (a) counseling interactions, (b) validation of experiential learning, and (c) career education programs. A fourth type-- collective development activities--can be added; although atypical, these activities seem to be related to career development programs.

Counseling Interactions

According to Lhotellier (2001), counseling interactions can be defined generically as "counseling acts" based on the "creation of a dialogic community in which prevail together the thoughts of the other person, the methodical and plural search for the meaning of a problem situation, and the construction of an active and creative approach" (p. 14). Egan (1998) contended that counseling acts also aimed to help clients "manage their problems in living more effectively and develop unused or underused opportunities more fully" (p. 7). As stressed by Egan, counseling interactions are also intended to teach clients how to resolve their everyday problems themselves.

Counseling interactions are fundamentally psychological. They owe their expansion to the considerations of Rogers and, in particular, the publication of Client-Centered Therapy in 1951. The basic idea is that a nonleading interview, undertaken by a counselor adopting an attitude of open understanding (empathy), provides in itself an opportunity for clients to discover by themselves certain aspects of their "self" and to restructure their personality through this very discovery. However, "Rogerian" neophenomenology is not the only theoretical reference for this practice.

For example, some counselors use concepts stemming from psychoanalysis or from sociology when looking at the "life stories or career genograms" of their client (de Gaulejac, 1987). Counseling interactions take on somewhat different forms, according to whether the client is an adolescent or an adult.

Competencies Assessment and Development

The core issue of career counseling for adults is to help them cope during an occupational or professional transition and, in some cases, to help them develop their career. For this purpose, counselors help clients to identify their potential by analyzing their experiences related to work, training, and their social life. This involves enabling clients to identify their assets, to recognize their skills (competencies), and to define their priorities in terms of training or occupation, and it also entails encouraging them to commit themselves to the realization of the projects thus defined.

The situation of adolescents differs notably from that of adults. During adolescence, the future seems--theoretically at least--to be more open. Most psychologists (e.g., Erikson, 1959, 1968) consider adolescence to be a determinant period in self-construction. It is at this time that adolescents develop many possible "selves" and are particularly sensitive to ideas concerning not only the future of society but also what they dream of becoming. To paraphrase Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951), adolescence is the time of tentative choices. But at the same time, this period is one of seeking personal consistency based on certain values or personal projects. Hence, at this time, family, social, and academic pressures explicitly or implicitly influence adolescents to identify certain goals rather than others. For example, Gottfredson (1981) has stressed that parents generally expect their children to aspire to a social position of a level at least equivalent to their own.

Adolescence is also a time of life during which individuals are reminded, sometimes brutally, of social and community standards as well as of the standards of peer groups to which they belong. They are called on to determine how they will relate to these standards. Need it be mentioned here that suicide is the second cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds in France (and is the first cause of death in Canada; Dorais, 2001)? This is typically a male issue, given that it concerns boys 3.5 times more often than girls, and it is attributed in most instances to coming to terms with their identity. Dorais has pointed out that, according to North American studies, suicide attempts are between 6 and 16 times greater for young men who are gay or bisexual than for heterosexuals.

In all training systems, important career choices must generally be made during adolescence. The complexity of personal and career issues at this age is not always perceived by adolescents; many good students adopt a "logic of excellence" (Dumora, 1990), which satisfies family expectations and meets academic institution criteria. In this logic of excellence, the question "what will I become" is dealt with only in the superficial form of the readymade answer "I want to do well in school, and we'll see after that." The situation of weaker students is more delicate. For them, career choices sometimes involve bereavement behavior regarding "possible" or "ideal" selves (Dumora, 1990). The less adequate academic capabilities of these students limit their future options.

Counselors who become involved in counseling interactions with adolescents regarding their future may encounter complex and painful questions. At the same time, these counselors may be confronted with contradictory expectations held by adolescents or young adults, their family, and the school institution. Therefore, the major question that arises is the independence of practitioners regarding these various "social actors" and processes.

Despite these fundamental differences between career counseling for adolescents and that offered to adults, many of the psychological processes involved in counseling dialogue seem similar. This is why career counseling for adolescents can be considered a "technology of the self" (Foucault, 1988) that prepares them to relate to themselves--as future adults--in the form, for example, of the validation of experiential learning.

Experiential Learning

The validation of experiential learning is an actively developing career counseling practice. It involves adults who seek recognition and legitimization of the skills that they have acquired through their life experience. Validation of these acquired competencies consists of(a) individuals' recognition, or identification, of everything they have learned by experience and (b) legitimization of these skills by the granting of a diploma either by the state or by official certification bodies.

The fundamental difficulty in the validation of such developed skills arises from the difference in nature of practical know-how and knowledge acquired by training. As Clot (1999) has written, the former is imbued with the implication of work experience. The latter is more formal, structured in such a way that it can bc easily evaluated. Candidates for validation of acquired competencies, hence, must restructure the representation of their activity. This is by no means an easy process. Individuals can recognize their activity only by presenting it to others. This verbalization of experience changes its nature. It involves a dialogue. Thus, the validation of experiential learning can be seen as an activity that will produce relatively abstract and noncontextual skills and knowledge that are based on know-how, prowess, attitudes, modes of interactions, and so on and that are implemented in particular situations. This production is the fruit of a "dialogic interlocution."

This issue of validation of experiential learning will probably have notable consequences in the wider field of career guidance. This approach stresses that counseling interactions go beyond mere self-discovery. In this respect, career counseling activity appears to be, per se, a process of self-construction. The issue of validation of experiential learning leads to a future vision of career counseling practices that are aimed at adolescents or young adults, involving dialogic cogeneration of knowledge and competencies based on their know-how that has been gained through hands-on experience.

Career Education

Although career education exercises were already included in Parsons's (1909) Choosing a Vocation, it was initially in the 1970s that career education programs were first developed in schools in wealthy countries. Generally speaking, their aim is to help beneficiaries to make better career choices (Hoyt, 1977).

Career education theorists interpret this general objective in markedly different ways. This applies, for instance, to Pelletier and Dumora (1984) who believe that these career education practices must aim at helping adolescents to acquire the skill that will enable them to best cope with various academic and job transitions. The perspective defined in 1957 by Leon was more immediate: Help adolescents to broaden their vocational horizon and choose their job in the most thought-out and most motivated way. Hoyt (1977), who played a major role in the development of career education practices in the United States, expressed a somewhat different intention: to transform attitudes of adolescents in such a way as to develop their "employability" and their "adaptability." This variability in assigned objectives of career education reverts to the more general question of the ultimate goals of career interventions, which I discuss next.

There are two major classes of career education practices from a pedagogic standpoint: those that Hoyt calls "infusion" and those consisting of specific programs. Infusion indicates the use of ordinary teaching to contribute to career education. Career education programs form a series of educational sessions, which are incorporated into the schedule of students along with other regular instruction.

Many career education programs used with young students are based on the traditional model of career counseling: pairing (Guichard, 2001b). These programs lead participants to produce portraits of themselves in terms of interests, values, qualities, academic results, and so on. Students work in the same way on jobs and training. This provides students with a repertoire of shared dimensions describing both themselves and the jobs (or training) that interest them. The structure of these descriptions is obviously determined by taxonomies, which form the foundations of the method. The program leads them to determine a particular mode for the integration of these dimensions and, hence, gives them the ability of pairing their self-portraits with corresponding jobs and training. One of the taxonomies most widely used for this pairing is that of Holland (1966, 1992).

Few career education programs have been rigorously evaluated. Nevertheless, the results for those that have tend to be positive (Huteau, 2001). Adolescents who have participated in such programs tend to know more about jobs, to have a more precise self-image, to participate in a range of activities, and so on. It also seems that career education programs concentrated in the space of a few days are more effective than those distributed in the schedule throughout the year. Furthermore, two French studies (Forner & Vouillot, 1995; Markou, 1997) showed that programs provided by teachers for their own pupils tended to lower the ambitions and goals of adolescents from modest backgrounds.

Collective Development Activities

The three categories of career guidance practices just mentioned are examples of current career intervention; however, there are others that certainly can be included among career intervention practices, although they may not be immediately perceived as such. This applies in particular to interventions known as "collective development activities." Collective development activities can be defined as sets of practices organized and implemented by specific communities in a particular locality that are aimed at the development (e.g., economic, social, cultural) of the communities involved through the development of each of the participants in these activities (Demunter, 1990; Dubar, 1979). These activities range from helping with schoolwork to helping youth realize ambitious projects, such as the creation of a local television channel.

These collective activities are similar in several ways. First, their primary goal is collective development: development of a local community. They certainly produce development of each participant, but this takes place through interactions fostering the development of others and of oneself: Interaction (shared activity) is the basic principle. These actions, occurring in the context of a collective project, energize individuals. They lead to the development of certain competencies (such as being able to work on a collective project or learning how to perform specific tasks) and, hence, to the transformation of representations of self and of one's own possibilities. These collective interactions often involve people from outside the community concerned. They are hence "socially" mixed, which means it is reasonable to hope they can enhance social integration. Collective action also encourages the personal development of these "outsiders." Interactions between participants are not solely related to the activit y at the core of the project in question (schoolwork, for instance). Other things are talked about; more general topics are discussed, for instance, topics that concern the meaning each individual will derive from completion of the project, the way in which it is integrated into his or her life story, the aims the individual might develop in the same field, and so on. Such topics are very similar to those at the very heart of counseling.

Ultimate Goals of Career Counseling

As previously mentioned, the operational objectives of career counseling methods differ notably. These differences are explained in part by more fundamental divergences concerning the ultimate society or ethical goals of these practices. The following four categories of goals for career interventions can be identified.

1. Encouraging the client to build up a realistic view of work and of the job market. This view is that of employers. In employers' eyes, career counseling must contribute to solving the problem of basic inequality between job supply and demand. They note that the expectations of individuals-- adolescents in particular--often focus on fields in which few jobs are available (creative jobs, research, sports, and so on), whereas certain occupational areas (e.g., construction, services) have a shortage of employees. Seen this way, the mission of the career practitioner is conceived as requiring clients to construct more realistic representations of the job market and of the actual possibilities of finding employment.

The expectations of employers may be even more radical. The secretary of the largest substructure affiliate of the Mouvement des Employeurs de France (French Employers Movement) stated that "we are in a world where the unlimited duration work contract is ... a situation in process of extinction" (De Calan, 1997, p. 208); hence, the ultimate goal of career counseling is to prepare youngsters for flexibility.

2. Reducing social inequalities. The intentions of social reformers are very different from those of employers. In general, the effort of social reformers is to prevent career counseling practices from contributing to a reconstruction of an identical undesirable social structure. They want these activities to contribute either to the transformation of this structure or, more modestly, to narrow the gap between dominators and the dominated. This has led, for example, to the development in recent years of career intervention programs intended to promote equal access to jobs for men and women.

More generally, social reformers expect career practitioners to direct their activity particularly to groups that might not seek help spontaneously for themselves: the economically deprived, culturally excluded, immigrants, and so on. These reformers are highly aware of the role that unequal access (because of social origins) to pertinent information regarding training and jobs plays in perpetuating social divisions. Partisans of reform also stress the role of social representations (Farr & Moscovici, 1984) and stereotypes that create feelings in some adolescents from modest social and economic backgrounds that a particular career path is not accessible to them. The mission of career practitioners is then perceived as being to lead clients to transform their representations of self and of their social and occupational positions so that they no longer accept as inevitable a future fate that they have felt to be "unquestionable." Those who extol social reform are often proponents of methods that encourage the c ooperation of people (adolescents in particular) of different social backgrounds to work together to accomplish collective projects. Finally, these reformers ask what role career development practices might have in the economic and social development of countries where growth seems lacking.

3. Forming the citizen. According to their political stance, statesmen may lean toward one or the other of these categories of ultimate goals. They nevertheless cannot neglect one in favor of the other (if they are to avoid the risk of finding themselves in a particularly difficult political position). They see the goal of career guidance practices as contributing to social cohesion. Job placement is a necessary condition for such cohesion. Politicians, therefore, heed what employers have to say about the goals of career interventions. Nevertheless, they are also aware of the risks of a breakdown of social order that can result from exclusion of the most deprived individuals. They are aware of their demands for recognition, misbehaviors, urban violence, and so on. Hence, these politicians cannot neglect the point of view of social reformers, which leads them to recognize that career practices must be incorporated in the wider program of the development of citizenship.

4. Enabling optimal individual development. The immediate expectations of adolescents and their families are more prosaic. They seek the best solution to the question they ask with the hope of achieving the best possible individual development. Nevertheless, this general expectation takes different forms. Some questions are ambiguous; there is a gap between the explicit question (e.g., which school subject would you advise me to choose?) and the real and implicit motive of that question (e.g., please, help me find who I want to be). The remarks of Zarka (2000) concerning counseling interactions and those of Dumora (1990) about the "logic" of the choices of young people reveal four broad categories of questions that they or their families may ask counselors. Strategic questions, corresponding to "a logic of excellence" (Dumora, 1990, p. 124) are those of students that the sociologist Ballion (1982) has named "school consumers." These students adopt an attitude toward school similar to that of consumers toward goods. Their questions can be summarized as follows: What is the best strategy for me to achieve the best social position that I can hope to obtain? Some adolescents from modest backgrounds, whom Dumora called pragmatists, transpose this question to a minor key: What must I do to achieve the modest goals I have identified for myself? Ambiguous questions come from adolescents in a state of uncertainty or who use a "logic of resignation" (Dumora, 1990, p. 126). These queries are mixed with questions about academic strategies, with their basic problem: Should these students give up any hope of certain school, job, and even personal identity forms (possible selves) in which they had been hoping to build themselves? Counseling is of major importance to these adolescents. Finally, some questions are paradoxical. They can be formulated as follows: Influence me so that I can be capable of deciding, or "influence me this way to ensure my decision." These come from young people engaged either in a "logic of rationaliza tion" (Dumora, 1990, p. 125; they give up on their earlier great hopes) or in a "logic of illusion" (Dumora, 1990, p. 125; they hold on to these hopes, despite the fact that such hopes are at odds with their current situation). Although these four types of questions (e.g., strategic, pragmatic, ambiguous, paradoxical) are considerably different, they all revert to the same concern for self-construction and social adaptation. In some instances, the emphasis is on means--how to become this or that? In others, the aim of the question is what they should become.

Goals of Counseling and Intervention Strategies of Counselors

The intervention strategy adopted by counselors when confronted by such questions and expectations depends to a large extent on the ideological models governing their actions, as well as their institutional position (see Savickas, 2000). Practitioners may feel nearer or closer to one or other of the ultimate goals for career interventions just mentioned: They may tend to place greater emphasis on the realism of vocational choices, on the transformation of social relations, on construction of the citizen, or on individual development. However, their activity also depends on their occupational position. Counselors in private practice must of necessity focus their interventions on the demands for individual development of their clientele. A practitioner employed by an employment service in industry cannot ignore the manpower needs of one or another occupational sector. The same applies to those working within a training institution, who must necessarily take into account the training provided by the institution to which they belong.

Conclusion: Career Counseling for Human Development

Conjecture about the ultimate goals of career counseling has not been particularly productive in recent years. At the very most, questions have been raised about the economic role of career counseling practices (Killeen, 1996; Watts, 1996). These are asked in the following way: To what extent do these career counseling practices contribute to the industrial growth of a nation? Is it possible to measure this contribution in terms of economic value? These aspects are important. Economic development cannot be neglected when most of humankind lives in great misery. However, at a time when uncertainties about economic development models are tending to emerge, a preliminary question must be asked: What is the purpose of this economic development? In other words, should the goal of economic development suffice in itself, or, on the contrary, does it make sense only in the context of more general considerations about humanity (e.g., humankind, world organization, relations between nations and people) that we, as huma n beings, intend to develop?

It seems impossible for career practitioners to avoid deliberating about this question at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Their activities concern school, work, and personal identity, and it so happens that each of these three areas is in crisis.

School Crisis

The crisis in schools shows itself in various ways. Some are spectacular: Schools are sometimes burned down; some are places of physical or mental violence, or even murder. Some good students now withdraw from participation in academic competition (they are called hikikomoris in Japan). Other more insidious aspects of this crisis are probably more fundamental: Many parents want their children to come into contact only with the very best and, hence, refuse to let them attend "common" classes including children from a broad range of social backgrounds. Faced with such demands, schools segregate, either openly (with increasing numbers of private schools specializing in particular social groups) or more surreptitiously (e.g., geographic enrollment restrictions).

This school crisis is no doubt correlated with the extraordinary expansion that this institution had undergone in the twentieth century, which can certainly be called the "school century." Educating youngsters has constituted a major transformation in the means for integrating them socially. Schooling is indeed a very special approach to the social integration of youngsters that is characterized particularly by the fact that they are separated from adults and learn not by direct contact with a mentor-- as was the case for apprentices and journeymen--but through formalized knowledge taught by a corps of specialists.

Our current system of education has pursued three main objectives since its beginnings: (a) learning (reading, writing, and so on), (b) education and social integration (complying with certain shared values, construction of rules governing interactions, and so on), and (c) the reproduction of social structures (identical or different). The current crisis shows the predominance in today's ideology of this latter objective over the other two. In such a context, "entering a good study program" becomes for many the primary--if not the only--objective of schooling.

Work Crisis

The work crisis is equally apparent. The concepts of "suffering at work" (Dejours, 1998) and of "mental harassment" (Hirigoyen, 2001) have formed the basis of interesting discussions in France in the past few years. An article ("Alcool, Tabac, Dopage, au Travail" ["Alcohol, Tobacco, and Doping at Work"], 2001) published in the journal Sante et Travail reported that many workers were only able to accomplish their duties by alternating doses of stimulants and tranquilizers. However, the major manifestation of this work crisis is unemployment and underemployment. In his inaugural address to the 89th session of the Work International conference held June 5, 2001, Juan Somavia, director of the International Labor Organization (ILO), denounced the lack of "decent jobs" in the world (Buhrer, 2001). According to the ILO, the combined number of registered unemployed and underemployed workers currently reaches the impressive figure of 1 billion people who are without opportunities.

Work today is far from capable of satisfying such expectations of all job incumbents (Blustein, 2001). Some are deprived of work and others suffer from their working conditions or the nature of their occupational activity.

Career counseling practices are based on a representation of work conceived as a vocation that enables individuals to develop their capabilities and improve their situation in life. This current central position of work in an individual's life does not mean that it is the only significant human activity. However, as pointed out by Clot (1999), work is nevertheless one major role for self-fulfillment of the employed, precisely because it is no longer an activity that is determined almost at birth by the occupation of one's parents and because it no longer occupies all the waking hours of a person's life. Workers seek recognition in the context of this fundamentally social activity, which they wish to see invested with meaning by virtue of its integration with their other activities. Clot also stressed the fact that work activities were fundamentally different from other activities. Work necessarily links workers to a specific organization that, itself, belongs to a society, a market, and so forth. Work forces workers to adapt to jobs and to funct ion within a system of interactions organized before they "inhabit" it in their own way. This is not necessarily the case for other kinds of activities (for example, leisure).

Personal Identity Crisis

The personal identity crisis has given rise in recent years to a multitude of publications (for a synthesis, see Dubar, 2000). Its most obvious manifestations are the breaking up of some states and wars between nations or between social groups because of ethnic, religious, language, and similar differences. This uneasiness regarding identity is also reflected by other secondary events. Examples are youth gang warfare in underprivileged areas, the notable success of national populist parties in local or national elections, the development of religious fundamentalism of all sorts, multiplication of sects, and, in certain instances, use of drugs or tranquilizers.

It is by no means easy to recognize the origin of this identity crisis. Nevertheless, a degree of consensus is emerging regarding the hypothesis of a major role of globalization of the economy, work, information, and certain cultural products. "Identity crystallizations" can be interpreted as attempts to maintain a positive self-image in local contexts where nothing now seems to guarantee such individual recognition and self-realization (Giddens, 1991; Sandel, 1998; Sennett, 1998). These crystallizations are the "turning in on oneself" of people trying to construct themselves in former identity frames (i.e., former self-concepts; Guichard, 2001a) in a world context that does not offer them any identity or moral model.

The Core Question of Counseling

It seems that career practitioners and career theorists are failing to recognize the importance of these crises, as well as their current and future consequences. The question at the core of current career practices and research is "how is it possible for everyone to fully achieve his or her own potential?" As already pointed out, we now envision that each individual must find (with the help of a counselor) his or her own answer to the following question that corresponds to an individualist model of career interventions: I-low can individuals be helped to determine what they want to be and how to achieve it? Obviously, it has by no means been ruled out that a given individual might feel that the best route to his or her self-achievement is through participation in tiny activist groups espousing a nihilist ideology.

Therefore, career practitioners and theoreticians cannot avoid taking into consideration the "good" and the "common good." This might lead to placing concern for development of the rest of humanity at the core of career counseling. The basic principle would be that human realization of self, as targeted by career counseling, is not possible without the development of others. The fundamental question of counseling would no longer be centered around helping people achieve their own potential as independent individuals, but rather by helping people achieve their own humanity, through collectively helping others achieve their own humanity, each in his or her own way. "To achieve their own humanity" means to develop qualities that can be seen in each culture as universal human qualities (e.g., search for justice, search for truth, openness to others). From both perspectives, career counseling practices focus on individuals. However, in the first one, the end is the achievement of an individual conceived as isolate d, whereas in the second, the end is the development of the humanity in everyone and of humanity as a whole. This new career counseling perspective would be governed by the rule of being based on values that can be considered as "universal" principles for action, values such as allowing everyone to develop, in his or her own way, fully universal human features.

This quest for universally acceptable principles on which career interventions could be founded would certainly require bringing about change in the expectations of some individuals that, in their crude formulation, cannot be universalized. This applies, for example, to the expectation that "I want to achieve my full potential." Such a desire might imply condoning the destruction of everything (including others) seen as an obstacle to such an end.

It should be stressed that this search for universal principles does not have the consequence of proposing a sort of abstract model of humanity. The aim is not to deny particular identity forms, but very much the contrary. The aim is to broaden the recognition of the humanity of others beyond ethnic, cultural, religious, social, and sex differences. This clearly implies the concept of career interventions intended to call into question or challenge any "identity confinement" of individuals that might lead them to reject, as not human, any identity form not matching their subjective identity frames (Guichard, 2001a; Guichard & Huteau, 2001).

This proposal, aimed at providing a universal moral grounding, will have inevitable consequences for career intervention in terms of the concrete activities of career counselors. For example, if it emerges that some current forms of production organization do not engender personal development of people, but rather their actual suffering at work, conclusions should be drawn regarding career education programs. It could be imagined, for example, that these programs would be based on considerations of what human work is and that their objective would be to prepare youngsters to claim this human dimension of work for themselves and for others.

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Jean Guichard, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (National Conservatory of Applied Technology), Paris, France. This article was originally given as a lecture at the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance conference (50th anniversary) in Paris, September 2001. Correspondence concerning this article should he addressed to Jean Guichard, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, 41, rue Gay Lussac, F75005, Paris, France (e-mail:[e-mail]).