Challenges for career counseling in Asia: Variations in cultural accommodation.

Using K. Lewin's (1938) concept of a force field analysis, a model is proposed for examining the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia in terms of prevailing and countervailing forces. The model also suggests a need to avoid a simple importation of Western models of career counseling, which may not be an optimal fit for the Asian cultural context. Instead, the cultural accommodation approach is offered as a viable alternative.

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As the globalization movement is rapidly taking hold, it is incumbent upon us in the counseling profession to evaluate its impact on how we practice and conduct research. The purpose of the special section in this issue has been to highlight how career counseling is being practiced in Asia. As the final article in the issue, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you a conceptual model for analyzing the challenges for career counseling in the Asian cultural contexts. On the basis of the preceding articles in this issue, I would like to offer a broad conceptual framework for understanding some of the challenges discussed by these authors.

The model I am proposing is based on the application of a Lewinian force field analysis. Using such an analysis, I will discuss the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia as essentially one of transferring Western models to Eastern cultural contexts. Because details of this model have already been presented elsewhere (see Leong & Santiago-Rivera, 1999), I provide only an overview here. Borrowing from Lewin's (1938, 1975) famous formulation that behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and his or her environment (i.e., B = f[P, E]), it is proposed that some of his conceptualizations can be extended and applied to a higher level phenomenon. Whereas Lewin primarily focused on an individual's personality and behavior, his concepts can be readily applied to social movements as well, such as our present topic--the movement of transferring Western models of career psychology and career counseling to the East.

Table 1 illustrates a proposed model of social movement, which parallels Lewinian concepts. For Lewin, a person and his or her psychological environment are contained in an individual life space. Our parallel is the social environment's social space, which contains a variety of social institutions and social movements. Therefore, the advances of a movement, like the importation of Western models of career counseling, can be studied and understood in view of this force field analysis that delineates the prevailing and countervailing forces. Similar to Lewin's equation, our present equation is SM = f(P, C), where the advances and development of a social movement would be a function of the prevailing and countervailing forces. These prevailing and countervailing forces are similar to Lewin' s driving and restraining forces in his analysis of personality dynamics. Like Lewin's theory, these forces come from individual needs and valences (value for a particular person).

The social movement of transferring (if viewed from the Western perspective) or importing (if viewed from the Eastern perspective) Western models of career psychology and career counseling to Asian countries is subject to a series of prevailing and countervailing forces. The challenges of providing career counseling in Asia is embedded in these prevailing and countervailing forces. My current model of the prevailing forces is not meant to be exhaustive but, instead, to illustrate the utility of my application of the Lewinian model to understanding this problem. The prevailing forces (see Table 2) that have facilitated the transfer or exportation of Western models of career psychology and career counseling have included the Western countries' reliance on and advancement in science. The advances in science and technology in the West, supported by stable political contexts, have resulted in advanced and affluent economies, which in turn can invest further in science, especially the social sciences.

In many Asian countries, their economies and their reliance on science and technology are less well developed. When viewed in light of this differential, it seems quite evident that there would be a natural gradient in the flow of scientific information and models from the West to the East. This gradient in the flow of science and technology from the West to the East operates through such mechanisms as Asian countries' reliance on Western institutions of higher education to train and educate their political and intellectual elites. This development can be readily understood from the perspective of Maslow's Hierarchical Model of Needs (Maslow, 1970). In Western countries, where a long history of reliance on science and technology has produced well-established and affluent economies, greater resources can be freed up to be devoted to the higher order needs, particularly psychological ones, because the lower order survival needs have been taken care of relatively well. It is no accident, therefore, that psycholo gical theories and interventions are much more established in Western cultures than in Asian cultures. The fact that Western and Asian countries are on different levels in Maslow's hierarchical model contributes to the natural gradient mentioned earlier.

This natural gradient in the flow of science from Western to Eastern countries promotes the monopoly of Western models of science across the world. In some sense, Darwin's model of evolution applies here as well. The "fittest" countries, with the most advanced economies and the most rigorous scientific foundations, will triumph over countries with less developed economies and scientific developments. Given such a scenario, it is natural that countries with less well-developed economies and scientific foundations would seek to adopt Western models of economies and Western models of science. This is another factor that contributes to the creation and maintenance of the natural gradient mentioned earlier. As this process is multiplied in various cities, regions, and countries in Asia, the monopoly of the Western models of science grows further. With this monopoly comes the twin problems of availability bias and training bias when Asian countries are faced with the challenges of providing effective career counsel ing services for their citizenry. The availability bias consists of the human tendency to use heuristics in making decisions and forming judgments. When asked to make decisions, there is a natural human tendency to use the most readily available information as the basis for making such decisions. Because of the monopoly of Western models of science, including Western models of career psychology and career counseling, these are the models that are most readily available when our Asian colleagues are asked to plan and implement career counseling services in their countries.

Training bias adds further to the monopoly of Western models of science. It involves the natural gradient in which Asian countries send their best and brightest students to be educated in Western colleges and universities. As part of this educational process, these Asian students learn, internalize, and become proficient in the use of the Western models of science, which naturally have Eurocentric bias. After they earn their degrees and return to their home countries, the scientists bring with them a training bias and a reliance on Western models of science, which adds further to the availability bias.

In some Asian countries, such as China, it is their underdevelopment in science and technology that has created pressures to modernize. Given the natural gradient mentioned earlier, many of these Asian countries have begun to modernize by adopting Western models of science and technology. This economic pressure to modernize also adds to the increasing monopoly of Western models of science. From a cross-cultural psychological perspective, the primary dangers of a monopoly are the potential problem of "imposing an etic." Of course, cross-cultural psychologists have made a distinction between etic and emic approaches to the study of culture.

Etic refers to the search for universal laws of behavior, as represented by American psychology, whereas emic refers to the culture-specific approach, as represented by the ethnographic method of anthropologists. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. However, problems occur when psychologists and counselors assume that the scientific information that they have acquired to guide their practice and interventions are etic (think universal) when in fact they are emic (unique to the college sophomores who form the primary samples for American psychology). To intervene with other cultures on the basis of these pseudo-etics has been referred to as "imposing an etic" among cross-cultural psychologists. Later on, I present one example of this problem of imposing an etic in career counseling.

Our model of a force field analysis also requires the examination of the countervailing forces in the transferring of Western models career counseling to Asian countries (see Table 2). As illustrated by the preceding articles in this issue of The Career Developement Quarterly, the political contexts in each of the countries is a very important factor in the development of career services. The case of career counseling in China is a good illustration of this point. The Communist takeover of China and the resulting Cultural Revolution severely restricted the development of career services due to an anti-intellectual and antiacademic sentiment. On the other hand, in Japan, the need for career services was delayed for many decades because of different cultural and political factors. In Japan's case, the lifetime employment practices within Japanese organizations eliminated the need for career services. In the case of Taiwan, its close ties to the United States have created a cultural and political context for the development of career services, which are very similar to those of the United States, despite differences in cultural values. To various extents, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Taiwan have imported Western models of career psychology and career counseling and are implementing these models in specific regions.

The prevailing forces discussed earlier exert great pressures on many of these Asian countries to modernize and adopt Western models of science. As this process continues, Eurocentric models of science will gradually become a monopoly. If there is doubt about the power of this prevailing force, one need only review the existing textbooks on career psychology or career counseling to determine how many of the career development models in those books have non-Western origins. However, despite this great need to modernize, many Asian countries are also motivated by a fear of assimilation, specifically assimilation into a Western form of civilization with its many associated evils, as perceived by these countries. Therefore, there has been a rallying cry of "Modernization without Westernization" in many of these Asian countries. (For those ofyou who may be interested, Michael Bond has a very interesting discussion of the modernization problem for the Chinese and their concerns about the potential loss of Chinesene ss in his book, Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights From Psychology [1991; Hong Kong, China: Oxford University Press].) The dilemma for the Chinese people is how to maintain their cultural identity while climbing on the bandwagon of modernization.

Another countervailing force to the wholesale adoption of Western models of science is that of the cultural mismatch problem. Models of psychology or career counseling developed in the Western cultural context will likely have some universal elements and some culture-specific elements. These culture-specific elements, when applied in another cultural context, are likely to create culturally dystonic experiences. As an exercise to help you experience this culturally dystonic phenomenon, when you are introduced to someone, try bowing instead of shaking hands. For individuals who are more courageous, you can try it the French way and kiss this new person on both cheeks as a form of greeting. I am proposing that Western models of career counseling will have elements that will contribute to a cultural mismatch with various Asian cultural contexts. This mismatch, in turn, will create culturally dystonic experiences, which will increase the amount of unmet needs as time goes on. The continued applications of these Western models without cultural accommodation will lead to ineffective counseling at best and therapeutic failure at worst. I talk more about cultural accommodation later in this article.

It is partly a result of the prevailing forces mentioned earlier and partly the increasing monopoly of Western models of science that have created its parallel countervailing force, namely the rise of indigenous psychologies. To give a better understanding of this countervailing force and the impetus for it, let me quote from Durganand Sinha (1993) in his chapter on indigenous psychology in India:

When modern scientific psychology, based on the empirical, mcchanistic, and materialistic orientations of the West, was imported into India as part of the general transfer knowledge, it came in as a ready made intellectual package in the first decade of the century. It tended to sweep away the traditional psychology, at least among those who had been involved in modern Western education. In fact, this transfer in a way constituted an element of the political domination of thc West over thc third world countries in the general process of modernization and Westernization. The domination was so great that for almost three decades until about the time India achieved independence in 1947, psychology remain tied to the apron strings of the West and did not show any signs of maturing. Very little originality was displayed, Indian research added hardly anything to psychological theory or knowledge, and was seldom related to problems of the country. Research conducted was by and large repetitive and replicative in cha racter, the object being to supplement studies done in the West by further experimentation or to examine some of their aspects from a new angle. Thus, the discipline remained at best a pale copy of Western psychology, rightly designated as a Euro-American product with very little concern with social reality as it prevailed in India. (p. 31)

There is a great deal more to be said about indigenous psychologies as another countervailing force, but, due to space limitations, I only observe that indigenous models of psychology have an uphill struggle against the power and hegemony of Western models.

What should we as counselors do about the emerging monopoly of Western models of science? There are essentially three major approaches to culture in psychological theories. The first is the Universalist approach in which culture is considered to be an unimportant and nuisance variable that needs little or no attention. The cultural variable is essentially ignored. This is the dominant approach in mainstream psychology and represents the Universal dimension within Leong's (1996) integrative model. As Leong pointed out, this approach is necessary but not sufficient for understanding the experiences and behaviors of individuals, given the importance of the Group dimension (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status).

The second approach is the culture assimilation approach in which cultural differences are recognized but minimized because it is assumed that other racial and cultural groups should assimilate to mainstream American culture (i.e., Western European culture). With a strong belief in the "melting pot" concept, and to the extent that these racial and cultural persons assimilate, then these psychological theories and models will work equally well with these groups.

The third approach is the cultural accommodation approach in which the culturally unique experiences of culturally different groups are considered to be major factors in understanding their behavior. These culture-specific factors are identified and added to the existing theories and models to enrich them and to increase their relevance and utility to other crosscultural populations. To understand the challenges facing career counseling in Asia, I propose that what is needed is the cultural accommodation approach in which Western models are critically examined for their universal and culture-specific elements. The elements that are universal, such as job satisfaction, will transfer readily to other cultural contexts. I am assuming that every human being seeks satisfaction from his or her work; it is the correlates, their meaning and sources of satisfaction, that are likely to vary across cultures. The elements that may be culture-specific will have to be tested and empirically evaluated in the new cultural c ontexts. When these culture-specific elements have been identified, they may need to be replaced by culture-specific elements from the target country.

For example, research in India showed that the caste system plays an important role in the meaning of vocational interest inventory (Leong, Austin, Sekaran, & Komarraju, 1998). Although vocational interest and choice may be universal, its meaning and implementation is very likely influenced by culture-specific factors. In the case of the India study, the authors found that they could not directly adapt the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI; Holland, 1985) for use in that culture because work is so highly integrated with India's long-established caste system.

Indeed, the Indian coauthors on the project informed the other authors that many of the participants in India would not complete the VPI "as is" because it included occupations that would be considered too low in the caste system for them to even consider. To include these items without qualifications or modifications would be considered an insult to the higher caste members in the sample. To address this culture-specific problem without doing undue violence to the VPI, the authors finally decided to change the wording of the instructions to include a category of "too low-status for me to consider." They also included other response categories to test for linguistic and conceptual equivalence.

The proposed cultural accommodation approach involves three steps: (a) identifying the cultural biases, cultural gaps, or cultural blind spots in an existing theory that restricts the cultural validity of the theory; (b) selecting current culturally specific concepts and models from the target culture to fill in the cultural gaps and accommodate the theory to racial and ethnic minorities; and (c) testing the culturally accommodated theory to determine if it has incremental validity above and beyond the culturally unaccommodated theory. The value of the proposed cultural accommodation approach will be determined by future research. Two major lines of research on the value of a cultural accommodation approach consist of (a) showing that the culture-specific variables can account for significant amounts of variance in the vocational behavior of individuals in the target culture, and (b) demonstrating incremental validity where culture-specific variables account for additional variance above and beyond those acc ounted for by the variables in the original unaccommodated model. A more detailed exposition of this cultural accommodation model can be found in chapters by Leong and his colleagues (Leong & Serafica, 2001; Leong & Tang, in press).

Finally, let me illustrate the complexities involved in this cultural accommodation approach with one particular theoretical model. This model is Harry Triandis's (1994) conceptualization of Individualism-Collectivism as a cultural syndrome. According to Triandis, "a cultural syndrome is that pattern characterized by shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and values that are organized around a theme and that can be found in certain geographic regions during a particular historic period" (p. 43). Individualistic societies are seen as those in which the needs of the individual are put before the needs of the group. Western societies are traditionally seen as being Individualistic. Collectivistic societies generally put the needs of the group before the needs of the individual. Eastern societies are seen as Collectivistic in nature (Hofstede, 1980). The type of society one is raised in affects many aspects of a person's life, including the manner in which one communicates, the life choices one makes, and how one copes with stress. Eurocentric models of career psychology and career counseling, which are developed in the Western cultural context, are likely to contain a strong bias toward individualism. What cultural mismatch and culturally dystonic experiences are created when a career development model developed in the West and based on a independent construal of the self is transferred to another culture with a much more interdependent construal of the self? What type of cultural dynamics are likely to occur in a career counseling session in which counselors trained in the Western models operate with the assumption that individual goals have priority over group goals when their clients have the opposite assumption (i.e., group goals have priority)?

What are the major implications if such models are imported into Asian countries, which often have a greater emphasis on collectivism, without cultural accommodation? As illustrated by the articles in this special section, Western models of career counseling and career development have been exported to different countries with varying degrees of cultural accommodation to local conditions and cultural differences. The purpose of this article and this entire issue is to encourage us, as a profession, to begin to systematically examine the implications of a career counseling enterprise that is dominated by Western models and theories. As we ponder the advantages and disadvantages of a profession that is dominated by one major cultural orientation, we need to be mindful of the need to evaluate the "unintended consequences" of the exportation of our theories and models. In this article, I have also proposed that a cultural accommodation approach is a fruitful method for the exportation of our career counseling mo dels and theories to other countries and other cultures. What to accommodate for and how to make those accommodations should become the focus of our future inquiry as we career counselors and career researchers embark on this new millennium.

TABLE 1

An Extension of Lewin's Force Field Analysis to Social Movements Such as
the Multicultural Movement

Lewin's Model of Personality  Proposed Model of Social Movements

Life-Space                    Social-Space
B=f(P,E)                      SM = f(P,C)
Personal typology             Social typology
Psychic energies              Social energies
Locomotion                    Expansion or constriction
Personal equilibrium          Social equilibrium
Personality dynamics          Social dynamics
Forces and tensions           Forces and tensions
 Driving forces                Prevailing forces
 Restraining forces            Countervailing forces
Individual needs, valences,   Individual needs, valences, vectors
  vectors                     Organizational level and
                                institutional dynamics
TABLE 2

Prevailing and Countervailing Forces in Social Movements Such as the
Advancement of Western Models of Science

Prevailing Forces        Countervailing Forces

Western countries'       Political context:
 reliance on and          Political turmoil and
 advancement of science   ideology, and so on
Maslow's Hierarchical    Fear of assimilation
 Model of Needs          Modernization without
Natural gradient for      westernization
 flow of science         Culturally dystonic
 and technology           experiences
Availability bias and    Role of unmet needs
 training bias            and paradigm
Monopoly of the           shifts
 Western models of       Rise of indigenous
 science                  psychologies
Dangers of monopoly:     Cultural accommodation
 Imposing an etic
Pressures to modernize

References

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture's consequeces: International differences in work-related values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Holland, J. L. (1985). Vocational Preference Inventory manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Leong, F. T. L. (1996). Towards an integrative model for cross-cultural counseling and psychotherapy. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 5, 189-209.

Leong, F. T. L., Austin, J. T., Sekaran, U., & Komarraju, M. (1998). An evaluation of the cross-cultural validity of Holland's theory: Career choices by workers in India. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 52, 441-455.

Leong, F. T. L., & Santiago-Rivera, A. (1999). Climbing the multiculturalism summit: Challenges and pitfalls. In P. Pedersen (Ed.), Multiculturalism as a fourth force (pp. 61-72). Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel.

Leong, F. T. L., & Serafica, F. (2001). Cross-cultural perspective on Super's career development theory: Career maturity and cultural accommodation. In F. T. L. Leong & A. Barak's (Eds.), Contemporary models in vocational psychology: A volume in honor of Samuel H. Osipow (pp. 167-205). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Leong, F. T. L., & Tang, M. (in press). A cultural accommodation approach to career assessment with Asian Americans. In K. Kurasaski, S. Sure, & S. Okazaki (Eds.), Asian American mental health: Assessment, theories and methods. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

Lewin, K. (1938). The conceptual representation and the measurement of psychological forces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lewin, K. (1975). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row. Sinha, D. (1993). Indigenization of psychology in India and its relevance, In U. Kim & J. W. Berry (Eds.) Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context (pp. 30-43). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Triandis, H. (1994). Culture and social behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Frederick T. L. Leong is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University in Columbus. An earlier version of this article was given as a keynote presentation at the National Career Development Association convention in Portland, Oregon, June 29th-July 4th, 1999. Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Frederick T. L. Leong, The Ohio State University, Department of Psychology, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (e-mail: [e-mail]).