Implications of Sociopolitical Context for Career Services Delivery.

This article analyzes the implications of sociopolitical context for career services delivery. Beginning with a reflection on the social foundations of the practice of career counseling, 4 specific Portuguese conditions are presented and discussed in light of existing knowledge in the field. The 4 underlying issues presented are (a) the impact of political changes on career services delivery, (b) the rigidity vs. flexibility of the educational system, (c) political and psychological perspectives on employment, and (d) the relationship between power and career services delivery. A research agenda founded in political anthropology is proposed that may enhance future career services delivery.

We begin this article with a statement: Psychology, in a broad sense, and politics should establish a common platform of theoretical thinking as well as a convergence for action. Psychology should not forget the contexts where people live, and politics should not forget that citizens are persons with specific behaviors and different life stories. In other words, we think that an interface between politics and psychology should become a concrete reality. Political psychology is a well-developed scientific field; however, cooperation between behavioral scientists and politicians needs to be deepened. Psychology needs to assume that the political structure that affects people's lives (e.g., type of regime, labor laws) is an important dimension of their life context. In addition, when, for example, politicians make laws, they must put their efforts into ensuring that those laws are representative of the people's expectations and will and that the law adjusts itself to the behavioral laws that govern people.

Both psychologists and politicians are agents of change. However, behavioral change is not possible without the understanding of life contexts, nor is social change possible without the understanding of dimensions of the self. In a previous article (Santos & Ferreira, 1998), we demonstrated this idea by presenting an overview of the political context of career counseling in Portugal, namely of the reciprocal interactions between individual development issues and contextual factors that affect vocational behavior. The main idea presented was that, in a context of accelerated political and social development, career counseling should act as a major foundation of "citizenship" through empowerment methodologies. In other words, career counseling, going further than the classic person--environment fit model, should try to enhance the development of persons in a broad sense; important strategies for such enhancement are, in our view, the dimensions of creativity and social innovation. That is, career services deliv ery must adapt to the contexts in which it is embedded; it must not represent a static attitude but rather a more proactive posture.

The implications of sociopolitical contexts for career services delivery are not seen as being only one-way but rather are seen as being circular and existing within mutual feedback systems. Psychologists and counselors have a social responsibility to react dynamically and in a scientific manner to the tensions inherent between political context and the personal and developmental characteristics of clients. It is a two-step methodology of intervention--to facilitate adaptation to the world of work and simultaneously to enhance personal development.

This methodology may lead us to a situation in which we will finally be able to overcome one of the most challenging criticisms that, since the 1960s, has been directed at psychology. This criticism (referred to as an "ideology of replacement") focused on the belief that psychology is an instrument of social adaptation of problematic behaviors to the "status quo." There is a school of thought in the European social sciences, which is well represented by authors like Berger and Luckman (1967) and Deleule (1969), that notes that psychology does not give enough importance to the social and political dimensions of life contexts because of its excessive focus on the individual. In sum, the argument is that by looking only at the internal aspects of individual experience, the result is a biased view of human behavior as well as a biased view of society. Consistent with our theme of contextualizaiton of behavior, we think that, in general, we need to deepen our political psychology knowledge to study the effects of social contexts on people. Simultaneously, we need to generate psychological commitment in politics, especially in the career psychology domain (Osipow, 1993).

Social Foundations of the Practice of Career Counseling

We have assumed in our preceding arguments that we need to take a critical view of the practice of career counseling. After the 1974 Portuguese revolution, it was quickly understood that education and vocational training and vocational guidance practices, in fact, consist of two related processes or factors. The first component of vocational guidance pertains to social selection and cultural reproduction, in the sense that French sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) proposed. The second refers to "self-determination" in the sense suggested presently by Blustein and Flum (1999). The first process assumes that the educational and vocational system is a tool for the reproduction of the social hierarchy, where students coming from lower economic and social classes have more probability of school and vocational failure, replicating previous generations' life and work paths. The second process assumes that the educational and vocational system is a tool that ideally fosters occupational attainment and vocation al satisfaction, in which individuals are empowered to overcome social and economic barriers to have more freedom of choice and autonomy in their life and work paths.

In 1975, the Portuguese researcher Campos wrote a book titled Education Without Social Selection in which the idea of education as empowerment was central. Twenty-five years later, counselors continue to face identical problems and continue to raise the same questions. They continue to struggle with understanding how to surpass an individualistic focus of career guidance, how to embed career guidance practices in a continuous and developmental orientation into the educational and vocational training systems, how to structure educational and vocational programs in order to insert vocational goals, how to build career education methodologies in a "self-deterministic" fashion, how to match vocational decisions with existential options and how to adjust these to the social and historical contexts, and how to enhance learning strategies in order to offer more occupational opportunities to clients. For example, if counselors know that cognitive abilities are based to a significant extent on social and cultural cons truction and determination and also know the social value and influence of cognitive abilities on access to job opportunities, how can career counselors compensate for this phenomenon via their array of intervention strategies? In other words, how do they infuse vocational goals into compensatory educational methodologies (e.g., Reynolds & Gutkin, 1999)?

These are questions that are raised persistently because, in our view, endeavors in the fields of vocational psychology and career counseling are extremely challenging and difficult ones. Solutions are not easy to find, but we think that if career counselors confront social matters, they must, indeed, generate first a profound analysis and reflection about the social foundations of their models and practices. The classic work of Vondracek, Lerner, and Schulenberg (1986) offered an epistemological grid that permits us to combine human developmental issues and the contextual issues. Regarding the specific theme of this article, Vondracek et al. quoted from Bronfenbrenner, who pointed out that a revision of the relationships between public policy and basic science is needed (p. 42). These authors also referred to the work of Krumboltz (1981), who pointed out a sample of public-policy-related environmental conditions that affect career development (e.g., social policies of selection of workers, labor laws, the educational system). Vondracek et al. concluded that career counselors need to have, according to Bronfenbrenner's (1979) conceptualization, a functional integration of public policies and science procedures, or "interconnectedness" between these areas.

Although career counselors are beginning to develop epistemological models of analysis (e.g., developmental-contextualism), it is difficult to find systematic scientific production in this area. Career counselors can, however, find some interesting research, like that presented by Pfeffer (1989), about political perspectives on careers in organizational contexts; this work stressed the interplay between interests and power networks and its influence in human resource management procedures. In his introductory statements, Pfeffer (1989) stated

Although individual choices and strategies are important and efficiency concerns do have some role in explaining organizational arrangements and individual decisions, the current preoccupations overlook some important considerations for understanding careers and career processes. This chapter develops a more political and sociological focus, arguing for the importance of interests, environments, and networks. This perspective alters both the questions asked and the analysis used to answer them. (p. 380)

In the politics and standards of hiring, in the way recruitment and job search interconnect, in the shape of the internal labor markets and job classifications within the mobility structures of the organizations, and in the politics of wages and succession, Pfeffer (1989) identified important contexts for the understanding of careers in organizations. This approach is essential to a new view of careers. Quoting Pfeffer (1989) again, we are able to better understand his point of view:

Concepts such as cohorts (Pfeffer, 1983; Stewman & Konda, 1983) and network ideas that emphasize the interconnections among people, both in helping each other as in recruitment and in the zero-sum competition for status and promotions, are essential. (p. 393)

In a more universal way, Herr (1996b) presented a look at the future trends in career guidance concerning the social shifts that are expected for the next century. With the danger of being too simplistic, psychosocial dimensions of personal flexibility and career motivation could become the general target behaviors that counselors stimulate in their clients (see also Herr & Cramer, 1992). However, it should not be forgotten that there are complex and specific characteristics in each particular social and career setting. In fact, Herr (1996b) did not ignore such realities. For example, he noted that different ways of funding career services (state vs. private) led to different counseling practices in such domains as the counselor's freedom and autonomy to apply more personalized techniques, and not just the standardized procedures that exist in every organization. Universality and, paradoxically, diversity will bring us growing difficulties at the same time (see also Hayrynen, 1996; Watts, 1996a). In a special section of an issue of The Career Development Quarterly, varied authors (Bloch, 1996; Harris-Bowlsbey, 1996; Herr, 1996a; Lent, 1996; Savickas, 1996; Watts, 1996b) discussed the realities of diversity and globalization and the importance of individuality and specificity of persons and groups in relation to the diffusion of general models and techniques.

More specifically, Herr (1996a), Bloch (1996), and Watts (1996b) have provided some insight and direction about the future of career counseling in their descriptions of the important changes that are occurring in the ecological context of vocational guidance, the structure of the world of work, and in social policy related to career services. Lent (1996) eloquently summarized this look into the future when he stated that a different metaphor and set of roles has to be envisioned, that is, Za view of counseling and guidance as linchpins in the processes of work preparation and transition, helping individuals and organizations to anticipate and negotiate passages to and between career settings. (p. 64)

In confronting the challenges of this century, then, convergence is being reached regarding the main goals for career services delivery. As we noted previously, the diffusion of general and global models and techniques is occurring. Yet, we question whether this is sufficient and whether it will be responsive to local problems and cultures. Iris important to recall that, from a political point of view, career counselors are witnessing the renaissance of regionalism and the increasing affirmation of local and ethnic identities and cultures. What do they need to solve these problems? In sum, they must analyze the future trends of the world of work and the social foundations of vocational behavior. In this way, they will be better able to plan career services delivery and to adapt it to the specific sociopolitical contexts.

To synthesize, career counselors have new universal vocational constructs (e.g., personal flexibility, career motivation) that oblige them to think about new forms of career services delivery. At the same time, regional political systems, local cultures, and specific social and career phenomena are in contrast to the globalization phenomena. In other words, personal flexibility as a universal challenge and behavioral target for career counselors may acquire different meanings as a function of context (see also, e.g., Barnes-Farrell, 1993).

Career counselors also must open different fronts of research to inform their practice. A possibly productive pathway is one that combines (a) a more global and structuralist approach, (b) segmental models of vocational behavior (e.g., Super's, 1990, 1994, Archway Model of Career Determinants), and (c) more qualitative and case-study analyses to test both prior approaches and models. Consequently, in the following sections, we present four cases taken from the Portuguese experience and apply existing knowledge to these specific Portuguese conditions. The first case addresses the impact of political changes on career services delivery, the second addresses the rigidity versus flexibility of the educational system, the third addresses political and psychological perspectives on employment, and the fourth addresses the relationship between power and career services delivery.

Case 1: Impact of Political Changes of Career Services Delivery

This first case concerns the impact of a rapidly changing political structure on career services delivery. In Portugal, the political system is a democracy, but a rather young democracy. Until 1974, Portuguese citzens lived under a fascist regime. This radical political transition naturally encompassed a change to a high level of freedom and personal volition in one's decision making. From an existential point of view, according to Yalom's (1980) psychodynamic model, freedom means openness to decision making, responsibility, and individual choices. Freedom, with its vast array of options, however, brought enormous challenges to people who sometimes struggled with responsibility avoidance and considerable internal and external barriers. Growth in career indecision and decisional conflict were the main expressions of these rapid and radical shifts in the political structure in the country (Santos, Ribeiro, & Campos, 1997). Regarding this case, we suggest that a way to counterbalance the impact of this sociopolitical context is to reinforce the strategies of career exploration within career services. Blustein (1997) and Blustein, Phillips, Jobin-Davis, Finkelberg, and Roarke (1997) stated the importance of exploration in the school-to-work transition. According to these authors, the stimulation of exploration attitudes and competencies leads to more intrinsically motivated vocational behaviors and, therefore, more agentic ones. Career maturity and adaptability are enhanced if career counselors provide people with coping strategies to gather and process occupational information, especially when the environment is not "friendly" in this dimension.

The social cognitive perspective on career development (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1996; Lent, Hackett, & Brown, 1997) also provides a fundamental tool for intervention. Stimulating learning experiences through experiential activities brings more self-efficacy to vocational behaviors in a context in which the flow and diversity of information is too expansive to handle only in "introspective ways." Person inputs, background contextual affordances, learning experiences, self-efficacy processes, outcome expectations, interests, choice goals, choice actions, performance domains and attainments, and contextual influences proximal to choice behavior are the main dimensions of this social learning model. Following the tradition of the learning models of vocational behavior, a counselor must then turn these dimensions into concrete fields of intervention.

Following the ideas of Blustein and collaborators, activation of exploration behavior is a good way to define interests in a more concrete and adjusted way (Blustein & Flum, 1999). In general, we support the emerging psycholgical perspective that control of human behavior is not a mere function of information processing but is a complex interaction between cognition and action (Lord & Levy, 1994). In the language of vocational psychology, this means that today it is not enough to "test and tell," but rather career counselors must stimulate learning experiences that lead people to the elaboration of occupational self-concepts that are more adjusted to the modern world of work.

Case 2: Rigidity Versus Flexibility of the Educational System

A second relevant sociopolitical issue is that the educational and vocational training system forces students to make major decisions, often well before they are prepared for such choices. Developmental theory (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) states that by age 15, adolescents should be exploring. In the Portuguese educational system, however, students at this age are obliged to make early choices in high school between major sets of courses. This has vast repercussions for subsequent choices because the choices made at that age limit the options open to young persons later. For example, the choice of the humanistic studies branch in high school makes it impossible for an adolescent to change later to a more scientific or technological area. The Portuguese educational system, thus, is organized in a way inconsistent with what is known about the process of adolescent vocational development. That is, it requires young persons to make early and important educational decisions that affect their life or career tra jectory. The adolescent is confronted with choices when in psychological terms he or she is still in a process of vocational identity formation.

This mismatch is a good demonstration of the eventual conflict or antagonism that may happen between social policies and scientific knowledge and practice. In this case, we think that a strong intervention would require the placement of psychologists near the political institutions to promote meaningful changes in the way the educational system is structured. Despite this educational context, however, career counselors must answer to the needs of clients. Thus, career services delivery must be concerned with the negative impact of such threats on the vocational identity development process, embedding personal counseling activities in the overall intervention. The new alternatives presented by the constructivist career counseling models and methods (Savickas, 1997) represent one good option for intervention. Furthermore, if the context (e.g., educational system) is not planned according to models of lifelong human development, then vocational professionals must become proactive. This may require a political c ommitment from counselors and researchers to discover and adopt new and effective models of intervention.

Finally, in such a context as we have described, professionals must be concerned with the personal construction of work meanings rather than with a strictly vocational adjustment perspective. Beyond educational constraints, adolescents must learn how to find interests, satisfactions, and motivations within the world of work, independent of the solutions found for their career problems. In the end, adolescents must find a way to express their occupational self-concepts no matter the configurations of the world of work. A more subjective approach to decision making, choices, and implementation of career plans (Breda, 1996) must be the focus of career services delivery in situations like the one just described. A good example is the match between work and leisure activities that, in our opinion, must be encouraged in career and vocational education programs.

Case 3: Political and Psychological Perspectives on Employment

The third case we present pertains to the global problem of unemployment, which has a particular set of unique characteristics in the Portuguese culture. Generally, unemployment is conceptualized primarily from a remedial perspective (e.g., finding a new job) and not from a developmental--vocational point of view (e.g., finding a new job with a new personal meaning). In the evaluation of the outcomes of these kinds of interventions, relapses are frequent with unemployed clients, with many of these clients becoming long-term unemployed individuals.

This is the context in which career counselors often work with the unemployed. Yet current thinking is that they must have "lifelong strategies" of career counseling to cope with the constant change and evolution in the world of work. In the specific domain of intervention with adults, they are convinced that prevention and treatment strategies must be organized and developed around the maintenance of the psychological structures of identity and the perspective of personality. In other words, time perspective interventions as Marko and Savickas (1998) described should be encouraged. When careers are no longer anchored in a "never ending job," the impact of the loss of the attachment to a valued social dimension disappears more easily. Intervention outcomes related to temporal continuity, optimism about the ability to achieve future goals, and planful attitudes are, in our view, basic variables to take into account within the work with unemployed persons who present a clear deficit of these characteristics (Lo ureiro, 1997).

In Portugal, at the Institute of Employment and Vocational Training (lab service), among the workshops offered for unemployed people are self-esteem group interventions incorporated within career decision making, learning, and job search activities. This is an example of a good integration of more traditional activities with those representative of more modern work realities. Career counselors must also clearly incorporate human resource management methods, like time perspective interventions, in career services delivery in employment and vocational training settings.

Case 4: Relationship Between Power and Career Services Delivery

This last case concerns the fact that in the Portuguese sociopolitical system, most career development tasks are performed within government organizations (e.g., public schools, vocational training centers, employment bureaus) wherein the members of counseling staff are controlled by nonspecialized institutional hierarchies. Often the management of career services is done by persons who have lesser academic and professional backgrounds than the professional counselors. This situation evokes, in our view, complex ethical problems with respect to the design of career services delivery. "Political correctness" often is in contrast to the scientific foundations of psychological practice.

How are career counselors to address this problem? Only by clear demonstration of the value of new and different methods will they be able to demonstrate to politicians the most adequate strategies in the domain of the career services delivery. Therefore, we suggest that a common procedure for the delivery of career services may be the introduction of research facilities into the different settings and organizations where psychologists and counselors work. Concurrently, professional training of career counselors and psychologists, using a scientist or practitioner model, is needed. Career counselors and psychologists, then, would be more aware of research and research needs. This would contribute to an enriched dialogue with professionals at research-oriented institutions and would facilitate and enrich the bridge between theory and practice. Furthermore, the introduction of research facilities and the acquisition of newer professional roles would make a substantial contribution to analyzing the outcome value s and quality of the different career counseling techniques and programs.

Conclusion: A Research Agenda for Intercultural Comparative Studies

Usually career counselors try to find solutions for the problems that surround them. Yet, it is often the case that they must first identify and explore the different dimensions of these problems and deepen their understanding of them. As opposed to simply trying to identify solutions for problems, our intention in this article was to scan different scenarios for the situations raised by the implication of contextual factors in career services delivery, namely within the Portuguese sociopolitical domain. We tried to enumerate a number of issues that, in our view, are important.

The new challenges brought by the postmodern forms of the organization of work and society constitute the first element of a complex system of interactions, which we think must be studied. Associated with this, we have the contrast of the newborn regionalisms, local cultures, and more specific situations (e.g., different forms of ideological and political organization of states) that constitute the second element of the system. Finally, the third element consists of knowledge about sociological influences on vocational behavior. This "triangle" intersects with segmental theoretical models and practice strategies, whose applications to different cases enlighten the current problems. The result of this triangulation is a sociological meta-theory about the possible factors that affect an individual's career.

A next step is to confront existing vocational models with the extracted sociological framework. In other words, we think that a convergence between vocational and sociological knowledge needs to be stimulated. Finally, given the different sociological realities in different countries or regions (e.g., different educational, training, or economic systems; plurality of cultures and subcultures; and configurations of welfare programs), an analysis of existing responses in terms of career services delivery should be produced.

Certainly the produced realities, when compared with each other, will be convergent in some aspects and divergent in others. This intercultural comparison could help to determine the efficacy of career services delivery, knowing that each situation will require different approaches, according to different contexts; time and space; and the sociopolitical, educational, cultural, and economic realities of countries or regions. In this way, we propose a research agenda that, facing the broad scope of these problems, must have an inspiration based on political anthropology. Intercultural comparative studies could be a first step to advance the knowledge and the political efficacy and usefulness of career services delivery.

Eduardo J. R. Santos and Joaquim Armando Ferreira are both associate professors in the Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciencias da Educacao [College of Psychology and of Education Sciences] at the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal. Anna Chaves is a doctoral student in the Department of Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology at Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts. This article was originally prepared for presentation in the symposium on Contextual Factors in Career Service Delivery at the 106th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), San Francisco, August 14-18, 1998. The first two authors express their gratitude to Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian for the grants for their participation in the APA convention. The authors also thank David Blustein for his comments and help with this article. Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Eduardo J. R. Santos or Joaquim Armando Ferreira, Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciencias da Educacao, Universidade de Coimbra , Run do Colegio Novo, s/n, 3000 Coimbra, Portugal (e-mail: [e-mail];[e-mail]).

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