Introduction to the special section.

Every generation produces a few leaders in each profession who become giants in their field. Not necessarily recognized as such in their own time, they are frequently celebrated a generation or two later for the contributions that they earlier made. David Valentine Tiedeman (1919-2004), who is today recognized by many of the leaders of career counseling and vocational psychology as a forerunner of 21st-century career counseling, is one such giant in our field. This special section of The Career Development Quarterly honors him for the ideas that he has left with us, although he was often highly criticized or ignored at the time when he presented them.

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In his article, Mark Savickas (2008) eloquently puts Tiedeman's contributions into perspective:

    When individuals of deep scholarship and intellectual daring lunge
    ahead of the learned community whom they are addressing, they may
    not receive the honor that they deserve. Instead, they may blend
    undistinguished into the scholarly landscape and somehow become
    taken for granted. Something like this has happened to the scholarly
    contributions of David Valentine Tiedeman (1919-2004). Being the
    first psychologist to systematically apply constructivist
    epistemology to the comprehension of careers, Tiedeman broke with
    intellectual traditions to lead the counseling profession in a new
    direction. As he cleared a path into the future, he identified what
    was to be avoided and articulated what was to be done. When others
    lagged behind, he moved forward by himself. (p. 217)

The Genesis of This Special Section

The articles published in this section emerged as a result of a special symposium dedicated to honor Tiedeman and his work that was held not long after his death at the 2006 National Career Development Association (NCDA) Global Conference in Chicago. That symposium occurred as a result of a chance meeting between Mark Savickas and Lee Richmond at the NCDA conference 1 year earlier. There, Savickas and Richmond quite literally "bumped into each other" in a hotel hallway. Richmond then had the opportunity to tell Savickas how much she enjoyed the Festschrift he had been involved in planning for Donald Super. Richmond said that she wished something of that caliber could be done in honor of David Tiedeman. "David was a thinker way ahead of his time," Savickas said. "Thirty years ago, he had ideas about social construction theory and aligned it to constructing careers. Today, we think this is new when in actuality the profession is catching up with him!" Then, he suggested that because Richmond had been Tiedeman's friend, she might organize a symposium in Tiedeman's honor at the 2006 NCDA conference. Then, when Savickas offered to be the lead speaker and prepare a major presentation, Richmond started to work on creating such a session.

Martha Russell, the incoming president of NCDA, said she liked the idea. NCDA Executive Director Deneen Pennington and her staff set aside a place for the symposium. Anna Miller-Tiedeman, David's wife, named three people for the panel (in addition to Savickas) whose professional lives, she thought, were most influenced by David. The three people were JoAnn Harris-Bowlsbey, David Jepsen, and Rich Feller. All named were persons whose lives had been touched by and whose professional careers were influenced greatly by Tiedeman's work. Anna said that David had loved each of them. Moreover, each must have loved David because all immediately agreed to participate on the panel to celebrate Tiedeman, the counselor, the scholar, the teacher, and the person. With the exception of Feller, who spoke, as is characteristic of him, extemporaneously from his heart, all wrote their presentations ahead of time. These presentations form the foundation of the articles in this special section. Also included are words from Anna Miller-Tiedeman about her husband, his work, and their work and life together.

Personal Perspective

This section provides a personal insight into the person of David Tiedeman from Lee Richmond's perspective.

As panel chair, my (Richmond's) role was to introduce the others. However, as it did to each of the symposium participants, meeting David Tiedeman had its effect upon my life and changed the direction of my work. That meeting fits Tiedeman's ideas about the way that life works. It was April 1983, in Washington, DC, and, once again, the place was a convention hotel, only this time it was the American Counseling Association convention. The theme of the convention was "Counselors Help America Work," and I was program chair. The convention was planned to feature health or wellness counseling and also career development. The health topic opened the conference. The keynote speech was to be a debate between the then president of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the president of the American Holistic Medical Association. C. Gilbert Wrenn was to serve as moderator. As things worked out, there was a freak blizzard in Pittsburgh that April day, and the president of the AMA got snowed in. He phoned and said that because of the storm, his plane was delayed and he could not get to Washington in time to speak.

The program then changed. I introduced the program as a dialogue between Wrenn and Gladys McGarry. The discussion was exhilarating and forward looking and deserved the standing ovation that was given to the two speakers at the close of the session. At the end of the program, when people came to the podium to talk to the keynote speakers, a rather short man with sparkling eyes and an almost impish smile came and shook my hand. "Did you plan this program?" he asked. I told him that I had, although not exactly as it was presented. He then emphasized that it was presented exactly as it should have been. "It was perfect, the best thing I have heard at this convention in years," he said. I then asked his name. He told me that his name was David, David Tiedeman. My thought was "My god--he touched me." Before then I had read of him and of his theories only in textbooks.

I saw David again the next day, on the "career" day at the convention when many of the programs were focused on career counseling. He was on a panel planned by Carole Minor and moderated by Nancy Schlossberg. David, John Holland, John Krumboltz, and Donald Super presented their theories and demonstrated how their theories applied to the career lives of clients. All of the presentations were brilliant, but somehow I resonated to David's theory. Whereas the others talked about work and their ideas about how it is chosen, he talked about life and how career is constructed within the individual in terms of his or her sense of being, relative to other people and events that occurred in his or her life.

I wanted to learn more and told David so. He invited me to attend the 1983 Assembly to Advance Career that he and his wife, Anna Miller-Tiedeman, presented at the University of Southern California. I did attend, and, by a random selection of names, I became Anna's roommate. I have not stopped learning from them since.

Later, as I was then teaching and coordinating the counseling program at Johns Hopkins University, I invited them to come to Baltimore and teach a special course. I also attended that course and learned more about internal process theory. Students along with me included Linda Kemp, then the director of career development for the U.S. Postal Service, and Harvey Huntley, a Lutheran minister. Huntley had been chosen to design a career plan for employees relative to the national merger of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church. Kemp, Huntley, and myself all latched onto the internal process theory, the Lifecareer theory, as espoused by the two Tiedemans. Programs still exist in the postal service and in the church that were developed according to the model that was provided in that class 24 years ago.

The Lifecareer model that Anna Miller-Tiedeman had developed was heartily endorsed by David and embellished by his life process theory. The connection between spirituality and career, and the model that was developed by Deborah Bloch and myself, was sparked by the work of the two Tiedemans.

Over the years, the Tiedemans and I became friends, visiting when possible each other's homes and staying in touch by mail, phone, and e-mail as best we could. In the end, what I remember of David is that he was gentle of speech and strong of character; that he was modest; that he adored his wife, liked science fiction, and had a sense of humor equaled only by his broad and somewhat impish smile. I remember talking with him one day when I did not like something going on at the university at which I was then working. I did not know what to do. Should I speak up? Or what? I asked David. He answered with a question: "What is your job title?" I said, "Professor." He said, "Well, then, profess!"

Professional Perspectives

The articles of which this special section is composed attempt to put Tiedeman's contributions into a historical perspective. They focus especially on his early work and its application.

Mark Savickas (2008) argues convincingly that Tiedeman laid the foundation for the "contemporary theory and practice of career construction" (p. 217). He charts Tiedeman's journey from logical positivist to career constructionist.

    Tiedeman's dissatisfaction with the methods of positivist psychology
    impelled his quest for a new paradigm. He wanted a psychology that
    did more than offer only a sum of miscellaneous facts. He wanted to
    investigate how the facts of lived experience organize themselves
    into a whole that gives new meaning to a life in progress.
    (Savickas, 2008, p. 218)

Savickas (2008) writes that "Tiedeman viewed the then-prominent theories of Roe (1956), Holland (1959), and Super (1957) as unarticulated parts, each in a neat box of Newtonian science" (p. 219), and, as Tiedeman developed his critique of his contemporaries' theories, his own view along with new definitions emerged. Tiedeman's new language for career was an attempt to get his peers to break out of their old ways of thinking. For him, "career is guided thought that lends direction to a person's vocational behavior" (Tiedeman, 1964, p. 18). This new view provided the impetus for the development of career construction theory. In Tiedeman's process theory of self and career (as Tiedeman eschewed such, this is not the name of his theory, merely descriptive), "career emerges from self-organization, purposeful action bridges discontinuity, and decisions evolve through differentiation and integration" (Savickas, 2008, p. 217).

David Jepsen (2008) provides a personal and logical argument as to why we should read Tiedeman's work and, at the same time, gives us the essence of Tiedeman as a person and of his professional contributions. Jepsen writes of what made Tiedeman unique to the world of career development. Like a Zen Buddhist master, Tiedeman "recognized paradoxes in career decision processes (e.g., the requirement that a decision maker be both committed and tentative at the same time; Tiedeman, 1967, 1975)" (Jepsen, 2008, p. 226).

First, according to Jepsen (2008), Tiedeman

    insisted that he did not write a career theory. Rather than
    advancing theoretical propositions amenable to empirical tests, he
    offered "primitive terms in a science of career development"
    (Tiedeman & O'Hara, 1963, p. v). He believed that each person can
    become a career theorist, that each of us is capable of developing a
    theory of our own career. (p. 226)

Second, Tiedeman

    conceptualized the human career as a process, not an outcome, such
    as a series of occupational roles. From his perspective, career is
    "a lifetime achievement, always in the process of emergence"
    (Tiedeman, 1971, p. 123). He frequently used the analogies of motion
    and flow when describing career. Specifically, he believed that
    career is "the time-extended working out of oneself" through
    mechanisms such as acts of deciding and "mapping of self (Tiedeman,
    1971, p. 124). (Jepsen, 2008, p. 226)

Third, Tiedeman

    framed the goal of a person's career development not as entering a
    job or an occupation but rather as "the making of a life and the
    evolution of existential meanings" (Tiedeman & O'Hara, 1963, p. 4).
    Whereas other career scholars emphasized vocational behaviors or
    work roles, Tiedeman insisted that the fundamental quality that
    develops throughout a career is the meaning the person attributes to
    experiences.... [Tiedeman] argued that the internalization of the
    decision processes, that is, going beyond the words used in talking
    about decisions, leaves the person with a heightened sense of
    personal agency. (Jepsen, 2008, p. 226)

David Duys, Janice Ward, Jane Maxwell, and Leslie Eaton-Comerford (2008) revisit Tiedeman's contributions as applied to today's world and conclude that his ideas hold up remarkably well. These authors focus on Tiedeman's decision-making process--a nonlinear model that allows for career path recycling and revisiting of previously completed phases. According to these authors, Tiedeman's (1961) model "provides a framework to better understand phases associated with evolving priorities throughout life" (Duys et al., 2008, p. 237). They also discuss an application of this process that they call "retro-development" (Duys et al., 2008, p. 236), or the process of working backward through these decision-making phases.

Finally, they discuss "parallel streams" (Duys et al., 2008, p. 237), which occurs when people simultaneously pursue different vocational interests.

    For Tiedeman, engagement in parallel vocational paths is not seen as
    a failure to make a significant investment in a primary occupation
    but rather as an accepted manner of further exploring one's
    interests and abilities. A counselor who operates from Tiedeman's
    perspective would be quite comfortable helping a client
    simultaneously deal with issues associated with each endeavor. (Duys
    et al., 2008, p. 237)

Duys et al. (2008) contend that these ideas embedded in Tiedeman's (1961) original model address variables often ignored by other models. "The idea of nonlinear movement, flexibility, and individual development that Tiedeman's model explores makes it an excellent resource for counselors helping clients contend with a volatile labor market" (Duys et al., 2008, p. 239).

In the concluding article in this special section, Anna Miller-Tiedeman (2008) offers us her perspective on the work of her late husband, partner, colleague, and collaborator, David Tiedeman. Miller-Tiedeman was arguably David Tiedeman's most influential collaborator given that she introduced him to constructivism and quantum physics in the 1970s (Savickas, 2008). Using his own words, Miller-Tiedeman guides us through Tiedeman's work. She uses the structure of (a) his professional credo, (b) his Harvard Studies in Career Development, (c) his declaration in 1983 about career, (d) his thoughts about statistics of vocational guidance, and (e) his beliefs about self-counseling and consciousness.

Furthermore, she cites four practice or theory and practice themes in Tiedeman's work. Tiedeman's first practice theme "involves protecting personal perception in an effort to increase individual personal development" (Miller-Tiedeman, 2008, p. 243). Tiedeman's second theory and practice theme "involves supporting an idea capable of liberating the perception, thereby freeing it for increased development" (Miller-Tiedeman, 2008, p. 244). Tiedeman's third theory and practice theme "holds that statistics matter little in an individual life. If anything, they tend to capture, not liberate, perception, and this can truncate development" (Miller-Tiedeman, 2008, p. 244). Tiedeman's fourth practice theme "involves moving to a science supporting a consciousness of being conscious in order to recognize process even at a young age" (Miller-Tiedeman, 2008, p. 244).

Miller-Tiedeman also graciously contributed the curriculum vitae and photographs that accompany this special section.

Conclusion

Tiedeman was always growing and developing, as he moved from an outcome- to a process-focused view of life and career. What runs throughout the articles in this special section is Tiedeman's contributions to both theory and practice. He knew he was offering intellectually provocative insights into career development, and he deliberately used a new language to move career counseling and development professionals out of their comfort zone to help them overcome their previous professional learning and their inertia. "Tiedeman's change in language about careers both reflected and fostered the change he sought to bring about in career theory" (Savickas, 2008, p. 220).

He grew out of his statistics phase, as Miller-Tiedeman (2008) stated, but he could only do that through his own expertise in that field of study. Just as Picasso's modernist view of art grew out of his excellence in the foundational techniques of representational art, so did Tiedeman evolve. As an expert statistician, he could see through the holes in that worldview, and it led him to a new vision, a vision informed by engineering, science, and physics. A vision so big that it encompassed the relativity of a person's universe; the importance of perception; and how individuals construct their own lives, vision, and theory about their own human nature as well as their careers.

    There is no reason why kids can't themselves be theorists of human
    nature. It's too heady a game, theory in human nature, to permit
    psychologists to monopolize it. It's the capacity to theorize about
    one's own nature which I make the center of my work. (D. V.
    Tiedeman, personal communication, July 7, 1971)

Finally, as Savickas (2008) writes,

    [Tiedeman] elaborated a new paradigm that applied a constructivist
    epistemology to the comprehension of career. His model of career
    consciousness fits postmodern societies with their information
    technology and global economies. Counselors who use career
    construction models and narrative counseling methods are well
    advised to revisit Tiedeman's initial formulations. His seminal
    articles provide inspiration and instruction for the continuing
    elaboration of career construction theory. (p. 223)

His process theory of self and career laid the foundation for today's career construction theory and other constructivist, social construction, and narrative theories. For this and all that he gave to our profession, with this special section, we pay tribute to the contributions of David Valentine Tiedeman.

References

Duys, D. K., Ward, J. E., Maxwell, J. A., & Eaton-Comerford, L. (2008). Career counseling in a volatile job market: Tiedeman's perspective revisited. The Career Development Quarterly, 56, 232-241.

Jepsen, D. A. (2008). A tribute to David Tiedeman. The Career Development Quarterly, 56, 225-231.

Miller-Tiedeman, A. (2008). Essential Tiedeman: Anchoring the North Star for human development. The Career Development Quarterly, 56, 242-245.

Savickas, M. L. (2008). David V. Tiedeman: Engineer of career construction. The Career Development Quarterly, 56, 217-224.

Tiedeman, D. V. (1961). Decision and vocational development: A paradigm and its implications. The Personnel and Guidance Journal, 40, 15-21.

Tiedeman, D. V. (1964). The cultivation of career in vocational development through guidance-in-education (Harvard Studies in Career Development No. 29). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, Center for Research in Careers.

Lee J. Richmond, Department of Education, Loyola College in Maryland; Mark Pope, Division of Counseling and Family Therapy, University of Missouri-St. Louis. Tiedeman photo (this page) reprinted with permission. Correspondence concerning this introduction should be addressed to Mark Pope, Division of Counseling and Family Therapy, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 415 Marillac Hall, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63121-4400 (e-mail: [e-mail]).