Special section: Challenges for Career Counseling in Asia.

Introduction

Globalization is becoming a significant trend in the social sciences. As Friedman (1999) pointed out, this trend is sweeping across the various disciplines of politics, economics, education, and psychology. No longer are we just concerned about how our students are doing in schools relative to their classmates or to those students across the county line. Our comparative framework has become global; we are now comparing our children's school performance against that of children in Japan, Singapore, or Germany.

This global perspective is also evident in the National Career Development Association (NCDA). At their recent ninth Global Conference in Portland, Oregon, the conference focused on "Best Practices in Career Development Across Cultures." During the conference, one of the keynote panels focused on "Challenges for Career Counseling in Asia." That panel was so well received that we decided to propose the development of a special section of The Career Development Quarterly (CDQ) devoted to that topic.

The special section, titled "Challenges for Career Counseling in Asia," consists of seven articles that examine the nature of career counseling services in Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. The last article in this issue was written by one of us (Leong) and focused on presenting a conceptual model for understanding the development of career counseling services in Asia. This last article was the keynote presentation given at the end of the panel at NCDA. We chose to focus on the East and Southeast Asia for two reasons. First, three of the presentations at the NCDA keynote panel were made by individuals from East Asia. Second, we needed to focus on countries in which we know of active scholars and practitioners who are involved in career counseling services and research. Third, we hope that this special section is just a beginning and that more articles that examine career interventions in other parts of Asia will be published in future issues of CDQ.

Career counseling in Asia is a fairly recent development historically. With the worldwide phenomenon of increasing technological sophistication and its corollary, instantaneous global communication, we are seeing a merging of historical stages in the development of career counseling within each country (Pope, 2000). Yet, as each country enters the twenty-first century, each finds that it must meet these technological and career challenges in its own uniquely nationalistic and cultural way. For example, although the transition from an industrial to a technological stage is one that is important for all nations to complete, each country must navigate those waters in the hands of individuals who are bound by their national and cultural context.

As you read each article, you will see commonalities in the development of career counseling in the countries represented. All are bound together by geography and economics--the macroculture. Each is, however, unique in so many other ways, including language, traditions, and rituals--the microculture. The central theme of this special section is to seek a greater and deeper understanding of the complex interactions between these cultural factors and career counseling services as they are currently practiced in these different countries.

What we have assembled in the special section is a broad representation of career counseling as it is currently practiced in seven Asian countries. In some cases, culturally unique approaches to career counseling are described, whereas in others, authors point to the challenges of accommodating to these cultural factors when Western-based models of career counseling are imported. Regardless of whether a culturally unique approach or a culturally accommodating approach is described, each article inevitably reveals the distinctive flavors that are added to career counseling as they have been interpreted in that particular country's cultural context. A second theme of this special section has been to illustrate the important role of contextual factors in the practice of career counseling.

As evidenced by the NCDA members' positive responses to the keynote panel at the Portland conference, we hope that this special section will represent a more detailed and permanent record of the ideas and concepts shared at that conference. We also hope that this special section will serve as a catalyst for us to continue to examine the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia and other parts of the world.

References

Friedman, T. L. (1999). The lexus and the olive tree: Understanding globalization. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Pope, M. (2000). A brief history of career counseling in the United States. The Career Development Quarterly, 48, 194-211.