tives) from the full menu that a culture offers. Choosing one par-
ticular occupation is but the end of a long process in which young-
sters have greatly constrained that final choice, knowingly or not.
Compromiseis the process by which youngsters begin to relin-
quish their most preferred alternatives for less compatible ones that
they perceive as more accessible. Individuals often discover, when
the time comes, that they are unable to implement their most-pre-
ferred choices. In a sense, they have to reverse the choice process
and reconsider their less-preferred alternatives, perhaps even ones
they had earlier ruled out as unacceptable. Compromise can occur
either in anticipation of external barriers (anticipatory compro-
mise) or after they are encountered (experiential compromise).
Circumscription Process
The circumscription of aspirations from early childhood through
adolescence can be described by several principles, which play them-
selves out in four stages of development. However, it is first essen-
tial to describe how the entire process is conditioned on cognitive
development. It is widely recognized, of course, that cognition and
human limits in information processing are essential to under-
standing career development. However, age changes and individ-
ual differences in general cognitive ability (intelligence) remain
underappreciated.
Forming occupational aspirations is a process of comparing
one’s self-image with images of occupations and judging degree of
match between the two. This is a very demanding cognitive process
that requires perceiving and understanding properties of self, occu-
pations, and the place of both in the social world. Young children,
however, hold only primitive images of themselves and the world
around them. They nonetheless begin to draw conclusions about
which kinds of work are suitable—and distinctly unsuitable—for
them. Simplistic or not, their conclusions can have lasting conse-
quences because they lead youngsters to rule out from further con-
sideration progressively more sectors of the occupational world of
GOTTFREDSON’S THEORY OF CIRCUMSCRIPTION, COMPROMISE, AND SELF-CREATION 93