The Concept of Life Space
One very important dimension of the context in which careers
develop is social roles, that is, the duties and rewards a culture
assigns and ascribes to its members based on variables such as sex
and race. The term life spacedenotes the collection of social roles
enacted by an individual, as well as the cultural theaters in which
these roles are played. The work role, albeit a critical role in con-
temporary society, is only one among many roles that individuals
may occupy. While making a living, people live a life. The social
elements that constitute a particular life space coalesce into a pat-
tern of core and peripheral roles. This arrangement of roles, or “life
structure,” organizes and channels the person’s engagement in soci-
ety, including occupational choice. Usually two or three core roles
hold a central place, and other roles are peripheral or absent. For
example, a medical student indicated that her major roles are stu-
dent, child, and sibling. These three roles constitute the core of
who she is; they are fundamental to her identity and essential to her
life satisfaction. She values and finds meaning in her peripheral
roles as a friend, companion, and church member, yet she can
vacate these peripheral roles, and sometimes does, when her core
roles require more of her time.
A person’s core roles interact to reciprocally shape each other.
Thus individuals make decisions about their work role, such as
occupational choice and organizational commitment, within the
circumstances imposed by the social roles that give meaning and
focus to their lives. To understand an individual’s career, it is impor-
tant to know and appreciate the web of life roles that connects the
individual to society. Accordingly, counselors must determine the
constellation of roles that an individual plays and the relative im-
portance placed on the work role. Sometimes examination of a life
structure will reveal that the career problem is not occasioned sim-
ply by a work-role transition, such as college graduation, but that
the problem is spun in another strand of the web. For example,
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