and gender, as well as family socioeconomic status. Maranda and
Comeau show how various schools of sociology interpret these struc-
tural factors differently, with contrasting implications for the person
and for career. Some approaches to context that emphasize multi-
plicity and complexity also draw implications for counseling prac-
tice. Hotchkiss and Borow identify a range of counseling practices to
help clients address the structural dimensions of their contexts,
including informing clients about the labor market and combating
gender stereotyping. They also cite Gottfredson’s career theory of
circumscription and compromise (Gottfredson, 1981) as a particu-
larly good explanation of career that incorporates the gender and
status dimensions of occupational aspiration.
Other career theories address context by looking specifically at
how things (for example, roles) are woven together. Rather than focus
on the list of variables as Hotchkiss and Borow (1996) did, these
theorists suggest that career should be looked at as a kind of inter-
locking system. Vondracek and colleagues’ contextual-developmental
approach to career (Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986)
addresses the dynamic interaction between the context and the per-
son, using the concept of affordances. Patton and McMahon (1999)
also examine the interlocking nature of career systems by explicitly
labeling their approach as a systemic approach to career development;
they propose it “as a potential overarching framework for career the-
ory” (p. 134). Leong and Hartung (2000) provide a particular exam-
ple of the interlocking nature of factors that pertain to career. In
discussing multicultural career and counseling issues, they suggest that
the demographics of increasing cultural diversity are in the process of
producing a multicultural mind-set, in other words, the reciprocal
influence of people from different ethnic groups living in the same
groups and societies affects the way we know and think about multi-
cultural issues. Leong and Hartung go on to propose counseling inter-
ventions in career that are culturally functional, that is, procedures
that fit for the joint undertaking that is multicultural counseling.
Finally, we know that context reveals the meaning of events
or phenomena that would otherwise be ambiguous or unavailable
A CONTEXTUALIST EXPLANATION OF CAREER 211