Career Choice and Development

A CONTEXTUALIST EXPLANATION OF CAREER 219

Interpretation and Narrative

Interpretationrefers to the process by which people make sense of
action and context. People tend to interpret others’ actions, for the
most part, as intentional and goal-directed, but it is these constructs
of intentionality and goal orientation that are particularly subject to
and salient for interpretation. Interpretation connotes making sense
of something that already exists, that is, finding its meaning, as one
“interprets” the already spoken words of a foreign language. Even in
this act, however, there is meaning that projects forward in time.
The interpreter translates according to her or his present and antic-
ipated context (“What and how will the listener understand?”).
Interpretation also addresses issues of meaning over the long term.
Telling a story that involves the long term serves to integrate the lis-
tener in the long-term process of project or career. The narrative is
not a reproduction of events but a construction that the teller thinks
the other should know about for some reason. Collin and Young
(1992) address the notion and importance of the long-term mean-
ing that one makes of one’s life. They link interpretation, in part, to
the development of a sense of identity through the construction of
narratives. The development of the narrative is enhanced by artic-
ulating it (Taylor, 1989). Collin and Young observe that narrative “is
built from history, culture, society, relationships and language. It
embodies context” (p. 8).
Linde (1993) refers to coherence as the process used to repre-
sent context. Cochran (1990) uses the phrase holistic constructionto
identify the process of constructing “a coherent and reasonably

Action

Systems

Career

Project

Joint action

Action

can be seen

from the

perspective

of

Perspectives

on Action

Levels of Action

Organization

Manifest behavior

Internal processes

Social meaning

Goal

Functional steps

Elements

and

defined as

FIGURE6.1. Main Concepts of Action Theory