tion serves to energize and motivate action. Specific career actions
and projects can be frustrating, difficult, or dull; one must be ener-
gized by emotions in order to carry out the specific action and also to
transcend it. It is difficult to imagine that a career or project can be
engendered or maintained over the long term without the emotion
to sustain it. For example, a pianist may be motivated by love of
music to repeatedly practice a piece that she wants to master. Sec-
ond, emotions serve to regulate and control actions, projects, and
careers. People rely on internal processes to make moment-to-
moment decisions about their actions. Finally, emotion provides the
key to narratives of project and career. Career and project are con-
structed from issues of concern in a person’s life. Because emotion is
associated with needs, desires, purposes, and goals, it is able to access,
develop, and orient narratives about project and career. Not only do
emotions cue the person to the narrative but they are used when the
person is constructing and developing narrative. Young, Paseluikho,
and Valach (1997) illustrate the place of emotion in the construc-
tion of career in parent-adolescent conversations. They found that
emotion regulates the action in the conversations and is implicated
in the goals and strivings of the parents and adolescents; thus emo-
tion serves as the basis of the narratives they construct together.
Simply put, our emotional processes regulate our actions, and these
processes are social in nature. At the same time, to a certain extent
our emotions are constructed by our actions, projects, and careers.
The Validity of the Explanation
In addressing the validity of this contextualist action theory of
career, we are concerned about how sound it is, about its breadth
and its applicability; we know it has considerable range and applic-
ability. As we pointed out, it addresses the three properties of con-
text, multiplicity, the interweaving function, and the meaning of
career itself. Moreover, it addresses these properties for knowledge
generation about career and for career practices, as well as in its fo-
cus on human action.
A CONTEXTUALIST EXPLANATION OF CAREER 223