152 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT
At about the same time that Davidson and Anderson (1937)
and Form and Miller (1949) were studying objective careers, other
sociologists were studying subjective careers. These studies involved
life histories and were originally called “own story” research. Soci-
ological life-history research seeks to draw an intimate portrait of
the sequence of events in the course of a person’s life and illuminate
how this sequence expresses a trend in behavior. During the 1930s,
life-history research was enthusiastically promoted by the Univer-
sity of Chicago Sociology Department, led by Clifford Shaw (1930,
1931). Shaw’s use of the term careerfocused explicitly on the sub-
ject’s point of view, particularly how individuals conceptualize their
social roles and interpret their experiences. This subjective per-
spective on private meaning stands in contrast to the public pattern
of occupations in a work history. It coincides with Hughes’s defini-
tion (Hughes, 1958) of subjective careeras an evolving notion from
which people see their lives as a whole and interpret the meaning
of their attributes, actions, and experiences. It is this subjective
meaning—the one individuals use to orient themselves to their so-
ciety’s occupational structure—that Super (1954) assessed with a
technique that identified the preoccupations (for example, themes)
that shape a career and the concept that Miller-Tiedeman and
Tiedeman (1985) denoted. They suggested that career should be
defined as the meaning one places on behaviors related to their
careers.
The premise of career construction theory is that careerdenotes
a reflection on the course of one’s vocational behavior, not voca-
tional behavior itself. This reflection can focus on actual events
such as one’s occupations (objective career) or on their meaning
(subjective career). From this perspective, a subjective career is a
reflexive project that transforms individuals from actors of their
career to subjects in their own career story. It tells one’s “own story,”
usually by emphasizing a sense of purpose that coherently explains
the continuity and change in oneself across time, which is similar
to McAdams’s conception of identity (McAdams, 1993).