tive fitness of attitudes, beliefs, and competencies—the ABCs
of career construction—increases along the developmental
lines of concern, control, conception, and confidence.- Career construction is prompted by vocational development
tasks and produced by responses to these tasks. - Career construction, at any given stage, can be fostered by
conversations that explain vocational development tasks,
exercises that strengthen adaptive fitness, and activities that
clarify and validate vocational self-concepts.
The next three sections of this chapter explain these proposi-
tions, first by addressing developmental contextualism (propositions
1–3), then vocational self-concepts (propositions 4–10), and, fi-
nally, developmental tasks as the nexus of career construction
(propositions 11–16).
Developmental Contextualism
Individuals construct their careers in a particular social ecology.
This context is multilevel, including such variables as the physical
environment, culture, racial and ethnic group, family, neighbor-
hood, and school. Historical era represents an additional contextual
dimension in career construction. As a social activity, work links
the individual to the group because it provides a way of connecting
to, cooperating with, and contributing to one’s community. The
link is actively encouraged by institutions such as the family, school,
and religious institutions, and by the media; all communicate to
infants and children within a given culture a more or less unified
view about how social relationships should be conducted and how
life should be lived. Thus people are embedded in environments
that affect them. A male born into an Asian family living in Man-
hattan might be encouraged to become a physician or an engineer
while a female with the same genetic potential living in Harlem
A DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY OF VOCATIONAL BEHAVIOR 157