may be socialized to become a waitress. Of course, this situation is
often unfair to an individual and detrimental to the community.
Development in a Social Context
Although initial statements of vocational development theory
ignored the fact that careers evolve in a social context, starting in
the 1980s there was a push to elaborate theory to situate careers in
social context and define their relation to historical era, geographic
location, race, and culture. Vondracek, Lerner, and Schulenberg
(1986), in articulating a new model of vocational development,
emphasized that careers develop in a particular time and place. Pre-
vious theorists had recognized that careers evolve in response to
societal demands, but these theorists had concentrated on an indi-
vidual’s responses to societal tasks. Vondracek and his colleagues
redressed this oversight by amending career theory to highlight the
context of development, especially the stimulus demands of a par-
ticular culture in a specific historical era. They asserted the impor-
tance of social ecology in their life-span approach to careers called
developmental contextualism. This view synthesizes the ideas that
“contextual change is probabilistic in nature, and that development
proceeds according to the organism’s activity” (p. 32). The result is
that, in the model of developmental contextualism, the individual’s
own organization and coherence interact with contextual opportu-
nities and constraints to produce development. While the context
shapes the individual, the individual shapes the context. Based on
this principle of reciprocity in development, Vondracek and his col-
leagues articulated two recommendations of great import. First,
they urged that career professionals appreciate plasticity in devel-
opment, that is, the potential for change in the individual and in
the context. Second, they enjoined career professionals to view
individuals as producers of their own development and, as a conse-
quence of this belief, to help clients consciously influence their own
development.
158 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT