role, careers are deeply grounded in “status identity,” that is, an indi-
vidual’s internal representation of his or her location among
unequal social positions. Linda Gottfredson (1996), in her socio-
logical theory of vocational development, sagaciously describes how
the social order, with its gender and class differences in employ-
ment, shape children’s occupational aspirations. She explains how
society encourages children to circumscribe the range of occupa-
tional alternatives that they consider and how, in making compro-
mises between the vocational self-concept and the social order, they
learn to let conceptions about an occupation’s prestige and sextype
overshadow their own vocational interests.
Thinking about the development of vocational behavior from
the self-concept perspective led to Super’s heuristic postulate
(Super, 1951) that in expressing vocational preferences, people put
into occupational terminology their ideas of the kind of people they
are; that in entering an occupation, they seek to implement a con-
cept of themselves; and that after stabilizing in an occupation, they
seek to realize their potential and preserve self-esteem. This core
postulate—that vocational self-concepts interact with work roles—
leads to the conceptualization of occupational choice as imple-
menting a self-concept, work as a manifestation of selfhood, and
vocational development as a continuing process of improving the
match between the self and situations.
Viewing occupational choice as an attempt to implement a self-
concept (see Super, 1951) was a simple formulation, yet the notion
of translating one’s self-view into occupational terms and then
preparing for and performing in that occupation had, and still has,
widespread appeal. It fits the developmental model in portraying a
career as a sequence of matching decisions. With a changing self
and changing situations, the matching process is never really com-
pleted. The series of changing preferences should progress, through
successive approximations, toward a better fit between worker and
work. Thus a career can be viewed as the life course of a person
encountering a series of social expectations and attempting to han-
dle them in such a way as to attune her or his inner world to the
A DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY OF VOCATIONAL BEHAVIOR 165