with the four major tasks of vocational development that society
imposes on children:
- Become concernedabout one’s future as a worker.
- Increase personal controlover one’s vocational activities.
- Form conceptionsabout how to make educational and voca-
tional choices. - Acquire the confidenceto make and implement these career
choices.
1.Career concernis the line of vocational development rooted
in dependence on parents and plotted by the coordinates of inter-
personal trust and intrapersonal hope (Erikson, 1963). Recent schol-
arship directed to constructing a relational theory of vocational
development has focused on how attachment to parents enables
infants to initiate and children to form a conception of self and
other people that extends into later life in general and into occu-
pational life in particular (Blustein, 2001; Flum, 2001). Infants and
children who establish secure attachments to their caregivers learn
to trust themselves and other people. This positive conception of
both self and others forms an “internal working model” of human
relationships that enables children and adolescents to feel secure as
they explore the work world and daydream about their place in it.
Later, as adults, this felt security allows individuals to interact pos-
itively with mentors, supervisors, and coworkers (Hazen & Shaver,
1990), as well as to commit themselves to their occupations and
stabilize in their organizations (Meyer & Allen, 1997).
In contrast, insecure attachments produce negative conceptions
of self or others (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991) that characterize
three less adaptive styles of career construction: (1) a preoccupied
style (negative self, positive others) of anxiety and ambivalence
regarding vocational development tasks, (2) a dismissive style (pos-
itive self, negative others) of dissocial attitudes toward vocational
development tasks, and (3) a fearful style (negative self, negative
168 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT