these studies suggest that the results are stronger than first believed
(Savickas, 1993a). Reviewers have expressed concern that each
year only a few new empirical tests of the theory are published
(Osipow & Fitzgerald, 1996; Swanson & Gore, 2000). In recent
years, these research studies have concentrated on the vocational
development tasks, exploratory behavior, vocational identity, and
the school-to-work transition. Also there have been important
applications and extension of the theory to gender and sexual ori-
entation, as well as to other cultures such as South Africa and Aus-
tralia (Swanson & Gore, 2000).
Given the current status of career construction theory, I believe
that three topics merit priority for future research. First, there is a
pressing need for a project that delineates specific aspects of the
vocational self-concept and how they relate to vocational behavior
(Betz, 1994; Super, 1990). This project would aim to improve defin-
itional specificity and organizational parsimony among the self-con-
cept dimensions and metadimensions. For example, such work could
investigate how career self-efficacy relates to vocational self-concept
metadimensions such as self-esteem, clarity, consistency, and real-
ism. It should also relate vocational self-concepts to vocational iden-
tities by building on the foundation of contemporary research about
identity style. Finally, it could prompt a switch from studying self-
concepts to investigating the process of self-conceptualizing by
applying the narrative paradigm of career as story (Savickas, 1998).
A second research priority calls for linguistic explication and
operational definition of career adaptability (Savickas, 1997a). This
construct has improved the theory in recent years, from envision-
ing mainly a maxicycle to involving minicycles of growth, explo-
ration, establishment, management, and disengagement, linked in
a series within the maxicycle. With the addition of the adaptability
construct, the process of transition through re-exploration and
re-establishment merits greater attention. Discontinuities in psy-
chosocial adaptation frame the dialectic of development, which
occurs when encounters between an individual’s thesis and society’s
antithesis produce a new synthesis. Development of potentials and
184 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT