6

A Contextualist Explanation

of Career

Richard A. Young, Ladislav Valach,

Audrey Collin

Virtually all theories of career choice and development attempt
to account for context in one way or another. Indeed, Parsons’s pio-
neering formulation of a process of vocational guidance (Parsons,
1909) was his response to the social and economic conditions of
early twentieth-century Boston. In this chapter, we extend the
career theorists’ concern with context by offering an integrative
explanation of career that addresses context extensively. This expla-
nation is informed by a way of looking at the world that is very
different from the way many traditional—and even many contem-
porary—career theorists see it. Our explanation is in accord with
recent developments in the social sciences and other fields, some of
which are referred to as postmodern. Using this perspective, we
reconceptualize the nature of “career” and hence of career counsel-
ing, with significant implications for theory, research, and practice.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to offer a contextualist
explanation of career based on action theory. We begin by examin-
ing the meaning of contextandcontextureand positing properties of
context based on these meanings. Several approaches to career
development and counseling that address the context of career (for
example, Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986) focus on one
or more of these properties. Nevertheless, although the approaches
arecontextual,most are not grounded in contextualism. In contrast,
we introduce action theory (Polkinghorne, 1990; von Cranach &

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