208 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT
Pepper’s four mutually exclusive world hypotheses or theoretical
frameworks in Western thinking (Pepper, 1942; the others are
organicism, mechanism, and formism). To understand the hypothe-
ses that people make about the world, Pepper uses root metaphors
or analogies from “some area of common sense fact” (p. 91). The
root metaphor for contextualism is the “historic event” (p. 232). By
this, he does not mean a past event but “the event in its actuality...
going on now,the dynamic, dramatic active event” (p. 232; Pepper’s
emphasis). It may also be called an act: “not an act conceived as
alone or cut off” but “an act in and with its setting, an act in its con-
text” (p. 233). Pepper suggests that “acts or events are all intrinsically
complex, composed of interconnected activities of continuously
changing patterns” (p. 233). He further indicates the immediacy of
an act by using the present participle of verbs, such as doing, endur-
ing, and enjoying—the type of language that, incidentally, resonates
readily with people’s everyday experiences of career.
Basing themselves to a greater or lesser extent on Pepper (1942),
more recent authors have provided further understanding of contex-
tualism (Capaldi & Procter, 1999; Hayes, Hayes, Reese, & Sarbin,
1993). For example, Gillespie (1992) suggests that contextualism is
“an interactive, dynamic worldview” and that “the contextualist
focuses on the readiness of experience and shared meaning that arise
out of interaction with others” (p. 18).
Contextualism conceives of the wholeness of an event and the
interpenetration of its features. We can use the metaphor of weav-
ing a tapestry and creating a pattern by the interweaving of threads
to illuminate the different ontological and epistemological assump-
tions of contextualism. Much social science research and theory,
including that on career, breaks phenomena into their component
parts in order to understand and analyze them. To the contextual-
ist, to analyze events in their various strands would be to start to
unravel the tapestry (Collin, 1994).
This chapter develops a contextual action, theoretical expla-
nation of career for which several aspects of contextualism are par-