Context in Career and Counseling
Theory, Research, and Practice
As we noted at the outset, context is well recognized in career theory
and counseling, although it is conceptualized in various ways (Hol-
land, 1997; Krumboltz, 1998; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 2000; Leong
& Serafica, 2001; Savickas, 2001). Contextualism is also recognized
in explanations of career (Richardson, 2000; Patton & McMahon,
1999). Richardson (2001) notes that counseling psychologists and,
by implication, counselors have always been contextualists, in that
they have always been interested in the significant contexts of peo-
ple’s lives, although many have not used explicitly contextual con-
ceptualizations. However, to our knowledge, no career theorist has
espoused contextualism as defined in this chapter. Thus we believe it
would be helpful to establish how a range of career development and
counseling theories, research, and practices represent and address
context.
We stated earlier that theories of career and counseling usually
address one or more of the properties of context. We said that the
properties of context are (1) a multiplicity and complexity of parts,
(2) the inextricable weaving together of these parts, and (3) the
meaning of events or phenomena. We now illustrate how these
career theories often address one or the other of the properties of
context and how they include counseling applications fitting that
property. We then propose that our contextualist action theory
integrates the properties of context with the domains of ontology,
epistemology, and practice identified earlier.
The career theories that incorporate the first of these properties
emphasize the complexity of the career world, the institutional struc-
tures that must be accommodated to, and the myriad of variables
that are at play in career development. In two discussions (Hotchkiss
& Borow, 1996; Maranda & Comeau, 2000), the authors identify a
number of sociological approaches that attempt to account for the
complexity of the variables that contribute to career. These variables
include structural factors such as the nature of the labor market, race,
210 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT