imize the substantial impact of objective features of the environ-
ment, but it does highlight the person’s active role in appraising and
making meaning out of what the environment provides.
Astin (1984), Mitchell and Krumboltz (1996), and others have
identified a number of opportunity structure factors affecting career
behavior. For conceptual convenience, we have divided such fac-
tors into two subgroups, based on their relative proximity to career
choice points:
- More distal (background) contextual influences (for example,
opportunities for skill development, cultural and gender-role
socialization processes, range of potential academic-career role
models) that help shape social cognitions and interests - Proximal influences (for example, emotional and financial
support for selecting a particular option, job availability in
one’s preferred field, sociostructural barriers) that come into
play at critical choice junctures
Figure 7.2 outlines the hypothesized connections of each set of
contextual factors to various career development outcomes.
Earlier we discussed the more distal role of contextual variables
in shaping the acquisition of self-efficacy and outcome expecta-
tions. We highlight here two major ways in which contextual fac-
tors are assumed to affect the career choice process per se. First, we
posit that features of the opportunity structure moderate the rela-
tions of interests to goals and goals to choice-related actions (that
is, efforts to implement goals). In other words, opportunity structure
variables affect people’s ability or willingness to transform their
career interests into goals and their goals into actions. (These
effects are shown by the dotted paths in Figure 7.2.) Persons who
experience beneficial environmental conditions (presence of ample
support, few barriers) are expected to negotiate these processes
more readily than those who experience nonsupportive conditions
or obstacles relative to their preferred course of action. Second, cer-
tain environmental conditions can exert direct, potent effects on
SOCIAL COGNITIVE CAREER THEORY 275