40 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT
occurred along the lines of functional tasks (related to people as op-
posed to data or things) and was influenced by the entrepreneurial
versus bureaucratic character of the work setting. Moreover, her
later findings (1976) indicate that intergenerational value trans-
mission is implicated in the tendency for sons of businessmen to
enter business and managerial occupations and the sons of profes-
sionals to choose professional work.
Whereas psychological and sociological views of career choice
have been converging, as Mortimer’s work illustrates, sociologists are
more likely than psychologists to be concerned with the ways in
which location in the social structure, as defined by parental occu-
pation, education, income, gender, race, or ethnicity, influence
diverse orientations toward work. Moreover, sociologists are inter-
ested in the ways that social institutions affect occupational choices,
work orientations, and attainments, as a person moves through the
life course.
A life course approach (Elder & O’Rand, 1995) sensitizes us
to the fact that occupational choice, as well as vocational devel-
opment, is not a one-time event or a process that is confined to
the early years of life. Instead, people continue to make occupa-
tional choices and career decisions as they move through their
careers, and this, as we will discuss later, has become increasingly
the case among contemporary cohorts. The contexts in which
people live their lives and pursue their educational and economic
goals (for example, primary and secondary educational institu-
tions, the labor market, and their family circumstances) provide
opportunities and challenges, as well as constraints, to their ca-
reers. We will examine several of these institutional settings later
in this chapter.
The combination of individual action in response to goals, pref-
erences, and values, as well as the workings of institutional settings
that determine structural opportunity, yield diverse lifelong career
patterns. These may be examined in terms of their continuity, sta-
bility, upward versus downward movement, rewards, and eventual
attainment.