Theoretical background
Narration may be simultaneously considered method and product of counselling sessions.
It is in human’s nature to relate what has happened, as a modality of presentation, self-
revelation, assisted understanding and positive transformation. The clients’ motivation to
“narrate themselves” varies according to the personality type, from the need of validation
by significant people, to the desire to create behavioural models in the group they belong
or wish to belong to, the intention to stand out from the crowd, the temptation to shock by
revelation, the tendency to infirm generality, up to the need of attracting support for an
idea or justification for certain already installed feelings.
The theory of career development was constructed by Donald Super (1957) around the
concept of vocational stages round an individual and generation. It is to be understood
that each person goes through the consecutive cycles of growth, exploration, affirmation,
administration, quitting on a continuum defining their career, irrespective of the
economic, psychological or cultural conditioning. This theory functioned in the 1960s –
80s as an argument of a stage in the worldwide development of the world of work marked
by the rise of common markets, the structuring of demand and offer at central level,
national educational reforms, promoting equality in all the fields of social life. The vision
of professional roles presupposes adapting to a complex of factors (qualification profile,
availability dynamics work tasks, work time, etc.) that should satisfy the requirements of
the system. The process begun in the 1990s of passing from an industrial economy to an
economy based on information and advanced technology (Herr, 2003) demanded the
transformation of the career development theory, so that it should now justify the
multiple transition phases in the life of a person: from school to work, from a job to the
next, from an occupation to the next; “professional cycles” can now be understood as
mini-cycles or activities rebuilding each new career change. Human development has
become the purpose and careers (work and relationships) the means of fulfilment.
Narrative approaches favour the natural integration of work into personal life, rather than
into a given job.
The stages of a career create the vocational habitus (Savickas, 2003), a common space
where individual work experiences are integrated together with significances derived at
the level of the community on the basis of which social and occupational structure is
organized at a given time. Reciprocally, the habitus provides a code accepted to decipher
the origin of personal significance in work experience and allows the transfer of personal
significance to other individuals.