Social Constructionism

The Self and Career Construction

A social constructionist position carries significant implications for transforming traditional notions of vocational and career psychology. Career choices, for example, are understood as coordinated forms of discourse and relational enactment, rather than as products of rational, cognitive, or individual decision making. The traditional supremacy of rational processes, as reflected in concepts such as “career decision making,” “self-efficacy,” or “career interests,” cede to relational and contextual processes that are understood as informing, scaffolding, or facilitating the emergence of given careers or career enactments, rather [Page 755]than as determining or causing the choice or selection of a given career by a given person. Because career discourses are viewed as relationally, culturally, and temporally bound, career choice is viewed more as an artifact of communal interchange than as a reflection of a “correct,” “preferred,” or “effective” decision or selection on the part of the individual. From a social constructionist perspective, the “I” does not exist outside of language or discourse; it is in and through language that the “self” is constructed, together with his or her vocational options and career possibilities.

Career Development and Narrative

The concept of the career narrative reflects many of the central tenets of social constructionism as applied to the area of career choice and vocational development. Individuals' stories, their ongoing narrative accounts of their lives and experiences, play a central role in a constructionist account. Individual stories have crucial constructive roles in creating and maintaining relational dialogues at individual, social, and cultural levels. Within the context of these narrative constructions, individual accounts are no longer seen as personal instantiations of self-concepts, self-efficacy, vocational dispositions, decidedness, or development. Instead, the person is understood as drawing from and being constituted by the broader culture in which he or she operates. An exclusive privileging of self-agency is counterbalanced by attention to issues of social, institutional, and cultural context. An individual's career narrative is understood as emerging from, and being supported by, broader narratives that are available from within the culture and society. The interplay between personal and institutional and cultural contexts necessarily introduces the role of political, social, and cultural forces in forging individual career choices and vocational development. The “choices” that individuals make are therefore bounded by the broader social and cultural metanarratives available in any given time and place, which situate career decision making more as an act of social and relational negotiation than as an act of personal choice and rational decision making.

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