Super, Donald Edwin (1910–1994)

There are two grand paradigms in vocational psychology. The first perspective for understanding vocational behavior concentrates on how individual differences in ability and interests relate to occupational requirements, routines, and reward. This paradigm, called the matching model, asserts that the goodness of fit between an individual's abilities and a job's requirements determines the worker's occupational success. Furthermore, the match between the individual's interests and the job's rewards determines the worker's job satisfaction. Workers who are successful and satisfied with their routines, in other words adjusted, remain in the job for long periods of time, thus achieving occupational stability. This paradigm lies at the heart of professional activities such as vocational guidance, personnel selection, and military classification.

In the 1940s, Donald Edwin Super made two major contributions to the matching model for understanding vocational behavior. In 1942 he published The Dynamics of Vocational Adjustment, which described his views on vocational guidance. In 1949 he published an encyclopedic tome, Appraising Vocational Fitness by Means of Psychological Tests that analyzed the data on the use of tests in vocational guidance and personnel selection. These two contributions secured his stature as a prominent vocational psychologist, and accordingly in 1949 he was promoted to the rank of professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University where in 1940 he had earned [Page 1646]Super, Donald Edwin (1910–1994) his Ph.D. under the sponsorship of Harry Dexter Kitson and where he worked from 1945 to 1975.

Following his promotion to the rank of professor, Super became more interested in theory construction than in the application of psychology to personnel selection and vocational guidance. A stinging critique of vocational psychology had been published in 1951 by Eli Ginzberg who in effect asserted that the discipline of occupational psychology had been operating without a theory. This critique ushered in the theory building era of vocational psychology during which John Lewis Holland in 1959 consolidated the voluminous research and reflection on the matching model into an elegant theory of vocational personality types and work environments. Super took a different tact. He turned his attention away from how individuals differ from each other in abilities and interest. Instead he concentrated on how an individual differs from himself or herself across time, that is, how individuals develop their careers.

The 1950s was a decade during which hierarchical corporations rose in urban centers of America. The bureaucratic structure of corporations created career paths along which individuals could grow in occupational responsibility and income. Career came to be viewed as the value accompanying bureaucratic form. Rather than remaining in one job for life, many individuals could envision progressing along a predictable sequence of positions. Super became the leading architect of vocational psychology's response to the new social arrangement of occupational lives into career patterns. He added a career development model to the longstanding occupational matching model. His developmental model of how a career progresses over the life cycle became the second major paradigm in vocational psychology, one that, paired with Holland's theory, dominated the field of vocational psychology during the second half of the 20th century.

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