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Life and Career Design Interventions to Help People Direct Their Active Lives Toward Human-Sustainable Development. The Case of Young People Interested in the Social and Solidarity Economy: Transformation for Sustainable Development and Decent Work
Abstract
Decent work is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as work that enables an individual to satisfy vital needs as well as needs for self-fulfillment and identity. This chapter emphasizes that for some young people, decent work corresponds to work whose main purpose is to contribute to the sustainability of society and the environment. A case of young graduates wishing to work in the “Social and Solidarity Economy” is presented with the results of a qualitative research study. These results reveal the importance of a set of prosocial attitudes among young people as being associated with the main purpose they wish to give to their work. On the basis of these observations, two sets of career counseling interventions are envisioned to help young people who seek a professional life that contributes to a human-sustainable society.
... From this perspective, career counseling also has a role to play, particularly in helping individuals manage their careers in a way that contributes to the protection of the environment and society (Cohen-Scali, 2018;Di Fabio & Bucci, 2016;Guichard, 2016;Plant, 2014). The term "green guidance" (Di Fabio & Bucci, 2016;Plant, 2014) has thus been introduced to describe career counseling approaches that explicitly encourage clients to consider global ecological and human needs (as defined, for example, by the United Nations ' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals;United Nations, 2015) in their career choices, in contrast to career counseling approaches that help individuals make vocational decisions on the sole basis of their aspirations and the constraints and opportunities offered by their environment. ...
... Accordingly, several interventions have been suggested to raise career clients' awareness of these issues and to identify the resources that enable them to act responsibly. These interventions include the use of targeted questionnaires (Di Fabio & Rosen, 2020), card games (Rochat & Masdonati, 2019), and lessons (Guichard, 2016), as well as dialogue (Masdonati & Rossier, 2021) and reflexivity interventions (Cohen-Scali, 2018). However, the issues and needs that are addressed by these tools, and therefore the context and timing of their application during the counseling process, remain vague. ...
... A first difficulty for sustainable career management thus arises when clients do not perceive the need to take ecological and human aspects into consideration in their career. Given the emergencies and social crises that characterize the contemporary climate, it is reasonable to consider it necessary to evoke ecological and human aspects systematically during the career counseling process (Cohen-Scali, 2018;Guichard, 2016). However, these issues may fall outside clients' values or lack of priority due to structural, social, or personal constraints. ...
Recently, career practitioners have been encouraged to help clients make career choices that are both environmentally and socially sustainable. However, to date, the career difficulties associated with this “green guidance” process have not been delineated. On the basis of the career development obstacles identified in the relevant literature, this article introduces a nonexhaustive typology of issues specific to the consideration of ecological and human factors in the context of career counseling. For each category of difficulty, examples are provided and practical suggestions are proposed. The contributions and limitations of this exercise are discussed, especially regarding its clarification of the role of career practitioners in promoting sustainability.
... In particular, it seems essential to question how work can contribute to a more sustainable world, both socially and ecologically. In fact, the dominant economic forms of work play a key role in phenomena such as resource depletion, global warming, overconsumption, and increasing social inequalities, each of which poses a real threat to the future of humanity (Cohen-Scali, 2018). Considering that social and ecological sustainability is needed to ensure the future of humanity and the promotion of a fair society, policymakers and all actors of this economic system such as organizations, associations, and unions have to question themselves about their impact on our ecological and social environment (Bal et al., 2020). ...
... Récemment, la Psychology of Working Theory (e.g., Blustein, 2001 ;Duffy et al., 2016) a souligné la nécessité pour les praticien·ne·s de l'orientation de contribuer à un « travail décent » et à promouvoir la justice sociale, des ambitions qui figurent parmi les objectifs de développement durable à l'horizon 2030 définis par l'ONU. Plus largement, d'autres auteur·e·s (e.g., Cohen-Scali, 2018 ;Di Fabio & Rosen, 2020 ;Guichard, 2016Guichard, , 2021Rochat & Masdonati, 2019) ont souligné l'importance de proposer des interventions qui permettent de tenir compte non pas de quelques objectifs spécifiques de l'ONU, mais de l'ensemble des besoins identifiés. Par ailleurs, l'approche de la psychologie positive de la durabilité (Corral-Verdugo, 2012), issue de la psychologie environnementale, part du postulat que les comportements durables (pro-sociaux et environnementaux) peuvent être le fruit de traits humains positifs (capacités, émotions, forces de caractère), et non uniquement d'émotions négatives telles que la honte ou la culpabilité, visant à éviter la dégradation de l'environnement social et physique. ...
Recently, career counselors were encouraged to help clients make career choices that are both environmentally and socially sustainable. However, to date, the career difficulties associated with such “green guidance” process have not been delineated. Based on career development obstacles identified in the scientific literature, this article proposes a non-exhaustive typology of issues specific to the consideration of ecological and human factors during career counseling. For each category of difficulty, examples are provided, and practical avenues are suggested. The contributions and limitations of this exercise are discussed, especially with regards to the clarification of the particular role of career counselors in promoting sustainability.
The sociological analysis of professional work has differentiated professionalism as a special means of organizing work and controlling workers. After clarifying the three concepts of profession, professionalization and professionalism, the paper continues with a section on professionalism, its history and current developments. The second section considers the main challenges to, and the third section the opportunities for, professionalism as an occupational value and for this category of professional practitioners and employees in the labour market.
For much of the history of the application of psychology to disability, the research and clinical focus of the field was deficits-oriented: documenting what people with disability could not do, proposing theories of why they could not do these things, creating measures to assess this incapacity and incompetence, and building interventions and treatments predicated on disease and pathology. It has been only in the last few decades that conceptualizations of disability allowed for consideration of strengths and positive attributes along with the presence of disability and only in the past two decades that a positive psychology of disability has emerged. This article will briefly summarize the factors that led to the emergence of a focus on the positive psychology of disability and a strength-based approach in the field, examine the state of knowledge and practice as it pertains to the positive psychology of disability, and will examine challenges that serve as barriers to progress in this area and opportunities for advancement. Among these is examining how “optimal human functioning” can be understood in ways that includes, and not excludes, people with disability. The importance of shifting the disability research and practice focus to emphasize flourishing, well-being, and self-determination of and for people with disability will be discussed, as well as the necessity for the field of positive psychology to more aggressively reach out to include people with disability among those populations whom the field values and includes.
Two forms of thinking about the future are distinguished: expectations versus fantasies. Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing one's thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively). Participants were graduates looking for a job (Study 1), students with a crush on a peer of the opposite sex (Study 2), undergraduates anticipating an exam (Study 3), and patients undergoing hip-replacement surgery (Study 4). Effort and performance were measured weeks or months (up to 2 years) after expectations and fantasies had been assessed. Implications for the self-regulation of effort and performance are discussed.
A South African case study is presented to provide insight into the career barriers and enablers of marginalized youth as well as recommendations for facilitating career decision-making processes. The systems theory framework of career development (STF) developed by Patton and McMahon was used as a conceptual guide to explore the influences affecting the career development of Grade 12 high school students at the Kayamandi township in South Africa. An in-depth qualitative analysis of participants’ perceptions was undertaken using the My System of Career Influences (MSCI) qualitative assessment measure developed by McMahon, Patton, and Watson. This instrument allows career influences to be explored at the individual, social, and environmental-societal levels. As part of the STF, a narrative approach was utilized to identify career enablers and barriers inherent in these adolescents’ career stories. This study provides a critical glimpse into the complexity of how the multitude of influences, including career enablers and barriers, can be intertwined in the context of adversity and marginalization.
Since their very beginning, most of the “life design interventions” (which were previously named vocational guidance, career counseling or career education) developed in the 20th century, have focused on the facilitation of access to available occupational functions and, especially, to paid employment. However, the severe
crises afflicting the world at present compel us to inquire in how much the current forms of work organization, as well as of the organization of the exchange of work’s products, have been accessory to triggering them. These organization forms are very efficient, but have negative consequences both for the planet (pollution, depletion of natural resources, etc.) and for the self-construction and health of a significant number of workers (exhaustion, stress, sense of worthlessness, burnout, occupational diseases, depression, suicide, etc.). But work as such is much more than just paid-work. Many work activities are exchanged in ways other than monetary ones (e.g., domestic work). Work has indeed a psychological function of praxis: people seek to satisfy their need for achievement by engaging in production of goods and services. This desire of achievement and self-fulfillment through working makes it possible to develop life-design interventions that address the issue of
constructing a human(e) sustainable world. Such interventions would be designed around the counselees’ reflection in which their inclusion in the current world of work would be secondary to the overriding concern of their individual contribution, by their humane and decent work activities, to the development of a good life,
with and for others, in just institutions, to ensure the sustainability of a genuine human life on earth.
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of participatory approaches to research and development, which organizes the cooperation between participants in different ways. Research circles are one of these forms of organization. Based on an empirical analysis of two research circles in a Danish RD project, this article focuses on the researcher's role, actions and challenges. The analysis focuses on the researcher as a co-creator of research circles. The analysis conclude that the researcher has the opportunity to negotiate the resources for participation for all participants in the research circle and that she assumes the responsibility for the organization of the circle meetings, their content and conduct. The researcher's actions and 'managerial’ work in the research circles affect the participants' experience of research circles as a democratic knowledge creation process. Discussions on participatory methods are seen as relevant to collaboration between universities, University Colleges (høgskola) and practices in research and development projects.
Keywords: research circles, participatory approaches, practice research, research in own practice, research and development, critical research approaches, collaboration, democratization
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of participatory approaches to research and development, which organizes the cooperation between participants in different ways. Research circles are one of these forms of organization. Based on an empirical analysis of two research circles in a Danish RD project, this article focuses on the researcher's role, actions and challenges. The analysis focuses on the researcher as a co-creator of research circles. The analysis conclude that the researcher has the opportunity to negotiate the resources for participation for all participants in the research circle and that she assumes the responsibility for the organization of the circle meetings, their content and conduct. The researcher's actions and 'managerial’ work in the research circles affect the participants' experience of research circles as a democratic knowledge creation process. Discussions on participatory methods are seen as relevant to collaboration between universities, University Colleges (høgskola) and practices in research and development projects.
Keywords: research circles, participatory approaches, practice research, research in own practice, research and development, critical research approaches, collaboration, democratization
This short paper summarizes the author's dissertation. The main objective of this dissertation was to investigate how older workers subjectively experience the transition from employment to retirement and successfully adjust to retirement. Using a consensual qualitative research design with a sample of 16 retired individuals, and two one-year time lagged design studies with samples of 55+ older workers (N = 161) and retirees (N =186), this dissertation explored how individuals develop a satisfactory lifestyle, detach themselves from work both socially and psychologically (i.e., identity and social contribution); which resources and how social interactions contribute to foster retirement adjustment in terms of well-being and identity.
http://osp.revues.org/5241
The present study describes social-level influences on black high school learners from a peri-urban township of career choices that were elicited using the qualitative career measure, My System of Career Influences (MSCI). The prominent influences on the career decision-making processes of isiXhosa-speaking adolescents included family, school and peer relationships, as well as media role models and cultural factors. While family support was salient, limited direct parental involvement in career planning was voiced. The school context provided rich examples of influences, such as subject mastery, that helped build self-efficacy beliefs and vicarious learning. In contrast, friends were described as both supportive and negative influences. Africentric narratives of overcoming hardship and adversity were explored that seemed to form resilient mechanisms strongly linked to a black racial identity. The reconciliation of 'western' career aspirations with rural cultural expectations in forming a coherent self-concept may be the greatest challenge in vocational identity development for black adolescents.
Altruistic behaviors typically improve the welfare of the recipient at the cost of the performer’s resources and energy. Do altruistic performers obtain any positive internal reward from altruistic behaviors? We conducted six experiments to explore whether altruistic behaviors could increase performer’s warmth perception of the ambient environment. The first three studies focused on crisis situations. A retrospective field study (Study 1, with Hurricane Sandy) and two laboratory studies (Studies 2a and 2b, with an earthquake scenario) found that people who helped others felt warmer of the ambient environment than people who did not. We extended to daily life situations and found that participants who performed helping behaviors in laboratory (either voluntarily in Study 3a or randomly assigned to in Study 3b) and passers-by who donated to a charity (Study 4) reported warmer perception of the ambient environment than those who did not. These findings suggested an immediate internal reward of altruism.
This article is about how the notion of place can be used in an analysis of career guidance practices and their development. It is about how a focus on the context of career guidance can develop an awareness of the place where guidance is practiced and support the development of career guidance in new places. In this article I introduce an analytical perspective on place; I give the example of the guidance café a practice development that took place into serious consideration because it was an attempt to develop career guidance practice through relocating it.
The ability of the individual practitioner to grasp how her own practice is interwoven with different societal structures and interests can be seen as the first step on the way to social justice. This article investigates how the practice portrait can be used as an analytical and practical method to nurture this ability. The practice portrait was developed within the tradition of critical psychology to reduce the gap between research and practice by giving voice to practitioners in various social practices. In this article, I use the practice portrait alongside practitioners at a university career centre.
The Cambridge Handbook of International Prevention Science offers a comprehensive global overview on prevention science with the most up-to-date research from around the world. Over 100 scholars from 27 different countries (including Australia, Bhutan, Botswana, India, Israel, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain and Thailand) contributed to this volume, which covers a wide range of topics important to prevention science. It includes major sections on the foundations of prevention as well as examples of new initiatives in the field, detailing current prevention efforts across the five continents. A unique and innovative volume, The Cambridge Handbook of International Prevention Science is a valuable resource for established scholars, early professionals, students, practitioners and policy-makers.
The Oxford Handbook of Retirement offers comprehensive, up-to-date, and forward-thinking summaries of contemporary knowledge on retirement, especially the important progress that has been made in the field over the past two decades. The approach taken spans human resource management, organizational psychology, development psychology, gerontology, sociology, public health, and economics. Chapters provide conceptualizations of retirement from multiple disciplines; existing theoretical perspectives and research findings on retirement, including adult development, career development, organizational and management, and economic perspectives; current and future challenges in retirement research and practice; and recommendations and suggestions for prospective areas of research.
Vocational (or career development) issues are produced in societies having specific characteristics and they bear the mark of their societal origin. Two categories of factors play a significant role in their definition: (1) broad general societal phenomena such as collective beliefs and representations and (2) the concrete ways in which work and education (and training) are organized and employment distributed. In our societies, six major vocational issues have successively emerged during the last century. Each of them has given rise to theoretical constructions that model them in a certain way. Vocational interventions (e.g. career counselling) have been developed within these different scientific approaches in relation to the (social, economical, etc.) ends and concrete goals they aim at. Three kinds of issues are typical of today’s situation: they are about the capacity to develop and invest in one’s own competencies, to cope with transitions and to anticipate one’s own future. These issues find their meaning within the broader question addressed to each individual: how should I best direct my life? Those issues are quite difficult to deal with and most people need to be helped by skilled counsellors. They also have to develop their self-reflexivity and their competencies. Therefore the training of counsellors, and an offer of life long education and training to people, are major challenges for all developed economies.
The working world has been undergoing a continuous and gradual process of flexibility, heterogeneity, and complexity of the regulatory mechanisms of work, something which has generated significant impacts and deep changes on many dimensions, revealing new scenarios, in addition to generating precariousness and vulnerability of a large part of the population in all countries. In that sense, the knowledge and strategies developed in the Latin American researches and practices in the career counseling field are potentially important in today's working world, because Latin America is a region in the world where this situation has always been present due to contexts and situations of socioeconomic inequality and psychosocial vulnerability, which often produces discontinuous, fragmented and intermittent work trajectories, despite the recent development of some countries like Brazil. Besides, some countries in the northern hemisphere, which have been under a welfare state for decades, are nowadays living under precarious work conditions with high rates of unemployment, and with an increasing demand of theories and strategies to face flexible and unstable situations. Thus, based on research and practices systematically developed in recent decades, inspired on the Life Design paradigm and grounded on the social constructionist perspective, the main objective of this chapter is to highlight general principles to career counseling in order to deal with situations of psychosocial vulnerability and flexicurity. To this end, the chapter will present and discuss: (a) The challenges that the working world have generated for contemporary workers, mainly through situations of flexicurity and psychosocial vulnerability; (b) The challenges for the career counseling field to face these situations; (c) The general principles of social constructionism, in terms of ontology, epistemology, methodology and ethical-political project, in dealing with the contemporary challenges; (d) The basic concepts of the proposed career counseling (psychosocial approach, psychosocial reality, psychosocial relation, practices, narratives, discourses, decent work, psychosocial vulnerability and psychosocial career); (e) A proposal for a theoretical and technical framework, in addition to an ethical-political project, for the career counseling inspired on the Life Design paradigm and based on social constructionism with some examples of practices with groups of people in situations of flexicurity and psychosocial vulnerability, among them, young people who are institutionalized, people with mental diseases, disabled people and unemployed. As a conclusion, it must be stated that the heterogeneity and the complexity of the current working world have required assumptions that ought to help in the understanding of it, and, at the same time, it might give support in the construction of analysis categories of the psychosocial phenomena of this working world, mainly for the ones who live in a vulnerable situation and have to face instability their entire lives.
The International Handbook of Career Guidance represents a project of inter- tional professional cooperation. It is intended as a catalyst for reform and was designed to support the development of career guidance in the years to come. Working for over four years from Belgium and Australia we had the privilege to collaborate with over 50 colleagues throughout the world to produce this Handbook. In every instance we selected key researchers who have an established reputation in the field of career development. They agreed to be involved and we are grateful for their support in this major effort. In this handbook we have tried to bring together a collection that summarises the diverse aspects of career guidance. It is a synthesis of the domain of career and vo- tional guidance firstly for an international readership and secondly it is designed to act as a reference for academics, researchers and professionals in the expanding field of career development. For this reason the Handbook includes coverage of the ba- ground and history of guidance right through to poignant issues relating to careers in the modern world of work. Policy issues relating to the provision of careers services as well as professional issues relating to career education, career counselling, career assessment, program evaluation and research methodologies are covered.
As a quintessentially human activity, work transcends countries and cultures. But as economies falter and labor markets go global, the concept of career can seem unrealistic—even alien—to many in economically developing and developed nations alike. The challenge to today's career professional is providing relevant services in the face of rapid, pervasive change.
The Handbook of Career Development assembles theoretical and practical innovations on a world scale. Written by professionals from diverse countries and fields, this progressive resource presents career guidance and workforce development as cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and responsive to contemporary realities. Advanced analysis allows a deeper understanding of the long-term needs of workers as varied as indigenous peoples, older women, immigrants, international students, and the recovering mentally ill. Easy-to-apply career service strategies are outlined for each of these special groups as also for others. And the book's multicultural vision entails reinterpreting the notion of career for the economically developing world, including for those engaged in traditional, rural and craft occupations. Among the areas covered in the Handbook:
• Innovations in career theory.
• The person in contexts across the lifespan.
• Effective career preparation in a volatile labor market.
• Green careers: work, environmental sustainability, and social justice.
• Enabling culturally sensitive career counseling.
• Services for special groups.
• New directions for assessment, practice, counselor training, competencies, and standards.
The Handbook of Career Development opens out realistic new paths for all involved in career services, including counselors, psychologists, social workers, human resource managers, educators, youth workers, and policymakers. It is a suitable resource for a range of academic fields such as developmental studies, economics, ecology, and indigenous studies, and makes an invaluable training text for aspiring career counselors.
Few books have ever made their presence felt on college campuses—and newspaper opinion pages—as quickly and thoroughly as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s 2011 landmark study of undergraduates’ learning, socialization, and study habits, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. From the moment it was published, one thing was clear: no university could afford to ignore its well-documented and disturbing findings about the failings of undergraduate education.
Now Arum and Roksa are back, and their new book follows the same cohort of undergraduates through the rest of their college careers and out into the working world. Built on interviews and detailed surveys of almost a thousand recent college graduates from a diverse range of colleges and universities, Aspiring Adults Adrift reveals a generation facing a difficult transition to adulthood. Recent graduates report trouble finding decent jobs and developing stable romantic relationships, as well as assuming civic and financial responsibility—yet at the same time, they remain surprisingly hopeful and upbeat about their prospects.
Analyzing these findings in light of students’ performance on standardized tests of general collegiate skills, selectivity of institutions attended, and choice of major, Arum and Roksa not only map out the current state of a generation too often adrift, but enable us to examine the relationship between college experiences and tentative transitions to adulthood. Sure to be widely discussed, Aspiring Adults Adrift will compel us once again to re-examine the aims, approaches, and achievements of higher education.
It is often assumed that the pathway from home to university and onwards to the labour market is a linear upward trajectory, ultimately resulting in improved opportunities and social betterment. This briefing paper summarises research tracing the lives of graduates across the five year period after leaving university, revealing that their migration pathways are often complex, non-linear and precarious. During this prolonged period of instability the parental home (and parental support more generally) provides a crucial safety net, potentially placing additional burden on mid-life parents who may also have care responsibilities to the older parent generation. The implications of these findings for adult social care, young adult welfare and regional economic development policy are considered.
Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über thematische Schwerpunkte, inhaltliche Ergebnisse und methodische Ansätze der Beratungsforschung im Feld Bildung, Beruf und Beschäftigung. Die Darstellung orientiert sich an einem systemischen Verständnis von Beratung. Dies konstituiert sich aus dem Beratungssystem mit den Ratsuchenden und den Beratenden sowie den organisationalen und gesellschaftlichen Kontexten. Dabei werden sowohl nationale als auch internationale Studien berücksichtigt und insbesondere Erkenntnisse zur Beratungsprozessforschung etwas ausführlicher behandelt sowie der Themenkomplex Wirkungsforschung gesondert betrachtet.
Cet article se propose d’étudier le lien entre les sentiments d’injustice relatifs à la société française des jeunes Français âgés de 18 à 30 ans et les injustices éventuellement vécues lors du passage à l’âge adulte. Les résultats présentés ici s’appuient sur l’analyse croisée d’une enquête par questionnaire auprès de 4 000 personnes et de 40 entretiens biographiques. Il y apparaît que l’entrée dans la vie adulte – en particulier la confrontation au monde du travail – est associée à une montée du sentiment d’injustice. Mais les sentiments d’injustice macrosociaux ne sont pas le décalque systématique des injustices vécues personnellement : ils résultent aussi d’un effort d’articulation entre des principes de justice communément partagés et une évaluation informée des inégalités observées.
The “life-design paradigm” described in detail in this ground-breaking handbook helps counsellors and others meet people’s increasing need to develop and manage their own lives and careers.
The present research investigated which strategies Israeli young adults (N = 254) use to cope with their career indecision and the perceived effectiveness of these strategies. Their perceptions of the effectiveness of coping strategies were compared to the respective judgments of career counselors (N = 36). The similarity between the young adults’ and the career counselors’ perceptions (r = .98) suggests that young adults have a fairly accurate judgment of the effectiveness of various coping strategies. However, career counselors perceived emotional help-seeking as a more effective strategy and helplessness and submission as less effective strategies than did young adults (|d| > 0.89). The results also show that Productive coping strategies, although perceived as effective by the young adults, were actually used less by them, whereas Nonproductive coping strategies, although perceived as ineffective, were used more. The counseling implications of the finding that the Nonproductive coping strategies but not the productive ones predict career decision-making difficulties are discussed.
An important research need concerns identifying and describing factors that promote reflexivity and change in life-design career interventions. Career construction counseling, a primary life- design intervention, uses narrative methods in an interpersonal process of helping people design a work life through reflexive action. Using Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR), the present study examined what prompts reflexivity and change in career construction counseling. A single case analysis method involving a 24-year old Caucasian woman examined one client's experience of processes that prompted change and reflection about her current career transition. Post-counseling IPR with the client of her videotaped career construction counseling session indicated five major themes: (a) role models prompt identity reflection, (b) early recollections foster cohesion, (c) follow-up questions add depth to the story, (d) counselor as audience provides clarity and validation, and (e) career construction interview questions illuminate perspective and need for action. Results support prior research indicating the usefulness of career construction counseling for promoting reflexive action in life design.