Under Pressure to Change: The Professional Identity of Careers Officers

The professional identity of careers officers is no longer secure. Their role as independent providers of vocational guidance has been challenged and they have been urged to accord employers and placement a higher priority in their work. The resistance to such proposed changes encountered during a study of careers officers in Midtown appeared to be motivated more by a genuine concern for vulnerable clients than simple professional inertia or calculated self-interest. Any imposition of change could prove counter-productive and provoke a serious dislocation in the provision of vocational guidance.     

Professional,Personal, and Relational: Exploring the Salience of Identity in Academic Careers

This article explores the role of identity in lived experiences within the professoriate. While scholarship has given some attention to professional identity and personal identity, little in the literature has attempted to present a holistic view of identity and the complex ways that it defines and influences academic careers. The authors present findings from their analysis of interview data from 50 participants across career stages, from doctoral students to full professors. These findings suggest that three distinct but related, and potentially synergistic, components of identity are salient in shaping perceptions of and experiences within academic careers. The authors offer future directions for research centered on a rich conceptualization of identity as critical for understanding faculty development, experiences, and needs.     

Multiculturalism in Britain and the Political Identity of Europe

The United Kingdom has traditionally been united by culture not ethnicity. Immigration has started to threaten this identity because of racism, lack of forethought and ill-conceived multiculturalism. The storm over Archbishop Rowan Williams' Sharia speech revealed how Islam in particular poses a problem. Williams is right to advocate more political pluralism in the face of variegated religious identities which exercise strong social influence but this needs to be an ‘organicist’ rather than ‘liberal’ pluralism, if Britain's political and religious inheritance is not to be threatened. The Christian character of Britain actually protects a certain pluralist variety and the role of other faiths, because of the peculiar character of Christianity.     

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.     

Careers education in higher education: Principles and practice

It is argued that careers education represents a distinctive new approach in careers guidance within higher education. A detailed analysis is presented of American and British experiments to date, dividing them into three groups: unit courses leading to credit, courses not leading to credit, and intensive experiences. Attention is also paid to the need to integrate formal group work of these kinds with other formal and informal learning experiences. Finally, an attempt is made to identify some crucial dilemmas and issues which need to be addressed if careers education is to be structured into the British higher education system.     

Conflict of interest in biomedical research: a view from Europe

In this paper I address the conflict of interest (CoI) issue from a legal point of view at a European level. We will see that the regulatory framework that exists in Europe does state the need for the independence of ethics committee involved in authorisation of research and clinical trials. We will see that CoI is an element that has to be closely monitored at National and International level. Therefore, Member States and Newly Associated States do have to address CoI in the authorisation process of research and clinical protocols of biomedicine. The opinions here expressed are personal and do not commit the European Commission. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a Conference on Conflict of Interest and Its Significance in Science and Medicine, 5–6 April, 2002, Warsaw, Poland. The author is a Scientific Officer in the Programme Science and Society dealing with ethics and science (Unit C.3).     

Careers Guidance and Counselling in England

This article gives a brief background on the history and recent developments in career counselling for young children, high school students, unemployed teenagers, and university undergraduates.     

Social science research in the 1990s: The contribution of constructivism

Social science research in this decade has not made the progress we expected of it. Our findings still diverge, generalization from these findings remains restricted, and the many questions vital to achieving a better society continue to be unanswered. In the next decade, social science research may be able to benefit from constructivism. In this article I explore some of the constructivist assumptions about people. These include their subjectivity and purpose, the central role of meaning for them, and how that meaning can be both unique and shared. I also examine some constructivist assumptions about social science. These assumptions enable us as social scientists to understand better the constructivist nature of ourselves as researchers, our research participants, and our research interactions. These assumptions also have implications for the types of data collection methods we choose to use, as well as for data analysis. An example of each is provided. The application of these assumptions seems likely to result in social science research which continues to be diverse and permits only restricted generalization, but is more relevant to the needs of our society.     

Identity behind the Iron Curtain: Recent advances in identity research in changing contexts

Abstract

The present article introduces the special issue on identity in the former Soviet bloc countries. We begin by discussing identity as a developmental task, as well as the social-contextual forces that direct and constrain the ways in which individual people construct their identities. We then articulate some specific challenges inherent in identity development within contexts characterized by social change – primarily the fact that the available identity alternatives, and the ways in which individuals are expected to go about choosing from among these alternatives, are likely changing rapidly. We frame Erikson’s original work as having been grounded in times of rapid social change in the post-World War II United States, and describe the direct relevance of Erikson’s work for the study of more contemporary instances of sociopolitical change. We then introduce and summarize the articles included in the special issue.     

Careers education and counselling in Northern Ireland: A historical outline

Vocational guidance services have been developing in Northern Ireland for about thirty years. Recently the careers service has been transferred from an education to a manpower services base, while the schools have been given greater opportunity, and responsibility, for the provision of careers education. The changes have given considerable impetus to careers teacher training, and to the appointment of schools' careers staffs. The possibility of further development of the partnership between careers officers and careers teachers is examined.     

Applying Chaos Theory to Careers: Attraction and attractors

This article presents the Chaos Theory of Careers with particular reference to the concepts of “attraction” and “attractors”. Attractors are defined in terms of characteristic trajectories, feedback mechanisms, end states, ordered boundedness, reality visions and equilibrium and fluctuation. The identified types of attractors (point, pendulum, torus and strange) and their relevance to career development are described. The attractor concept is then applied to major barriers in career development and life transition by a consideration of closed and open systems thinking. It is contended that ultimately the context of human experience is an open system and that career development difficulties arise when closed systems thinking is used in an open systems reality. The practical counseling applications and counseling research evidence using attractors are briefly reviewed. The additional potential contributions of the Chaos Theory of Careers to the career development field are also outlined.     

Personal Identity and National Identity: An Analogy

Simone Weil writes in one of her notebooks: “When one arrives at the absolute one can only express oneself by identities … – For identity alone expresses the unconditioned” (Cahiers, in Œuvres complètes, t. VI, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 113). Thus, it is that “the good is the good”, one and the same, unconditionally. Certainly, an individual is unique, a nation is equally so. Nevertheless, personal identity – or “character” – and the identity of a nation are not absolutes. When we wish to treat them as absolutes, we ignore the fact that the “person,” as well as the “nation”, only exists within relationships that they are subject to exterior circumstances and that their identity is situated in time. Is one correct to suppose that the character of an individual or the identity of the nation are “invariables that one continues to find throughout various manifestations”, (“Notes sur le caractère”, Écrits de Marseille, in Œuvres complètes, Op. cit., t. IV, vol. 1 (2008), 87) observed or probable? We hypothesize here that one can apply to national identity what Simone Weil wrote about the notion of character, in notes composed in Marseille and in her commentary on the Our Father (“À propos du Pater”, ibid., 337-345).     

Distance Guidance: Careers Advice by Post

Careers guidance is traditionally carried out face-to-face. Use may be made of facilities such as job-information leaflets and computer programs which the client uses on their own (perhaps at the suggestion of the counsellor), but the core of the guidance process is generally the careers interview. Issues examined include: is it possible to provide adequate guidance without face-to-face contact between client and counsellor? what might be lost or gained by the difference in approach? what are the circumstances in which distance guidance might be appropriate and how is it best provided?     

The New Careers: A Book Review

Book reviewed in this article: The New Careers: Indiuiduat Action & Economic Change by Michael B. Arthur, Ken‐ Inkson. and Judith K. Pringle     

Applying Chaos Theory to Careers: Attraction and attractors

This article presents the Chaos Theory of Careers with particular reference to the concepts of “attraction” and “attractors”. Attractors are defined in terms of characteristic trajectories, feedback mechanisms, end states, ordered boundedness, reality visions and equilibrium and fluctuation. The identified types of attractors (point, pendulum, torus and strange) and their relevance to career development are described. The attractor concept is then applied to major barriers in career development and life transition by a consideration of closed and open systems thinking. It is contended that ultimately the context of human experience is an open system and that career development difficulties arise when closed systems thinking is used in an open systems reality. The practical counseling applications and counseling research evidence using attractors are briefly reviewed. The additional potential contributions of the Chaos Theory of Careers to the career development field are also outlined.