The role of narrative in career construction theory

Career construction theory (CCT) (Savickas, 2005) approaches career counseling and career development from a constructivist and narrative perspective. As career theories move towards incorporating holistic approaches that take into consideration individuals' subjective experiences, narrative theory offers a means to draw out and clarify this story. Career construction theory, effectively integrates narrative and career conceptualizations to holistically create clarity in understanding what, how, and why individuals author their lives and careers in order to help individuals develop a cohesive identity, adapt within their environment, and construct the next chapter of their career story.     

Educating career guidance practitioners in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Rapidly changing policy contexts in England have dramatically affected the provision of career guidance, and the training and development of its practitioners. This paper takes an autoethnographic and self-reflexive approach to exploring the experience of a Senior Lecturer in Career Guidance who manages a centre that offers the Qualification in Career Guidance (QCG), and the Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development. Key questions are considered, such as: the effects of policy context on the type of qualification and curriculum offered, and their differences; the challenges of engaging learners in theoretical concepts and reflective approaches; and the tensions between ‘training’ practitioners and ‘educating’ them to develop a strong core of professionalism. The paper also considers the extent to which the learners develop as ‘knowledgeable social actors’.     

Narrating career, positioning identity: Career identity as a narrative practice

In contrast to traditional definitions of career identity as an individual construct, this article argues for a discursive approach to career identity as a narrative practice. Career identity is conceptualized as a practice of articulating, performing and negotiating identity positions in narrating career experiences. By using the concept of positioning, this approach situates identities within particular historic, cultural and interactional contexts via the discourses and master narratives that position identity. It also leaves space for individual agency and change via the reflexive capacity of the person to modify and negotiate the competing positions available. The methodological implications are considered, and illustrated with an empirical case analysis. The contribution of the proposed approach is in offering contextualized understandings of actual practices, resources and constraints of identity construction while also allowing for in-depth analyses of the particularities of identity work and possibilities for change in careers.     

Career guidance in multicultural societies: identity,alterity, epiphanies and pitfalls

This paper provides a scoping approach to the issue of career guidance in multicultural societies. It starts off by exploring the meaning of ‘culture’, moving away from ‘back-pack’ approaches that consider culture as a set of worldviews and dispositions that are readily shed or put on, to anthropological understandings of culture as deeply held ways of meaning making that permeate all levels of one’s life and one’s relationship with others. Such complex approaches to culture challenge career guidance workers to problematise notions they hold of themselves and of others, and to face up to the challenge of alterity. In effecting this troubling reaching inwards and reaching outwards, and in striving for the epiphany of ‘knowing’, a number of pitfalls need to be acknowledged and overcome. These include our own incipient monoculturalism, the romanticisation, essentialisation and exoticisation of culture, as well as restricted notions of equality.     

Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world: creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling

This paper explores the constraints to innovative, creative and reflexive careers counselling in an uncertain neo-liberal world. We draw on previously reported research into practitioners’ use of a narrative model for career counselling interviews in England and a Europe-wide auto/biographical narrative study of non-traditional learners in universities. The latter draws on a number of narrative interviews with an asylum seeker, to debate whether such a way of working with people, ‘in a clinical style’, offers contextualised insight into people's struggles to construct a career and a methodology for doing so. The paper also examines the difficulties of creating a ‘good enough’ professional, psychosocial space for experimentation with creative approaches in a marketised guidance world, where more is expected from less.     

Re‐Presentations of Space in Hollywood Movies: An Event‐Indexing Analysis

Popular movies present chunk‐like events (scenes and subscenes) that promote episodic, serial updating of viewers’ representations of the ongoing narrative. Event‐indexing theory would suggest that the beginnings of new scenes trigger these updates, which in turn require more cognitive processing. Typically, a new movie event is signaled by an establishing shot, one providing more background information and a longer look than the average shot. Our analysis of 24 films reconfirms this. More important, we show that, when returning to a previously shown location, the re‐establishing shot reduces both context and duration while remaining greater than the average shot. In general, location shifts dominate character and time shifts in event segmentation of movies. In addition, over the last 70 years re‐establishing shots have become more like the noninitial shots of a scene. Establishing shots have also approached noninitial shot scales, but not their durations. Such results suggest that film form is evolving, perhaps to suit more rapid encoding of narrative events.     

Eliciting Intelligence Using the Scharff‐Technique: Closing in on the Confirmation/Disconfirmation‐Tactic

The current study examined interview techniques aimed at eliciting intelligence from human sources. We compared two versions of the Scharff‐technique to the Direct Approach (a combination of open and direct questions). The Scharff conditions, conceptualised into four tactics, differed only with respect to the ‘confirmation/disconfirmation‐tactic’. The participants (N = 90) received background information and took the role as a source in a phone interview. They were instructed to strike a balance between not revealing too little and too much information. As predicted, the Scharff‐technique resulted in more new information than the Direct Approach. Importantly, the sources interviewed by the Scharff‐technique perceived that they had revealed less new information than they objectively did, whereas the sources interviewed by the Direct Approach perceived that they had revealed more new information than they objectively did. Furthermore, the interviewer's information objectives were better masked with the confirmation‐tactic than with the disconfirmation‐tactic. The results highlight the Scharff‐technique as a promising human intelligence gathering technique. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.