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.