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Weekly Updates4. Enabling optimal individual development. The immediate expectations of adolescents and their families are more prosaic. They seek the best solution to the question they ask with the hope of achieving the best possible individual development. Nevertheless, this general expectation takes different forms. Some questions are ambiguous; there is a gap between the explicit question (e.g., which school subject would you advise me to choose?) and the real and implicit motive of that question (e.g., please, help me find who I want to be). The remarks of Zarka (2000) concerning counseling interactions and those of Dumora (1990) about the "logic" of the choices of young people reveal four broad categories of questions that they or their families may ask counselors. Strategic questions, corresponding to "a logic of excellence" (Dumora, 1990, p. 124) are those of students that the sociologist Ballion (1982) has named "school consumers." These students adopt an attitude toward school similar to that of consumers toward goods. Their questions can be summarized as follows: What is the best strategy for me to achieve the best social position that I can hope to obtain? Some adolescents from modest backgrounds, whom Dumora called pragmatists, transpose this question to a minor key: What must I do to achieve the modest goals I have identified for myself? Ambiguous questions come from adolescents in a state of uncertainty or who use a "logic of resignation" (Dumora, 1990, p. 126). These queries are mixed with questions about academic strategies, with their basic problem: Should these students give up any hope of certain school, job, and even personal identity forms (possible selves) in which they had been hoping to build themselves? Counseling is of major importance to these adolescents. Finally, some questions are paradoxical. They can be formulated as follows: Influence me so that I can be capable of deciding, or "influence me this way to ensure my decision." These come from young people engaged either in a "logic of rationaliza tion" (Dumora, 1990, p. 125; they give up on their earlier great hopes) or in a "logic of illusion" (Dumora, 1990, p. 125; they hold on to these hopes, despite the fact that such hopes are at odds with their current situation). Although these four types of questions (e.g., strategic, pragmatic, ambiguous, paradoxical) are considerably different, they all revert to the same concern for self-construction and social adaptation. In some instances, the emphasis is on means--how to become this or that? In others, the aim of the question is what they should become.
Goals of Counseling and Intervention Strategies of Counselors
The intervention strategy adopted by counselors when confronted by such questions and expectations depends to a large extent on the ideological models governing their actions, as well as their institutional position (see Savickas, 2000). Practitioners may feel nearer or closer to one or other of the ultimate goals for career interventions just mentioned: They may tend to place greater emphasis on the realism of vocational choices, on the transformation of social relations, on construction of the citizen, or on individual development. However, their activity also depends on their occupational position. Counselors in private practice must of necessity focus their interventions on the demands for individual development of their clientele. A practitioner employed by an employment service in industry cannot ignore the manpower needs of one or another occupational sector. The same applies to those working within a training institution, who must necessarily take into account the training provided by the institution to which they belong.
Conclusion: Career Counseling for Human Development
Conjecture about the ultimate goals of career counseling has not been particularly productive in recent years. At the very most, questions have been raised about the economic role of career counseling practices (Killeen, 1996; Watts, 1996). These are asked in the following way: To what extent do these career counseling practices contribute to the industrial growth of a nation? Is it possible to measure this contribution in terms of economic value? These aspects are important. Economic development cannot be neglected when most of humankind lives in great misery. However, at a time when uncertainties about economic development models are tending to emerge, a preliminary question must be asked: What is the purpose of this economic development? In other words, should the goal of economic development suffice in itself, or, on the contrary, does it make sense only in the context of more general considerations about humanity (e.g., humankind, world organization, relations between nations and people) that we, as huma n beings, intend to develop?
It seems impossible for career practitioners to avoid deliberating about this question at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Their activities concern school, work, and personal identity, and it so happens that each of these three areas is in crisis.
School Crisis
The crisis in schools shows itself in various ways. Some are spectacular: Schools are sometimes burned down; some are places of physical or mental violence, or even murder. Some good students now withdraw from participation in academic competition (they are called hikikomoris in Japan). Other more insidious aspects of this crisis are probably more fundamental: Many parents want their children to come into contact only with the very best and, hence, refuse to let them attend "common" classes including children from a broad range of social backgrounds. Faced with such demands, schools segregate, either openly (with increasing numbers of private schools specializing in particular social groups) or more surreptitiously (e.g., geographic enrollment restrictions).
This school crisis is no doubt correlated with the extraordinary expansion that this institution had undergone in the twentieth century, which can certainly be called the "school century." Educating youngsters has constituted a major transformation in the means for integrating them socially. Schooling is indeed a very special approach to the social integration of youngsters that is characterized particularly by the fact that they are separated from adults and learn not by direct contact with a mentor-- as was the case for apprentices and journeymen--but through formalized knowledge taught by a corps of specialists.
Our current system of education has pursued three main objectives since its beginnings: (a) learning (reading, writing, and so on), (b) education and social integration (complying with certain shared values, construction of rules governing interactions, and so on), and (c) the reproduction of social structures (identical or different). The current crisis shows the predominance in today's ideology of this latter objective over the other two. In such a context, "entering a good study program" becomes for many the primary--if not the only--objective of schooling.
Work Crisis
The work crisis is equally apparent. The concepts of "suffering at work" (Dejours, 1998) and of "mental harassment" (Hirigoyen, 2001) have formed the basis of interesting discussions in France in the past few years. An article ("Alcool, Tabac, Dopage, au Travail" ["Alcohol, Tobacco, and Doping at Work"], 2001) published in the journal Sante et Travail reported that many workers were only able to accomplish their duties by alternating doses of stimulants and tranquilizers. However, the major manifestation of this work crisis is unemployment and underemployment. In his inaugural address to the 89th session of the Work International conference held June 5, 2001, Juan Somavia, director of the International Labor Organization (ILO), denounced the lack of "decent jobs" in the world (Buhrer, 2001). According to the ILO, the combined number of registered unemployed and underemployed workers currently reaches the impressive figure of 1 billion people who are without opportunities.
Work today is far from capable of satisfying such expectations of all job incumbents (Blustein, 2001). Some are deprived of work and others suffer from their working conditions or the nature of their occupational activity.
Career counseling practices are based on a representation of work conceived as a vocation that enables individuals to develop their capabilities and improve their situation in life. This current central position of work in an individual's life does not mean that it is the only significant human activity. However, as pointed out by Clot (1999), work is nevertheless one major role for self-fulfillment of the employed, precisely because it is no longer an activity that is determined almost at birth by the occupation of one's parents and because it no longer occupies all the waking hours of a person's life. Workers seek recognition in the context of this fundamentally social activity, which they wish to see invested with meaning by virtue of its integration with their other activities. Clot also stressed the fact that work activities were fundamentally different from other activities. Work necessarily links workers to a specific organization that, itself, belongs to a society, a market, and so forth. Work forces workers to adapt to jobs and to funct ion within a system of interactions organized before they "inhabit" it in their own way. This is not necessarily the case for other kinds of activities (for example, leisure).
Personal Identity Crisis
The personal identity crisis has given rise in recent years to a multitude of publications (for a synthesis, see Dubar, 2000). Its most obvious manifestations are the breaking up of some states and wars between nations or between social groups because of ethnic, religious, language, and similar differences. This uneasiness regarding identity is also reflected by other secondary events. Examples are youth gang warfare in underprivileged areas, the notable success of national populist parties in local or national elections, the development of religious fundamentalism of all sorts, multiplication of sects, and, in certain instances, use of drugs or tranquilizers.
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