Making career theories more culturally sensitive: implications for counseling.

The primary question addressed in this article is whether and how career theories can be more culturally sensitive without losing value as conceptual explanations or their usefulness for counselors. Contextual action theory is identified as a means to develop culturally sensitive explanations. Six steps are proposed and illustrated, including using the naive observations and subjective reports and recognizing ongoing processes. The use of these steps in counseling is also addressed.

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Counselors are faced with how to deal with clients' culturally based career issues within the defined space of particular social representations, daily practices, political ideologies, and legal systems. Many career theories have developed either without explicit attention to these particular spaces and contexts or by presuming that theories developed in one context are applicable to other contexts. Nevertheless, career theories have been applied in a variety of contexts. The primary question addressed in this article is whether career theories and explanations can be more culturally sensitive in order to reflect specific contexts. To address this question, we begin by describing a specific cultural context and issue, that is, the family as a locus of career development for Aboriginal youth in Canada who reside in cities (Marshall, Young, & Brokenleg, 2003). Later, we use it as a case illustration in developing culturally sensitive career theories.

Many Aboriginal youth (self-identified First Nations, Inuit, or Metis) who live in Canadian cities face particularly difficult situations represented by a high dropout rate among students, unemployment (Statistics Canada, 2002, 2003), family poverty (Statistics Canada, 2002), substance abuse, involvement with the justice system (Clatworthy & Mendelson, 1999), and other problems of urban youth generally. Many of these young people and their families contend with the effects of the residential school system in Canada (Assembly of First Nations, 1994; Bull, 1991; Haig Brown, 1988; Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, 1996). Among other practices, residential schools over several generations separated children from their parents and separated parents from the school (Haig Brown, 1988; Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, 1996). Compounded by a degree of embedded racism and physical and sexual abuse, the effect of the residential school system for many Aboriginal people in the current generation is a "disconnect" between parenting, schooling, and the process of becoming adults for young people (Kirkness & Bowman, 1992; Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, 1996). Although not all Aboriginal people attended residential schools and some experienced these schools positively, this disconnect has been further exacerbated for some Aboriginal children and youth attending schools that do not hold interest for them (Statistics Canada, 2003).

Although these issues do not reflect the cultural strengths of this community, they are issues faced by Aboriginal peoples in Canada and stand as an example of many localized, culturally specific concerns that challenge counselors. Can career development theories assist us as counselors in understanding and addressing these types of particular problems? If career theories and the interventions that flow from them are to be meaningful and used by counselors, they have to be able to reflect the complexity and specificity of cultural environments.

The broader issue of whether career theories can be more culturally sensitive arises in the context of increased cultural contact between peoples, the rise of multiculturalism within national groups, the growth of globalization as an economic and political force, and dissatisfaction with approaches to career development that do not explicitly address culture. In responding to the challenges counselors and researchers face in making career theories more culturally sensitive, we introduce the contextual explanation of career (Young, Valach, & Collin, 2002) as culturally responsive and propose six steps that emerge from this approach that can serve to make explanations and theories about career more culturally sensitive and relevant. Finally, we illustrate how these steps can be used in addressing the case described at the beginning of this article and suggest how counselors might apply these steps in their own counseling.

One might ask why career theories are important at all and whether they can be culturally sensitive. Under ideal conditions, they serve as a kind of organizing template for counselors. They are helpful because they reduce a complex range of behaviors to usable explanations, constructs, relationships, and, to some extent, predictions. In reality, however, the career theories that are used by counselors are often an amalgam of more formal theories and practical everyday explanations born from the application of personal experience-generated knowledge to the problems of clients' lives. These explanations are rooted in everyday thinking and reflect the daily lives of their clients. Some of these explanations are probably culturally sensitive, but few are culturally explicit. These tacit or "theories-at-hand" are heuristic explanations that are localized and particular and, to that extent, are useful to counselors. At the same time, however, counselors and clients may not have ready access to the explanations that guide their action, may be constrained by explanations that do not work well when translated to action, or may not be responsive in different cultural contexts. Nevertheless, understanding theory as a heuristic that both counselors and laypeople use in their everyday lives is a starting point for moving toward more culturally sensitive theories at the formal level. It is also important in reducing the theory--practice gap.

The attempt to make career theory more culturally sensitive hinges on distinguishing between grand theories (or metanarratives, to use the language of the postmodernists) that have a universalist perspective and the localized, particular theory or narrative that is culturally responsive. It is relatively easy to aspire to developing localized, particular theories. The challenge is to bring forward what is common across cultures in a way that localized, particular theories have meaning beyond their immediate setting.

The Challenges of Cultural Diversity for Career Theories

The challenges to accommodate to greater cultural diversity in career theories come primarily from within the theories themselves. These include how culture is understood in career theories as well as their cultural boundedness, the epistemological paradigms in which career theories are embedded, and the focus on the individual. The challenges are part of, and surrounded by, the predominant socioeconomic and political discourse of this era, globalization.

Culture in Career Theories

We recognize that a range of theories has grown up in the career field. Some theories have strong psychometric roots (e.g., Holland, 1997), others are broadly based in developmental psychology (e.g., Super, 1957), and still others have arisen in the counseling field (e.g., Cochran, 1997). Savickas (2002) classified the approaches to career theories as focusing on dispositions, concerns, narrative, or process. Although culture is implicitly addressed in the concerns and narrative classifications, it is not a significant explicit theme in any of the four groups. The inattention to culture in theories of career might be a by-product of the tendency of universalistic principles to allocate resources based on achievement rather than ascription of given or inherited traits.

Notwithstanding significant efforts to address diversity in the career field (e.g., Fouad & Bingham, 1995; Leong & Brown, 1995), recently, Stead (2004) critiqued most extant career theories for their extreme ethnocentric view. He also criticized efforts to accommodate existing theories to other cultures by adding cultural concepts and models (e.g., Leong & Serafica, 2001). He suggested that theoretical concepts in the career domain have to have meaning and salience in the particular cultures in which they are developed. In other words, from the outset, culturally sensitive theories should be based on the recognition of particular cultures and their artifacts.

Epistemological Paradigms

Efforts to make career theories more culturally sensitive are further confounded by their different epistemological paradigms. Savickas's (2002) groupings contain positivist, postpositivist, and constructivist paradigms. As Stead (2004) pointed out, theories that represent positivist or postpositivist epistemological paradigms see culture largely as a nuisance variable and in effect try to control for it in an effort to produce "universal" knowledge.

The Cultural Boundedness of "Career"

Young and Collin (2000) have argued that career is a very flexible construct. Even within English-speaking, Western industrialized countries such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the word career has a range of meanings. They have also shown that the meaning of career changes as the occupational structure of society changes. For example, the bureaucratic meaning associated with career in the past is less the case today when a range of different work patterns are recognized.