Challenges for career counseling in Asia: Variations in cultural accommodation.

Using K. Lewin's (1938) concept of a force field analysis, a model is proposed for examining the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia in terms of prevailing and countervailing forces. The model also suggests a need to avoid a simple importation of Western models of career counseling, which may not be an optimal fit for the Asian cultural context. Instead, the cultural accommodation approach is offered as a viable alternative.

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As the globalization movement is rapidly taking hold, it is incumbent upon us in the counseling profession to evaluate its impact on how we practice and conduct research. The purpose of the special section in this issue has been to highlight how career counseling is being practiced in Asia. As the final article in the issue, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you a conceptual model for analyzing the challenges for career counseling in the Asian cultural contexts. On the basis of the preceding articles in this issue, I would like to offer a broad conceptual framework for understanding some of the challenges discussed by these authors.

The model I am proposing is based on the application of a Lewinian force field analysis. Using such an analysis, I will discuss the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia as essentially one of transferring Western models to Eastern cultural contexts. Because details of this model have already been presented elsewhere (see Leong & Santiago-Rivera, 1999), I provide only an overview here. Borrowing from Lewin's (1938, 1975) famous formulation that behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and his or her environment (i.e., B = f[P, E]), it is proposed that some of his conceptualizations can be extended and applied to a higher level phenomenon. Whereas Lewin primarily focused on an individual's personality and behavior, his concepts can be readily applied to social movements as well, such as our present topic--the movement of transferring Western models of career psychology and career counseling to the East.

Table 1 illustrates a proposed model of social movement, which parallels Lewinian concepts. For Lewin, a person and his or her psychological environment are contained in an individual life space. Our parallel is the social environment's social space, which contains a variety of social institutions and social movements. Therefore, the advances of a movement, like the importation of Western models of career counseling, can be studied and understood in view of this force field analysis that delineates the prevailing and countervailing forces. Similar to Lewin's equation, our present equation is SM = f(P, C), where the advances and development of a social movement would be a function of the prevailing and countervailing forces. These prevailing and countervailing forces are similar to Lewin' s driving and restraining forces in his analysis of personality dynamics. Like Lewin's theory, these forces come from individual needs and valences (value for a particular person).

The social movement of transferring (if viewed from the Western perspective) or importing (if viewed from the Eastern perspective) Western models of career psychology and career counseling to Asian countries is subject to a series of prevailing and countervailing forces. The challenges of providing career counseling in Asia is embedded in these prevailing and countervailing forces. My current model of the prevailing forces is not meant to be exhaustive but, instead, to illustrate the utility of my application of the Lewinian model to understanding this problem. The prevailing forces (see Table 2) that have facilitated the transfer or exportation of Western models of career psychology and career counseling have included the Western countries' reliance on and advancement in science. The advances in science and technology in the West, supported by stable political contexts, have resulted in advanced and affluent economies, which in turn can invest further in science, especially the social sciences.

In many Asian countries, their economies and their reliance on science and technology are less well developed. When viewed in light of this differential, it seems quite evident that there would be a natural gradient in the flow of scientific information and models from the West to the East. This gradient in the flow of science and technology from the West to the East operates through such mechanisms as Asian countries' reliance on Western institutions of higher education to train and educate their political and intellectual elites. This development can be readily understood from the perspective of Maslow's Hierarchical Model of Needs (Maslow, 1970). In Western countries, where a long history of reliance on science and technology has produced well-established and affluent economies, greater resources can be freed up to be devoted to the higher order needs, particularly psychological ones, because the lower order survival needs have been taken care of relatively well. It is no accident, therefore, that psycholo gical theories and interventions are much more established in Western cultures than in Asian cultures. The fact that Western and Asian countries are on different levels in Maslow's hierarchical model contributes to the natural gradient mentioned earlier.

This natural gradient in the flow of science from Western to Eastern countries promotes the monopoly of Western models of science across the world. In some sense, Darwin's model of evolution applies here as well. The "fittest" countries, with the most advanced economies and the most rigorous scientific foundations, will triumph over countries with less developed economies and scientific developments. Given such a scenario, it is natural that countries with less well-developed economies and scientific foundations would seek to adopt Western models of economies and Western models of science. This is another factor that contributes to the creation and maintenance of the natural gradient mentioned earlier. As this process is multiplied in various cities, regions, and countries in Asia, the monopoly of the Western models of science grows further. With this monopoly comes the twin problems of availability bias and training bias when Asian countries are faced with the challenges of providing effective career counsel ing services for their citizenry. The availability bias consists of the human tendency to use heuristics in making decisions and forming judgments. When asked to make decisions, there is a natural human tendency to use the most readily available information as the basis for making such decisions. Because of the monopoly of Western models of science, including Western models of career psychology and career counseling, these are the models that are most readily available when our Asian colleagues are asked to plan and implement career counseling services in their countries.

Training bias adds further to the monopoly of Western models of science. It involves the natural gradient in which Asian countries send their best and brightest students to be educated in Western colleges and universities. As part of this educational process, these Asian students learn, internalize, and become proficient in the use of the Western models of science, which naturally have Eurocentric bias. After they earn their degrees and return to their home countries, the scientists bring with them a training bias and a reliance on Western models of science, which adds further to the availability bias.

In some Asian countries, such as China, it is their underdevelopment in science and technology that has created pressures to modernize. Given the natural gradient mentioned earlier, many of these Asian countries have begun to modernize by adopting Western models of science and technology. This economic pressure to modernize also adds to the increasing monopoly of Western models of science. From a cross-cultural psychological perspective, the primary dangers of a monopoly are the potential problem of "imposing an etic." Of course, cross-cultural psychologists have made a distinction between etic and emic approaches to the study of culture.

Etic refers to the search for universal laws of behavior, as represented by American psychology, whereas emic refers to the culture-specific approach, as represented by the ethnographic method of anthropologists. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. However, problems occur when psychologists and counselors assume that the scientific information that they have acquired to guide their practice and interventions are etic (think universal) when in fact they are emic (unique to the college sophomores who form the primary samples for American psychology). To intervene with other cultures on the basis of these pseudo-etics has been referred to as "imposing an etic" among cross-cultural psychologists. Later on, I present one example of this problem of imposing an etic in career counseling.