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

The prevailing forces discussed earlier exert great pressures on many of these Asian countries to modernize and adopt Western models of science. As this process continues, Eurocentric models of science will gradually become a monopoly. If there is doubt about the power of this prevailing force, one need only review the existing textbooks on career psychology or career counseling to determine how many of the career development models in those books have non-Western origins. However, despite this great need to modernize, many Asian countries are also motivated by a fear of assimilation, specifically assimilation into a Western form of civilization with its many associated evils, as perceived by these countries. Therefore, there has been a rallying cry of "Modernization without Westernization" in many of these Asian countries. (For those ofyou who may be interested, Michael Bond has a very interesting discussion of the modernization problem for the Chinese and their concerns about the potential loss of Chinesene ss in his book, Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights From Psychology [1991; Hong Kong, China: Oxford University Press].) The dilemma for the Chinese people is how to maintain their cultural identity while climbing on the bandwagon of modernization.

Another countervailing force to the wholesale adoption of Western models of science is that of the cultural mismatch problem. Models of psychology or career counseling developed in the Western cultural context will likely have some universal elements and some culture-specific elements. These culture-specific elements, when applied in another cultural context, are likely to create culturally dystonic experiences. As an exercise to help you experience this culturally dystonic phenomenon, when you are introduced to someone, try bowing instead of shaking hands. For individuals who are more courageous, you can try it the French way and kiss this new person on both cheeks as a form of greeting. I am proposing that Western models of career counseling will have elements that will contribute to a cultural mismatch with various Asian cultural contexts. This mismatch, in turn, will create culturally dystonic experiences, which will increase the amount of unmet needs as time goes on. The continued applications of these Western models without cultural accommodation will lead to ineffective counseling at best and therapeutic failure at worst. I talk more about cultural accommodation later in this article.

It is partly a result of the prevailing forces mentioned earlier and partly the increasing monopoly of Western models of science that have created its parallel countervailing force, namely the rise of indigenous psychologies. To give a better understanding of this countervailing force and the impetus for it, let me quote from Durganand Sinha (1993) in his chapter on indigenous psychology in India:

When modern scientific psychology, based on the empirical, mcchanistic, and materialistic orientations of the West, was imported into India as part of the general transfer knowledge, it came in as a ready made intellectual package in the first decade of the century. It tended to sweep away the traditional psychology, at least among those who had been involved in modern Western education. In fact, this transfer in a way constituted an element of the political domination of thc West over thc third world countries in the general process of modernization and Westernization. The domination was so great that for almost three decades until about the time India achieved independence in 1947, psychology remain tied to the apron strings of the West and did not show any signs of maturing. Very little originality was displayed, Indian research added hardly anything to psychological theory or knowledge, and was seldom related to problems of the country. Research conducted was by and large repetitive and replicative in cha racter, the object being to supplement studies done in the West by further experimentation or to examine some of their aspects from a new angle. Thus, the discipline remained at best a pale copy of Western psychology, rightly designated as a Euro-American product with very little concern with social reality as it prevailed in India. (p. 31)

There is a great deal more to be said about indigenous psychologies as another countervailing force, but, due to space limitations, I only observe that indigenous models of psychology have an uphill struggle against the power and hegemony of Western models.

What should we as counselors do about the emerging monopoly of Western models of science? There are essentially three major approaches to culture in psychological theories. The first is the Universalist approach in which culture is considered to be an unimportant and nuisance variable that needs little or no attention. The cultural variable is essentially ignored. This is the dominant approach in mainstream psychology and represents the Universal dimension within Leong's (1996) integrative model. As Leong pointed out, this approach is necessary but not sufficient for understanding the experiences and behaviors of individuals, given the importance of the Group dimension (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status).

The second approach is the culture assimilation approach in which cultural differences are recognized but minimized because it is assumed that other racial and cultural groups should assimilate to mainstream American culture (i.e., Western European culture). With a strong belief in the "melting pot" concept, and to the extent that these racial and cultural persons assimilate, then these psychological theories and models will work equally well with these groups.

The third approach is the cultural accommodation approach in which the culturally unique experiences of culturally different groups are considered to be major factors in understanding their behavior. These culture-specific factors are identified and added to the existing theories and models to enrich them and to increase their relevance and utility to other crosscultural populations. To understand the challenges facing career counseling in Asia, I propose that what is needed is the cultural accommodation approach in which Western models are critically examined for their universal and culture-specific elements. The elements that are universal, such as job satisfaction, will transfer readily to other cultural contexts. I am assuming that every human being seeks satisfaction from his or her work; it is the correlates, their meaning and sources of satisfaction, that are likely to vary across cultures. The elements that may be culture-specific will have to be tested and empirically evaluated in the new cultural c ontexts. When these culture-specific elements have been identified, they may need to be replaced by culture-specific elements from the target country.

For example, research in India showed that the caste system plays an important role in the meaning of vocational interest inventory (Leong, Austin, Sekaran, & Komarraju, 1998). Although vocational interest and choice may be universal, its meaning and implementation is very likely influenced by culture-specific factors. In the case of the India study, the authors found that they could not directly adapt the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI; Holland, 1985) for use in that culture because work is so highly integrated with India's long-established caste system.

Indeed, the Indian coauthors on the project informed the other authors that many of the participants in India would not complete the VPI "as is" because it included occupations that would be considered too low in the caste system for them to even consider. To include these items without qualifications or modifications would be considered an insult to the higher caste members in the sample. To address this culture-specific problem without doing undue violence to the VPI, the authors finally decided to change the wording of the instructions to include a category of "too low-status for me to consider." They also included other response categories to test for linguistic and conceptual equivalence.

The proposed cultural accommodation approach involves three steps: (a) identifying the cultural biases, cultural gaps, or cultural blind spots in an existing theory that restricts the cultural validity of the theory; (b) selecting current culturally specific concepts and models from the target culture to fill in the cultural gaps and accommodate the theory to racial and ethnic minorities; and (c) testing the culturally accommodated theory to determine if it has incremental validity above and beyond the culturally unaccommodated theory. The value of the proposed cultural accommodation approach will be determined by future research. Two major lines of research on the value of a cultural accommodation approach consist of (a) showing that the culture-specific variables can account for significant amounts of variance in the vocational behavior of individuals in the target culture, and (b) demonstrating incremental validity where culture-specific variables account for additional variance above and beyond those acc ounted for by the variables in the original unaccommodated model. A more detailed exposition of this cultural accommodation model can be found in chapters by Leong and his colleagues (Leong & Serafica, 2001; Leong & Tang, in press).

Finally, let me illustrate the complexities involved in this cultural accommodation approach with one particular theoretical model. This model is Harry Triandis's (1994) conceptualization of Individualism-Collectivism as a cultural syndrome. According to Triandis, "a cultural syndrome is that pattern characterized by shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and values that are organized around a theme and that can be found in certain geographic regions during a particular historic period" (p. 43). Individualistic societies are seen as those in which the needs of the individual are put before the needs of the group. Western societies are traditionally seen as being Individualistic. Collectivistic societies generally put the needs of the group before the needs of the individual. Eastern societies are seen as Collectivistic in nature (Hofstede, 1980). The type of society one is raised in affects many aspects of a person's life, including the manner in which one communicates, the life choices one makes, and how one copes with stress. Eurocentric models of career psychology and career counseling, which are developed in the Western cultural context, are likely to contain a strong bias toward individualism. What cultural mismatch and culturally dystonic experiences are created when a career development model developed in the West and based on a independent construal of the self is transferred to another culture with a much more interdependent construal of the self? What type of cultural dynamics are likely to occur in a career counseling session in which counselors trained in the Western models operate with the assumption that individual goals have priority over group goals when their clients have the opposite assumption (i.e., group goals have priority)?

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