Journal of Vocational Behavior 64 (2004) 373388

www.elsevier.com/locate/jvb

Introduction: Constructivism and social

constructionism in the career eld
Richard A. Younga,*,1 and Audrey Collinb
a

Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education,

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4
b
De Montfort University, UK
Received 19 November 2003

Abstract
The impact of constructivism and social constructionism upon vocational psychology has
often been through the use of the more generic constructivism. In this article constructivism
is distinguished by its focus on how the individual cognitively engages in the construction of
knowledge from social construction which claims that knowledge and meaning are historically
and culturally constructed through social processes and action. The considerable ambiguity in
the use of these terms is also discussed. Their contributions, challenges, and opportunities to
the career elds dominant discourses are examined: the dispositions discourse, the contextualizing discourse, the subjectivity and narrative discourse, and the process discourse. Broader
challenges and opportunities for the eld are also noted. The historical construction of knowledge, concern with language, action, and process problematize traditional understandings of
career. They raise opportunities to question fundamental assumptions, focus on context, culture, the personenvironment interaction, and practice.
2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Constructivism; Context; Discourse; Epistemology; Historical construction; Language;
Meaning; Ontology; Practice; Social constructionism

Corresponding author. Fax: +1-604-822-2328.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R.A. Young).
1
Both authors have made equal contributions to this article.
0001-8791/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2003.12.005

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1. Introduction
Constructivism and social constructionism separately, and subsumed under an
apparently generic or undierentiated constructivism, have gained a substantial
presence in social science including psychology. It is the purpose of this article to
identify the contributions they have already made to the career eld and the challenges and opportunities they oer it. It will also note how the articles in this Special
Issue, which represent a range of constructivist perspectives, take up some of these
challenges and opportunities.
Over the years, Savickas (1989, 1993, 2000; Savickas & Lent, 1994) have registered
the increasing inroads that constructivism has made into vocational psychology.
For example, in his review of the 1988 career counseling and development literature
(Savickas, 1989), he identied constructivist perspectives as new to the eld, mentioning the constructive-developmentalism perspective, the meaning-making paradigm, the family as interpretive system, family drama, and hermeneutical
inquiry. He concluded that practitioners might wish to use these to supplement
trait-and-factor vocational guidance (p. 127). By 1993, Savickas (1993) had observed that society was moving beyond positivism and objectivistic science in important ways. He tentatively suggested that this step is towards postmodern
interpretivism (p. 208), so that career counseling seems to be reforming itself in
an interpretive discipline (p. 214). The several allusions to constructivist perspectives during the debate on the possibility for converging the major theories of career
(Savickas & Lent, 1994) suggest that they may be established in the eld. By 2000,
Savickas (2000) considered that it was in response to massive changes taking place
in the world of work that many of vocational psychologys core concepts were being re-examined and, in many instances transformed (p. 58), leading to two
campsthough he saw them as complementary and collaborativeof objectivism
and constructivism.
Constructivism has grown exponentially in psychology over the last 25 years
(e.g., Mahoney, 2003). One element of its context that has favored it is the dominance of cognitivism as a paradigm within psychology (Driver-Linn, 2003); indeed,
it is regarded as the latest stage of development of cognitivism (Mahoney & Patterson, 1992). It has also been nurtured by the emergence of world views such as contextualism (Pepper, 1942) and postmodernism (Raskin, 2002; Sexton, 1997), which
have challenged the foundation of the discipline. Some of these challenges are embodied in social constructionism which, sometimes disparagingly, has been called
postmodernist.
The emergence of constructivism in the career eld is not due solely to the widespread inuence of cognitivism and postmodern thinking. It is being fostered and facilitated by the way in which career practitioners, seeking approaches that are closer
to the everyday situations of practice than those available to them through career research and theory, have turned to the counseling and psychotherapy literature where
the inuence of both constructivism and social constructionism has been signicant
in recent years (e.g., Mahoney, 2003). The perceived gulf between theory/research on
one side, and practice/social policy on the other, which became a major subtext of

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the convergence project (Lent & Savickas, 1994, p. 263) referred to earlier, is, according to Savickas (1994), reconciled in the [c]onstructivist philosophy of science
(p. 239).
Although it can be concluded that constructivism is now rmly established in
this eld, it is taking time to agree upon denitions and usage. This is evident in
the way in which the material that was labeled constructivist in Brown and Brooks
(1996) is re-named social constructionist in Brown (2002). Meanwhile, according
to Raskin (2002), [o]ne comes across so many varieties of constructivist psychology
that even the experts seem befuddled. Terms like constructivism, constructionism,
and constructive are employed so idiosyncratically and inconsistently that at times
they seem to defy denition (p. 2). This is not because constructivism and social
constructionism cannot be distinguished from one another. The former focuses on
meaning making and the constructing of the social and psychological worlds through
individual, cognitive processes while the latter emphasizes that the social and psychological worlds are made real (constructed) through social processes and interaction.
However, this simple distinction masks the variety and heterogeneity both within
and between themdue in part to diering epistemologies and ontologieswhich
serve to blur the distinction. Hence, in order to understand the contributions of these
perspectives to the career eld, we rst attempt to unpack constructivism by examining both constructivism and social constructionism. However, where appropriate,
we shall adopt Raskins (2002) practice of referring to plural constructivisms.

2. Constructivism
Constructivism is a perspective that arose in developmental and cognitive psychology, and its central gures include Bruner (1990), Kelly (1955), Piaget (1969),
von Glaserfeld (1993), and Vygotsky (1978). Constructivism proposes that each individual mentally constructs the world of experience through cognitive processes. It
diers from the scientic orthodoxy of logical positivism in its contention that the
world cannot be known directly, but rather by the construction imposed on it by
the mind. However, it is generally considered to share positivisms commitment to
a dualist epistemology and ontology. Thus, it represents an epistemological perspective, concerned with how we know, and by implication how we develop meaning.
These processes are internal to the individualintegrating knowledge (or meaning)
into pre-existing schemes (assimilation) or changing the schemes to t the environment (accommodation) (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Mahoney (2002) built on Piaget
and Kelly for his dening themes of constructivism (p. 747). He considered that
the self is a complex system of active and interactive self-organizing processes
(p. 748) directed towards self-organization and order, embedded in social and symbolic contexts (p. 748), and seeking to achieve balance between ordering and disordering processes (p. 749).
Within the overall constructivist family, there are several diering positions.
Three are frequently mentioned (e.g., Gergen, 1999, 2001b). Radical constructivists
like von Glaserfeld (1995) interpret that it is the individual mind that constructs

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reality. More moderate constructivists, like Kelly (1955) and Piaget (1969), acknowledge that individual constructions take place within a systematic relationship to the
external world. Finally, social constructivists, such as Bruner (1990) and Vygotsky
(1978), recognize that inuences on individual construction are derived from and
preceded by social relationships. Although this last position has some similarity to
that of social constructionism, it diers because of its dualist assumptions. However,
these dualist assumptions are not as central to scientists in other disciplines who take
on constructivisms mantle. For example, Damasio (1999) argued against the traditional separation of mind and body, reecting an increasingly common case against
dualism. Similarly, Bruner (1990), by focusing on acts of meaning, tried to overcome
the dualism of mind and culture and biology and physical resources.
Martin and Sugarman (1999) contended that the failure of constructivism lies in its
reliance on an individually sovereign process of cognitive construction to explain
how human beings are able to share so much socially, to interpret, understand, inuence, and coordinate their activities with one another (p. 9). Essentially, their point is
that constructivism posits a highly individualistic approach without reference to social interaction, contexts, and discourses that make self-reection, meaning-making,
autobiography, and hence career, possible. To some extent, this failure is being addressed as social constructivists (Bruner, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978) move to more social
explanations and the dualist assumptions of constructivism are challenged.

3. Social constructionism
Social constructionism is like the constructivist family in recognizing Kant (1781/
1998) as its intellectual progenitor, but contrasts with it in having a social rather than
an individual focus. It takes the view that knowledge in some area is the product of
our social practices and institutions, or of the interactions and negotiations between
relevant social groups (Gasper, 1999, p. 855). Generally put, social constructionism
contends that knowledge is sustained by social processes and that knowledge and social action go together. It is less interested, or not at all interested, in the cognitive
processes that accompany knowledge. Martin and Sugarman (1999) suggested that
attention to these processes in social construction shrouds the construction of knowledge as an interactional and rhetorical process and reies and externalizes the mental
world which itself is constructed through discourse. This stance that is critical of
knowledge construction is another distinction between social constructionism and
the constructivist family.
Social constructionism diers in other ways, too. It derives from multidisciplinary
sources: sociology (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Mead, 1934), literary studies, and
postmodern approaches (e.g., Derrida, 1982, 1998; Foucault, 1970). More signicantly, the dierences between these two perspectives (and indeed between social
constructionism and the traditional positivist understandings in psychology generally), run much more deeply for some social constructionists than the dierence between a social and an individual orientation. Unlike the dualist assumptions of the
constructivist family, the ontological position that social constructionism invokes is

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generally understood as anti-essentialist and anti-realist (Burr, 1995), although this

remains a matter of debate. For example, Gergen (2001b) argued that social constructionism and realism are two sides of the same coin: these discourses require
each other for their intelligibility, and they acquire meaning through the existence
of dierence (p. 22). As an epistemology, social constructionism asserts that knowledge is historically and culturally specic; that language constitutes rather than reects reality, and is both a pre-condition for thought and a form of social action;
that the focus of enquiry should be on interaction, processes, and social practices.
Corollaries of the social construction of knowledge are indeterminacy, polyvocality,
the need for contextualization, and pragmatics (Gergen, 2001b, p.121). Importantly, social constructionism does more than say that something is socially constructed: it points to the historical and cultural location of that construction.
Social constructionism covers a range of views from acknowledging how social
factors shape interpretations to how the social world is constructed by social processes and relational practices. Indeed, it is appropriate to speak of a family of social
constructionisms. Zuri (1998), for example, distinguished a metaphysical from an
empirical social constructionism, the latter, in his view, being compatible with objective social science. In addressing the eld of organizational psychology, Hosking
(2002) posited a relational constructionism, seeing all constructed realities and relations, as produced and emergent in relational processes (p. 7). Further distinctions are made between contextual and radical constructionisms (Madill, Jordan,
& Shirley, 2000).
Most social constructionisms overtly challenge orthodox, positivist assumptions.
Moreover, as Gergen (2001b) pointed out, For the constructionist, all claims to
knowledge, truth, objectivity or insight are founded within communities of meaning
makingincluding the claims of constructionists themselves. At the level of metatheory, most constructionist scholarship has been critical (p. 2). Thus, he regarded it
as the intellectual sinew that bind[s] together the sweeping dialogues of discontent in the social sciences, such as ethnomethodology, feminist theory, labeling theory, and critical theory. Indeed, there is a kind of unmasking that can be attributed
to social constructionism, particularly as what is unmasked is seen not to be the natural state of aairs, but constructs that have possibly served in the exploitation of
various individuals and groups for a assortment of reasons. Hence, social constructionism has been used in various ways in psychology, from providing accounts of ordinary people (Harre & Secord, 1972) to challenging oppressive and ideological uses
of psychology (Armistead, 1974; Brown, 1973).
Furthermore, Gergen (2001b) said that social constructionism asks a new set of
questionsoften evaluative, political, and pragmaticregarding the choices one
makes (p. 2). He pointed out that some social scientists use it as an empirically
viable theory concerning the generation of knowledge in all social and cultural domains. Moreover, constructionist dialogues are triggering dramatic developments
in methodology (p. 3), such as narrative, collaborative, ethnographic, and performance methods which are inuencing practices outside academia, emphasizing dialogue, co-construction, collaboration, community building, narrative, and positive
visioning (p. 3).

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The family of social constructionisms has emerged from the eorts of individual authors both to use the critical dimensions of social constructionism and to
come to terms with inconsistencies in its main claims. For example, Cromby
and Nightingale (2002) noted that some social constructionists rely on the notion
of language to the exclusion of what is outside of language. Another focus of
criticism has been the question whether, or the extent to which, one can stand
outside the world to know or critique it. Social constructionists such as Gergen
(2001a) have suggested that positivists cannot use the rigours of science to found
their objective knowledge of the world. But can social constructionists found their
knowledge of the world on some other basis that is not equally open to challenge? Finally, Martin and Sugarman (1999) have raised the problem of how human agency and change are possible in a world that is socially, historically, and
culturally constructed.

4. Ambiguities
To identify the contributions, challenges and opportunities for the career eld offered by constructivism and social constructionism, we sought to distinguish these
two perspectives clearly. However, apart from consensus that they dier on whether
construction is an individual cognitive or a social process, there is little agreement on
what else denes and distinguishes them. Rather, there are continuing debates on
their relative epistemologies and ontologies. Some use constructivism in a generic,
or undierentiated sense, apparently ignoring ontological and epistemological issues.
Others generate new sub-varieties of the perspectives, such as social constructivism
which shares several features of social constructionism. Yet others have used the
two terms interchangeably (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1999). Thus, there is considerable
ambiguity. This ambiguity may exist because these two perspectives have emerged
only relatively recently, and are perhaps still evolving. This particularly seems to
be the case with social constructionism. Or it may be the result of theorists bending
conceptual frameworks to their own ends, just as practitioners struggle to apply theory. However, perhaps it should not be assumed that greater clarity could necessarily
be achieved over time. Just as, according to Burr (1995, p. 2), there is a family resemblance or fuzzy sets between the diering views within social constructionism,
so also there may be to some extent between the two perspectives. In eect, the two
families of constructivism and social constructionism may both yet prove to belong
to the same extended family.
Nevertheless, we can identify some of the features of constructivisms that can be
recognized as particularly salient in contributing to the construction of career, as a
construct in theory, research, and practice and in peoples lives. These features are
that meaning is constructed in a social, historical, and cultural context, through action and discourse in which we form relationships and community. These features
allow us to address how career is constructed, to be critically aware of the process
of career in its historical and cultural context, and to use career practice to inform
career theory and research.

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5. Contributions, challenges, and opportunities

We shall now highlight some of the contributions that constructivisms are making
to the career eld and identify the challenges and opportunities they oer it. To enable us to do this, we represent the eld through its dominant discourses, which
reect the way we talk, think, and act about career: a dispositions discourse, a contextualizing discourse, a discourse of subjectivity and narrative, and a process discourse. Based on Savickass (2001) four levels of career theories, they largely
capture how career has been constructed at this moment in time in Western industrialized societies. Discourses are not single, unitary or bounded perspectives, but
fairly uid frames, that enable us to hold thoughts, discussion, and action together
in a way that is meaningful for a particular purpose at a particular time. Hence other
discourses, such as sociological and organizational discourses, could also be recognized. We also identify broader challenges and opportunities that constructivisms
raise for the career eld.
5.1. The dispositions discourse
The dispositions discourse is based on the notion of matching internal traits to occupational characteristics. Its power arises from its claimed cross-situational consistency and stability over time, that is, for adults, traits remain relatively the same
across dierent contexts and over periods of time (Swanson, 1999). This discourse took
root during the last century as Taylorism extended the division of labor by fragmenting
jobs into their basic elements and sought workers to match the re-designed jobs. The
dispositions discourse is supported by the highly respected results of sophisticated psychometric tests, making it virtually immune to challenge on scientic grounds.
In recent years, these traits, their formation, and how we understand them have
come to be seen by some from a constructivist perspective (e.g., Cochran, 1990; Savickas, 1993). However, constructivisms also challenge this discourse. One challenge
is to their epistemology and ontology and another is to their accompanying commitment to positivist research methodologies, which Kidd (this issue), focusing on emotion in career, discusses. Some, particularly social constructionists, assert the
processual nature of self (e.g., Mahoney, 2003), the contextualized and historical nature of knowledge, and the signicance of language as a pre-condition for thought
and a form of social action, and thereby contest some of the discourses key claims.
Stead (this issue) points out that social constructionism highlights how the core constructs of career psychology, such as personality and vocational interests, are not
necessarily universal but unexamined cultural constructions. Considerable uneasiness has long been expressed about the assumptions underpinning the concept of
the individual (e.g., Collin & Young, 1986; Richardson, 1993). Although this concern has become to some extent swept up with the postmodern, feminist, and multicultural critiques in psychology, it has also been given a rationale, discourse, and
methodologies by constructivisms.
However, Savickas (2003) saw social constructionism as enriching rather than
challenging. He pointed out that vocational interests and their measurement are

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socially constructed and that psychometrics and standardized psychological tests

have contributed signicantly to the social construction of the dispositions discourse.
For example, he proposed considering interests as a reection of social participation,
as a manifestation reective of internal processes that guide action, and as a social
artefact generated in relationship and community. Such proposals suggest considerable opportunity for social constructionism to contribute further to the dispositions
discourse.
5.2. The contextualizing discourse
In contrast to the decontextualized and relatively focused dispositions discourse,
this discourse locates individuals, their concerns and actions, and career, within their
social, economic, cultural, historical, temporal, and other contexts. Hence it addresses a wide range of disparate topics, for example, the situational and psychosocial variables of Savickass (2002) career concerns, which extend the person into
the social environment; and includes issues such as at-risk youth, organizational
change, school-work transitions, and the multicultural context.
Constructivisms, particularly social constructionism, have played their part in
contextualizing career issues. For example, Chartrand, Strong, and Weitzman
(1995) identied it as one of three perspectives on the interactional (personenvironment interaction) approach in vocational psychology, and Collin (1997) discussed
how individual and career are interwoven with their context. But, social constructionisms concern with how the person, in constructing self, also constructs society,
is also implied in considerations of the relationship between career and institutions
and the social order. This is seen in Barleys (1989) explanation of structuration,
which is how institutions jointly constitute and are constituted by the actions
of individuals living their daily lives (p. 52), and exemplied in Saxenians (1996)
description of careers in Silicon Valley. The relationship between person and society
is also reected in Mignots (this issue) discussion of how personal acts of meaningmaking give rise to social consequences so that the personal and social aspects of career are a duality, one immediately displacing the other. Social constructionism may
also be throwing a longer shadow over the eld, encouraging a greater awareness of
the signicance of context as, for example, in the nature-nurture interaction in Gottfredsons (2002) theory of circumscription and compromise, and other approaches
that recognize the way that social meanings inuence the construction of career.
With its explicit attention to the cultural, historical, and political contexts in
which career theory, research, and practice exist, and to the signicance of language
and discourse, social constructionism allows the contextualizing discourse to uncover issues of power and ideology in career. This is seen in some treatments of gender, such as Hop and Hornby Atkinsons (2000) challenge to taken-for-granted
constructions of male and female careers in the theories of career. It opens up the
recognition of rhetoric in career, as seen in Collin (2000), Collin and Young
(2000), and Gowler and Legge (1989), and of career ideologies (Richardson,
2000). Cohen, Duberly, and Mallon (this issue) show how the play of power and
ideology is uncovered in the accounts people give of their careers. Moreover, as

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Coupland (this issue) identies, social constructionism allows us to see how people
draw on, and indeed deploy or deny, common and organizational understandings
of career to construct their own account.
There are considerable opportunities for social constructionism in particular to
make further contributions to this discourse. It informs the notion of embedded
and relational selves (Blustein, 1994; Blustein et al., 2001) which throws a new
light on traditional understandings in career theory. Blustein, Schultheiss, and
Flum (this issue) regard social constructionism as a challenging springboard
to reconceptualize the space shared by work and relationships. They point out
that it yields alternative discourses on working experiences. This perspective could
also enhance the personenvironment approach that already has a substantial history in vocational psychology. Through its recognition that career and career
counseling are culturally constructed, and that indigenous psychologies are needed
(Stead, this issue), it could also make a signicant contribution to understanding
the many issues of diversity that have hitherto been largely neglected in the literature of career.
5.3. The discourse of subjectivity and narrative
Career represents a unique interaction of self and social experience. This discourse
concerns that interaction from the perspective of the individual. It addresses how the
individual constructs self over time, and in context, and includes self-denition, self
and agency, purpose, and subjectivity; as well as particular forms of construction
such as narrative, autobiography, life story, and the subjective career. It is hence particularly open to the inuences of constructivisms with their focus on the construction of meaning.
For many years, the notion of the subjective career, conceived by sociologists,
represented this concern with the individuals perspective (Goman, 1959; Hughes,
1937; Stebbins, 1970). Phenomenology has been one way to study it (e.g., Collin,
1986; ODonovan-Polten, 2001; Teixeira & Gomes, 2000). The emergence of constructivisms in the eld provided other eective and accessible conceptualizations
and methodologies; the features common to constructivisms that we identied earlier
are particularly pertinent to this discourse. The construction of self and narrative in
its various forms relies on the construction of meaning in temporal and social contexts and in relationship with others.
Kellys (1955) personal construct theory has been a signicant constructivist inuence, giving theorists, researchers, and practitioners the framework and methodology to identify, for example, the constructs that individuals use to anticipate and
interpret the role that work plays in their lives (e.g., Neimeyer, 1992; Parr & Neimeyer, 1994). A dierent inuence is captured in social cognitive career theory (Lent
& Hackett, 1994) which emphasizes the person [as] shaper of his or her experience
(p. 98). Cochrans (1997) narrative approach based on constructivism is another signicant contribution to this discourse. Bujold (this issue) elaborates on the contribution that constructivism brings to career through narrative, and Cohen et al. (this
issue) demonstrate that of social constructionism.

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Some versions of social constructionism (e.g., Gergen, 2001b) have presented a

critical challenge for career by undermining notions of self, agency, and choice,
key assumptions for autobiography and narrative. Frie (2003) countered the characteristically postmodern loss of self and agency with the suggestion that confusing an
essentialist notion of the self with subjectivity does not eradicate self-experience. Social constructionisms recognition that meaning is constructed through language in
context is of particular relevance to this discourse. This perspective emphasizes the
need in career theory, research, and practice to attend to the language people use
to interpret themselves and their situations, to their talk, and accounts (e.g., Hop,
1992; Murray, 1992). This attention to language challenges the way that individuals
experiences are interpreted and recorded by traditional theorists and researchers who
work with uniform, universalthat is, decontextualizedmeanings. Associated with
its attention to language is social constructionisms acknowledgement of the signicance of discourse. Coupland (this issue) treats individuals as discourse users, and
uses discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherall, 1987) to show how they account for
their career. Blustein et al. (this issue) discuss the signicance of language in the discourse about relationships and work. Mignot (this issue) discusses how social constructionism favors projectivity over subjectivity and objectivity, focusing on the
self in action rather than introspection or observation, so that a non-linear form
of representationmetaphoris needed for career.
5.4. The process discourse
This discourse addresses the processes by which a career develops, such as decision making (e.g., Gati, 1986), cognitive and social processes (e.g., Lent, Brown, &
Hackett, 2002), and lifespan development (e.g., Super, 1980), and that facilitate that
development in counseling and other interventions (e.g., Subich & Simonson, 2001).
In contrast to the three previous discourses, which have focused largely on what is
constructed, this discourse addresses the way construction occurs.
Constructivisms have much to contribute to this discourse because they place a
considerable emphasis on process (e.g., Mahoney, 2003; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), although, according to Hacking (1999), the clear distinction that is lacking in social
constructionism generally between construction as a product and as a process can
also be seen to some extent in constructivism. However, this distinction is clearer
in the career eld because of its explicit attention to practice. Indeed, constructivisms
have a strong anity with practice, concerned as it is with interventions in the career
process, with the validity of the individuals perspective and interpretation, and the
negotiation of meaning between counselor and client. The challenge for career
researchers and theorists is to focus on process in career explanations in such a
way that will allow practitioners to make use of theories that are heuristic for their
practice.
Constructivisms, if not explicitly invoked, are sometimes implied in work on processes in the career eld, such as exploration (e.g., Flum & Blustein, 2000; Super,
1957), and values (e.g., Brown, 2002). Heinzs (2002) biographical agency, selfsocialization through the microdynamics of individual agency in varying social

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contexts across time, is another example of the constructivist approach to the process
of construction in career. An explicitly constructivist perspective informs the career
construction theory of Savickas (2002), a major revision of Supers (1953) theory of
vocational development.
Several voices in this discourse refer to constructing as an individual process,
whereas Young, Valach, and Collin (2002) follow social constructionism in highlighting meaning construction as a social process taking place through joint action.
In this issue, Young and Valach analyze their research on parentadolescent joint
projects to illustrate the construction of the young persons career. They also discuss
how their action theory both reects and develops social constructionism.
In their dierent ways, constructivisms challenge the basis of career development
theories (Super, 1953, 1980; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996), which is that there is a
normative and predictable developmental sequence of ages and stages. According to
Mahoney (2003), constructivism regards human development as a process that is dynamic and dialectical, embracing both variability and disorder. At the same time, social constructionisms assertion that knowledge is historically and culturally specic
questions the existence of a stable and orderly environment, which is implied by the
notion of normative development. It further challenges the assumption that an individual could be judged objectively and evaluated against such a normative sequence,
and so undermines the concept of career maturity.
Constructivisms recognize that construction is an active process, that individuals
acting together in large and small groups, and in concert with history, culture, and
other broad factors, jointly construct the world in which they participate. Part of the
construction of career, for example, the emergence of new intentions in subjective experience that Richardson (this issue) sees as crucial to how people construct their
lives in changing times, takes place through language and narrative in dialogue with
counselors and other practitioners. Inuential exponents of constructivist counseling are Neimeyer (1993), who has used Kellys (1955) personal construct theory, and
Peavy (1992), who considered that counselors have to pay attention to relationship,
agency, meaning making, and negotiation. Cochrans (1997) approached the process
of constructing a career as a narrative process that occurs both within and outside of
counseling. Bujold (this issue) looks on narrative as a process as well as a product,
and emphasizes how counselors use narrative to facilitate the meaning-making process of their clients.
The closer relationship with practice that constructivisms bring to career theory
and research challenges theorists and researchers to re-frame their self-identity and
work together reectively and in new ways, giving the opportunity for more relevant
work (Collin, 1996). If social constructionism could integrate a strong conceptualization and data-based research with ndings that could be transferable to practice,
it could make considerable contributions to practice.
5.5. Broader challenges and opportunities
Constructivisms also unsettle traditional frameworks. Not only do they generate
contributions, challenges, and opportunities that are not easily classiable into those

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discourses, that fall between them, or that apply to all of them equally, but they also
challenge the discourses themselves. Social constructionism in particular comes at
the eld from a new perspective, and poses considerable challenges to some of its
key constructs: self, agency, and choice. One response from vocational psychology
has been to attempt to assimilate these new perspectives and widen the basis of
the mainstream theories (e.g., Kidd, this issue; Savickas, 2000). A dierent response,
exhibited in dierent ways by Richardson (this issue) and by Young and Valach (this
issue), is to wrestle with social constructionism itself, developing it in new directions.
Yet another response would be to take the opportunity it oers to provide a framework in which the traditional canons of career could be examined (e.g., Savickas,
2003). Hence constructivisms are not only enriching the traditional canon of career
by widening and deepening it; social constructionism has the potential to re-frame
the canon itself, as our adoption of discourses to represent the eld exemplies.

6. Conclusion
This Special Issue provides a broad range of articles that address constructivism
or social constructionism in career. These perspectives are increasingly discussed and
used in the social sciences possibly signaling a shift that is occurring in them, and in
science more broadly. Hence, it is timely for this examination of these perspectives in
the career domain. The dierences between constructivism and social constructionism are not denitive. However, both have already made worthwhile contributions
to this eld and, while they still present challenges, they also oer opportunities that
are likely to advance the eld further, or to change it.
The authors in this Special Issue have treated constructivism and social constructionism separately. However, we also recognize that these perspectives share a common heritage and may continue to evolve into a new, more integrated perspective
from which career can be considered. The implications for our theory, research
and practice, based on a dierent appreciation of action, language, context, relationship, meaning, culture, and career itself, are substantial.

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