The 2012 Leona Tyler Award Address: Constructing Careers-Actors, Agents, and Authors

Thomas Kuhn (1996), the historian of science, referred to a paradigm as a pattern of conceptual models and dominant practices that characterize a particular historical period. The present article traces the evolution and compares three major paradigms for career intervention, namely the formist paradigm of modernity's vocational guidance for the actor, the organismic paradigm of high modernity's career education for the agent, and the contextual paradigm of post-modernity's life designing for the author. Each of these paradigms has a distinct discourse that engages clients with a standard rhetoric and skill repertoire. Vocational guidance, from the objective perspective of individual differences, views clients as actors who may be characterized by scores on traits and who may be helped to match themselves to occupations that employ people whom they resemble. Career education, from the subjective perspective of individual development, views clients as agents who may be characterized by their degree of readiness to engage developmental tasks appropriate to their life stages and who may be helped to implement new attitudes, beliefs, and competencies that foster their vocational adaptation. Life design, from the project perspective of social constructionism, views clients as authors who may be characterized by autobiographical stories and who may be helped to reflect on life themes with which to reconstruct their careers. Depending upon a client's personal needs and social context, practitioners may apply career interventions that reflect different paradigms: vocational guidance to identify occupational fit, career education to foster vocational adaptation, or life design to construct a career story.