Vocational Maturity

Beginning with the founding work of Parsons and extending at least through the 1950s, the dominant theoretical orientation in vocational counseling was the "trait and factor" approach. This approach is governed by the assumptions that individuals have certain traits—abilities, interests, personality characteristics—and that various occupations require particular constellations of such traits in those who would pursue them successfully. The counseling process amounts to using tests of various sorts and other techniques to ascertain the client's traits and recommending consideration of occupations for which those particular traits are most appropriate.^[21] The trait and factor approach is alive and well in counseling today; for instance, Holland's influential theory of personalities, vocations, and their convergence is rooted in this perspective.^[22] Nevertheless, the trait and factor approach has come under fire for relying too heavily on tests and for simply accepting clients' personality traits as givens rather than investigating the psychological and sociological conditions that produce them.

One important reaction to perceived limitations of the trait and factor approach has been increased attention to when and how those personality traits relevant to vocational choices develop. Vocational counselors would identify the unfortunate lad described above, who dropped out of school after a frustrating attempt to pursue a career goal of mortician, as one who had not achieved vocational maturity at the time he took the interest inventory in the ninth grade. He was still in an exploratory phase. Preferences expressed at that time are likely to be unstable, so it is unwise (as it obviously was in this boy's case) to base important decisions and plans on them.^[23] Most interest inventories are designed for people of high school age and older, and it is recommended that they not be taken by younger individuals because their interests have not yet stabilized.^[24]

Stimulated largely by the pioneering work of Eli Ginzberg and associates^[25] and Donald Super,^[26] interest in vocational maturity was born in the 1950s and continues to be an important issue in counseling psychology. In a moment of linguistic inspiration, Edwin Herr and Stanley Cramer coined "vocationalization" as the process by which people come to internalize "the values, knowledge, and skills which led [sic? lead?] to effective vocational behavior."^[27] The individual who has vocationalized properly comes to define the self to a substantial degree in vocational terms ("I am a musician," or accountant, or bricklayer, etc.). Such people have gained a good understanding of their own abilities and interests and on that basis have selected "occupational careers." This term refers to a vocation that provides the opportunity throughout an entire work life for steady rises to increasing levels of responsibility, prestige, and/or compensation.^[28] For those who have vocationalized well, the occupational career is an important part of the meaning they find in life. Among the many occupational careers, a few examples are the academic or military professions (with their well-defined ranks), skilled crafts, management careers in business, and the Catholic priesthood.

For practitioners interested in vocational maturity, one of the major concerns of guidance is to act as midwife to the process of vocationalization. To this end, researchers in counseling have devised tests to measure the level of vocational maturity, for use primarily with adolescents and high school students. Instruments such as the Career Maturity Inventory, the Cognitive Vocational Maturity Test, and the Career Development Inventory measure attitudes toward occupational planning and choice, knowledge of what occupations are available and how to get information about them, and development of decision-making skills.^[29]

In a socioeconomic system as complex as our own, vocationalization is a lengthy process that requires extensive shaping of the human raw material to develop in people the specific skills necessary for various occupations and, more profoundly, to dispose them psychologically to include vocation as an important part of their definition of self. In Super's theory, for example, vocational maturity is a process consisting of five stages and

lasting nearly a lifetime. Adolescence is the time for crystallization of vocational preferences; identifying a specific career direction and taking initial steps to implement it occurs around ages 18 to 21; completing necessary training and entering the relevant occupation occurs around ages 21 to 24; during the stabilization phase, between ages 25 and 35, the individual settles down in the chosen career; the latter 30s to the mid-40s mark the consolidation phase, when attention turns to developing seniority and security in one's vocation.^[30]

If we look at it from the perspective of the socioeconomic system, it is clear that vocationalization is a highly desirable process because it produces marvelously efficient and devoted workers. The full significance of this becomes apparent if we compare vocationalization with Max Weber's thesis in his famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism .^[31] There Weber argued that the industriousness characteristic of capitalists had its origin in the notion that success in one's worldly calling was evidence to Protestants that one was among the Elect, destined for salvation. Hence people strove mightily to succeed so as to prove to themselves that they were doing God's work and to relieve anxiety about the fate of their immortal souls. Given its otherworldly orientation, however, this mind-set could scarcely allow the successful ones to use the considerable wealth they achieved for temporal pleasures. They continued to live frugally and valued self-denial. Even after the religious underpinnings of these attitudes and behaviors passed from the scene, people retained the habits of industriousness and asceticism, resulting in capitalists who work not to enjoy the fruits of their labor but as an end in itself.

I suggest that as a technique for inveigling people to devote their energy and lives to the growth and efficiency of the socioeconomic system, today's vocationalization is well evolved beyond the situation Weber described. Far from being a hollow shell left over from former eschatological anxiety, work today has been positively redefined as a source of satisfaction, happiness, and meaning in life. For the person who has truly vocationalized, one's sense of honor, self-worth, and identity is closely tied to career. Marry this degree of commitment with a program of extensive

training and placement on the basis of the individual's particular abilities and interests, and the result is a corps of workers who serve the system with boundless energy, consummate skill, and unstinting conscientiousness.

At first blush, there seems to be nothing wrong with this, for everybody wins. The socioeconomic system benefits from the attentiveness of its workers, while the workers simultaneously secure material well-being and find meaning in life in the context of an occupational career. Closer scrutiny reveals, however, that such human rewards are by no means invariably forthcoming. Vocationalization theory stresses those factors necessary for success that are dependent on the individual: maturity, ability, motivation, and an appetite for hard work. The theory is silent about external considerations that may impede the determined efforts of even those with high ability and motivation to achieve vocational success. But in reality, factors external to individuals and beyond their control frequently frustrate their career aspirations. In particular, two factors hold the ideal of a satisfying occupational career beyond the reach of many people. The more ancient of the two is denial of equal opportunity because of discrimination. More recent is "corporate restructuring" and the fundamental shift it represents in the organization of employment away from the notion of vocational careers.

Discrimination

The salient issues are embedded in the well-known caricature: when the chairman of the board at General Motors retires, everybody moves up a notch, and they hire an office boy. While the image this evokes plainly depicts an occupational career as a coherent pattern of progress from an entry-level position to retirement through grades of increasing responsibility, respect, and compensation, it reveals two biased assumptions inherent in the whole concept of vocationalization. One is that the process of moving up the career ladder is modeled on the ideal experience of white-collar employees. Workers on the assembly line are not involved. The other is that they hire an office boy, not an office girl. In other words, while vocationalization and an occu-

pational career are held up as ideals for everyone, they are modeled on the stereotyped experience of white, middle-class males.

This bias is built into the concept of vocational maturity at its base.^[32] Probably the first explicitly articulated theory of vocational maturation was advanced by Ginzberg and his associates in 1951. The empirical study on which the theory was erected pertained to Anglo-Saxon male adolescents of rather high socio-economic standing and IQs of 120 or higher.^[33] The tests used to measure vocational maturity are similarly skewed. The item construction, selection and validation of two important vocational maturity tests—the Career Maturity Inventory and the Career Development Inventory—was done on the basis of work with middle class subjects.^[34] Therefore, the "vocational maturity" that such tests measure may actually be how closely subjects approximate middle-class attitudes toward the world of work.^[35] Again, vocational interest tests such as the Strong Interest Inventory and the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey match interests expressed by subjects with those of samples of persons successfully employed in various occupations. Because white middle-class males predominate in the more prestigious and highly compensated occupations, their interests serve as the norm with which subjects' interests are compared. To the extent that interests are conditioned by socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and gender, those of white middle-class male subjects will match better with the norming groups in these higher-level occupations, and therefore test results will show them to be more interested in such occupations than subjects from other social categories.^[36]

The tilt toward white middle-class males is apparent in the facts regarding who actually experiences the coherent developmental pattern of an occupational career. Women and minorities have tended disproportionately to hold poorly compensated and less honored jobs. A 1959 study examined what had become of over 1,500 people in their mid-forties who were identified as gifted children (IQ of 135 or higher) in 1921–22. The great majority of the men had achieved prominence in professional and managerial positions, while about 50 percent of the women were full-time housewives.

Of those [women] who were working full time, 21% were teachers in elementary or secondary school, 8% were social workers, 20% were secretaries, and 8% were either librarians or nurses. Only 7% of those working were academicians, 5% were physicians, lawyers, or psychologists, 8% were executives, and 9% were writers, artists, or musicians.^[37]

Women's position in the work force has improved since then—but not dramatically. In 1979, women employed full time earned 63 percent of what men earned, while the comparable figure for 1988 was 70 percent. Between 1983 and 1988, the number of women in managerial and professional specialties rose from 41 to 45 percent, but they made no gains in salary, earning 70 percent of male salaries in both years.^[38] These figures bear out the widespread perception that women's inroads into business and the professions have been largely limited to the lower and middle levels and that a "glass ceiling" continues to bar their ascent to the highest positions.

As for minorities, in the late 1970s, black college graduates were earning about as much as white high school graduates.^[39] Since then, the economic condition of black families has actually worsened slightly, for earnings of black families dropped from 72 to 71 percent of those of white families between 1979 and 1988.^[40] In 1988, 27 percent of the whites in the work force were employed in managerial and professional positions, while 15 percent of the blacks and 13 percent of the Hispanics held jobs in these categories. Conversely, 23 percent of the blacks and 24 percent of the Hispanics were employed as operators, fabricators, and laborers, while 15 percent of the whites held jobs of these sorts.^[41] In sum, minorities are much likelier than whites to hold jobs that are poorly compensated and do not lend themselves to the sorts of challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for creative growth associated with the notion of an occupational career. "For routine unskilled or semiskilled occupations," writes W. L. Slocum, "the distinctions between occupational steps may be so small and worker turnover so great that it would be difficult to consider that a career line exists at all."^[42]

A danger of vocational maturity theory and the practices of guidance derived from it is that it encourages everyone to voca-

tionalize, to place career near the center of their sense of self and the meaning they seek in life. Minorities and the poor who buy into this strategy are likelier than others to be disappointed in their efforts to achieve a successful vocation. Given the emphasis guidance places on internal factors such as ability and motivation, they may well blame the failure on themselves, with resulting damage to their self-esteem. The tragedy is that the responsibility often lies not so much with them as with a system that discriminates against them and denies them equal opportunity. To preserve their psychological well-being, minorities and others who are subjected to discrimination are sometimes driven to a stance totally contrary to that promoted by vocational maturity theory. Far from finding personal fulfillment in work, persons in these circumstances are alienated from their work. They must find ways of convincing themselves that what they do for most of their waking hours has little or nothing to do with what they are as persons.^[43]

Charles Ford and Doris Jeffries Ford suggest that this situation calls for a special counseling strategy.^[44] They hold that many black workers, recognizing that they face greater obstacles in achieving a successful and satisfying occupational career than do their white counterparts, are not necessarily out to make career an integral part of their self-definition as vocational maturity theory expects. Their lateral movement from one job to another is therefore not "floundering," as it would appear from the perspective of such theories, but "calculated job speculation" designed exclusively to improve their economic position.^[45] Clients with this objective may be more effectively served by helping them to develop the most effective strategy for getting the most lucrative and secure job available rather than following the traditional counseling approach of seeking to place them in a vocation in which they might rise over the long term from an entry-level position to the top.^[46] Although this may well be an appropriate course for some clients in today's social conditions, it must be acknowledged that implementing it could in certain circumstances be extremely problematic. Imagine the charges of racism that would be forthcoming, for example, if a white counselor encouraged a middle-class white youth to go for his dream of becoming a lawyer

while (quite honestly and realistically) informing a lower-class black youth with the same goal that the cards are stacked against success and suggesting that she might want to learn how to become proficient at calculated job speculation.

Even if the utopian day should arrive when there is no more discrimination and equal opportunity is a reality for everyone, many people would still not achieve a satisfying occupational career. That ideal has always been beyond the reach of many, including many white middle-class males. In the mid-1960s, most men did not envision work in terms of a long-term career but made occupational choices according to short-term considerations. Some 70 percent of lower-middle-class men spent less than half their work lives in positions that manifested any sort of orderly career progression.^[47] Twenty years later it became apparent that even for the upper middle class, "career development as a process of implementing one's self-concept is a fast eroding dream for many Americans, and not just racial minorities."^[48] One thinks, for example, of the executives who must make midlife career changes on losing their jobs in corporate reorganizations, mergers, or takeovers and of the crowd of would-be academics who graduated with Ph.D.'s in the 1970s and 1980s to find no tenure-track faculty jobs awaiting them and who migrated for years from one temporary position to another until many of them left the profession entirely. This brings us to the second external factor that frustrates the ambitions of many people to achieve a satisfying occupational career.

The Demise of Fordism

In about 1973, a fundamental change in the American structure of employment occurred, signaling the end of the "Fordism" that had dominated the scene for the preceding sixty years. With its symbolic beginning in Henry Ford's $5 day (see chap. 4), the Fordist system rested on the proposition that employees be paid sufficiently high wages to enable them to be prime consumers of the ever-increasing quantity of goods produced by industrial capitalism.^[49] At its height, this system produced a particular organization of employment.

From World War II through the early 1970s, a growing proportion of American companies organized the division of work and the management of employees within their firms around the key institution of a full-time work force and an "internal labor market." Ordered hierarchies, promotion from within rather than from outside the company whenever possible, the erection of promotion ladders with relatively explicit rules and flexible procedures by which workers would be judged worthy of upgrading—these were the dominant characteristics of this form of corporate bureaucracy.^[50]

Note that precisely these are the conditions that foster the vocational experience we have been discussing under the name "occupational career." I suspect, in fact, that the emphasis in vocational guidance on the process of vocationalization and its culmination in an occupational career is an artifact of the Fordist organization of employment. Of course, these conditions were not realized in all companies or for all employees. That is why occupational careers were not available to many workers even at the peak of Fordism. Nevertheless, they did obtain in the largest private and public organizations, and the vocational ideal for everyone was formulated in their terms.

Since about 1973, the Fordist system has been transformed. International markets and competition, fluctuating currency exchange rates, technological innovations, new financial arrangements, and speed of communication favor those companies that can adjust rapidly to changing conditions. In response, many companies are "restructuring" both their blue-collar and white-collar work forces. The core of permanent, full-time employees is reduced ("downsized") and surrounded by a periphery consisting of part-time employees, temporary workers, and subcontractors. This represents considerable savings in labor costs, for peripheral workers are paid lower wages than those in the permanent core and the company does not provide them with health insurance, retirement, and other fringe benefits. Moreover, the company gains flexibility because it can enlarge or diminish the size of its labor force far faster than was possible under the Fordist system by simply adding to or cutting back on its number of subcontractors and part-time and temporary workers.^[51]

Under Fordism there was some truth in the adage, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." But the new system is anything but good for employees, because low-paying part-time or temporary jobs without fringe benefits are replacing Fordist jobs that held out the possibility of increasing responsibility and remuneration in a secure and satisfying occupational career. The transformation has serious implications for the profession of vocational counseling. To the extent that counselors continue to encourage their clients to vocationalize—to prepare themselves for an occupational career and to make it an important element in their self-image—they may be orienting them toward a world that, for many, no longer exists. Today, to make career an integral part of one's concept of self is less advisable than it was even two or three decades ago. In the present circumstances, an employment strategy exclusively focused on economic goals such as calculated job speculation may be relevant to more than just those who suffer from racial or gender discrimination.