Handbook of Life Design - From Practice to Theory and from Theory to Practice

[2][3]Chapter 1

Introduction

Laura Nota1 and Jérôme Rossier2

1Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology, University of Padova, Italy

2Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

The contemporary world and our recent history are characterized by a very rapid evolution of social and economical structures. This is very clear both to the authors of this volume and to readers. Rapid technological changes, the globalization phenomenon, economic and social insecurity, new migrations, prolonged economic crises, and much more are before the eyes of everyone. These changes have important implications for each individual and each citizen, but also for career counselors and professionals in the field of vocational and career psychology. These new challenges underlie the development of the new life design paradigm, first presented in a scientific article in 2009, and now further developed in this handbook.

There has been a downturn in people’s quality of life due to lower pay, loss of health insurance, fewer pension benefits, poorer labor conditions, and greater income inequality and instability. All this is increasingly affecting large groups of the population, among whom young people, older workers, short-term contract workers, migrants, and families having to manage long periods of school-work transitions experienced by their children, could be listed. It is evident that the change that characterizes the history of human beings is occurring so fast that it is resulting in significant hardships and difficulties. This present is also changing the idea of the future. Current conditions tend to stimulate a negative vision of it. Fairly frequently, it is perceived as involving considerable discomfort and feelings of despair and bewilderment. The tendency to think about the future as characterized by multiple perspectives, progress, improvement of living conditions, and new opportunities is lower than in the past. These unpleasant feelings and emotions are also associated with the spread of pessimism and the belief that it will be very difficult to get out of the crisis that is affecting different parts of the world and to contain its deleterious effects. Even counselors and career counselors themselves are not immune to all of this, as they often experience the same conditions of insecurity and underemployment as their clients.

Bearing in mind the conditions we are all living through, the increased number of at-risk individuals, the barriers and needs of career counselors themselves, the Life Design International Research Group was created in 2006, included scholars from diverse countries – Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the United States, who strongly believed that it is important to find answers which are different from those given in the past. The group is composed of Jean-Pierre Dauwalder (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Maria Eduarda Duarte (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal), Jean Guichard (Institut National d’Etude du Travail et d’Orientation Professionnelle – Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, France), Laura Nota (University of Padova, Italy), Jérôme Rossier

[4](University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Mark Savickas (Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine, USA), Salvatore Soresi (University of Padova, Italy), Raoul Van Esbroeck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), and Annelies E. M. van Vianen (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The Vrije Universiteit in Bruxelles hosted this group for 3 consecutive years, from 2006 to 2009. During that period, the group wrote a position paper that appeared in one of the most prestigious scientific journals of our field, the Journal of Vocational Behavior, to also stimulate a discussion and an international debate on some critical issues of vocational guidance and career counseling (Savickas et al., 2009). This position paper has since been translated into several languages – Brazilian Portuguese (Duarte et al., 2010), French (Savickas et al., 2010c), German (Savickas et al., 2011a), Greek (Savickas et al., 2010b), Italian (Savickas et al., 2011b), and Portuguese (Savickas et al., 2010a) – and it was one of the most cited articles from the Journal of Vocational Behavior in 2012.

With the aim of continuing the work of deepening and further developing ideas for research, training, and intervention actions, the group has met every year in different locations: at the University of Lausanne, at the University of Lisbon, at the INETOP of Paris, and at the University of Padova. We have organized several symposia in international conferences, to present our ideas and proposals, and discuss them with all of the colleagues of our field. In 2011, at the University of Padova, the idea of this book was born, to discuss how to use life design models, methods, and materials to assist people with coping strategies for important changes in our world.

This handbook is organized into five parts. Part II includes five chapters that address theory and conceptual reflections. Part III includes four chapters that apply life design to four different age groups. Part IV includes eight chapters that present ideas and suggestions for working with more at-risk people, in different contexts, and to facilitate the training of life design counselors.

In Part II, called “The Life Design Paradigm,” the conceptual structure of the life design approach is examined, and reflections derived from the position paper are provided. Also, a specific in-depth analysis, conceptual elaborations that enrich the early formulations, new developments, and relationships with other approaches, which are considered useful for further enrichment, are proposed.

The first chapter by Jean Guichard gives an introduction to the economic and cultural globalization that has taken place over recent decades, which in turn, has produced a reformulation of the major vocational and life design issues that people face. His chapter traces the conceptual developments that led to the birth of the career and life design paradigm. After a description of salient points, the author proposes three types of interventions – information, guidance, and dialogue – to focus on life design dialogues, which are useful to develop the reflexivity that clients need to design their lives.

Andreas Hirschi and Jean Pierre Dauwalder are the authors of the second chapter. After emphasizing the complexity of constructing careers today, the authors focus on the new life design paradigm, as a perspective that highlights the relevance of the complex dynamics and the unforeseeable results of multiple nonlinear interactions. They state that life design provides the basis for career interventions from a contextual and dynamic perspective. Moreover, the authors highlight the suggestion that career counselors should focus on the interaction between client and environment to obtain possible favorable career outcomes.

The third chapter was written by Maria Eduarda Duarte and Paulo Cardoso. After exploring the question of the gap between career counseling theories and reality that contributed to the emergence of the life design paradigm, they underscore the fact that life design involves not only the context of the self but also the construction of the self. They then provide[5] considerations on some topics which are currently debated in light of the life design paradigm for counseling, such as working alliances, co-construction of meaning, etc. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the practical contribution of the life design framework to counseling.

Jacques Pouyaud wrote the fourth chapter. He tries to make a synthesis of different, but quite close, approaches that could be included in the life design paradigm, under the auspices of the concepts of Ricoeur, the Savickas approach to career construction, the contextual action model of Young and colleagues, the active socialization conception of Malrieu and colleagues, and the making oneself self approach by Guichard. The personal reworking, synthesis, and conceptual anchor efforts allow him to emphasize the importance of the connection between meaning and action in the counseling process, pushing him to formulate a metaphor of identity constructing and directing as being like riding a bicycle.

The fifth chapter, by Mark Watson and Mary McMahon, addresses how several theoretical perspectives that have emerged in career psychology nowadays are embedded in postmodern, constructivist, and social constructionist approaches. It emphasizes a collaborative approach between the counselor and the client in which the focus is on making personal meaning and moving the client toward an action-oriented approach. Further, the authors delineate in particular the potential convergence and divergence between the life design and the systems theory framework, as an effort to ensure a new identity for the field and also to increase the opportunity to provide more personalized responses to clients.

Part III includes four chapters that apply life design to four different age groups. It is entitled “Life Design Across the Life Span,” and provides an overview of the issues relating to reflections that the life design approach has stimulated so far about what people are facing at different ages of their lives, as well as information on the processes that are important and should be strengthened to promote professional design and working lives.

The first chapter of this part, written by Paul Hartung, concerns children and childhood. He emphasizes how life design, which represents a...