Review of Career counseling: A narrative approach.

Abstract

LARRY COCHRAN Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, x + 166 pages (ISBN 0-7619-0442-5, us$35, Softcover) Reviewed by ANNE MARSHALL This book introduces narrative approach to career counselling. The author specifically makes the distinction that this is counselling approach, not career development theory. A narrative approach invites counsellors to make their career interventions with clients more personal. In contrast to the traditional objective emphasis in career counselling, this is subjective approach that emphasizes meaning and meaning-making. Cochran characterizes the central task of career counselling as emplotment rather than matching. Emplotment involves casting the individual as the main character in career narrative that is meaningful, productive, and fulfilling. Cochran's approach makes use of literary models and constructivist methods. He draws upon the personal construct approach of George Kelly (1955), as well as the writings of more recent authors such as Robert Neimeyer (1987) and Mark Savickas (1993). Specific client examples are used to illustrate the concepts and techniques presented. Canadian readers will appreciate an approach that does not rely on the American content that is so prominent in books focused on career. In Chapter 1, Cochran argues that narratives constitute our primary way of making meaning in the world. A narrative provides temporal organization in our lives, integrating beginning, middle, and an end into whole. Career counselling is concerned with narratives that empasize the future. The individual must identify with the narrative envisioned. In adopting career narrative, person tries to match an ideal vision with the possibilities offered by available options. This is continuous, dialectic process in which the individual is actively constructing meaning. These personal meanings are then expanded, refined, tested, and revised over the life course, resulting in unique career narrative. Cochran maintains that career counselling must focus on a person's capacity for future decisions and actions, what has been termed practical wisdom and sense of agency (p. 31). The standards for judging an ideal narrative include wholeness, harmony, agency, and fruitfulness. To help clients explore and emplot or implement their career narratives, Cochran proposes seven (rather than steps): Elaborating Career Problem, Composing Life History, Founding Future Narrative, Constructing Reality, Changing Life Structure, Enacting Role, and Crystallizing Decision. These episodes are intended to enhance deciding and acting, practical wisdom, and sense of agency. They are not meant to be followed in rigid fashion: different clients require different episodes, or different coordination and ordering of the episodes. Also, the arrangement of episodes might change as the course of counselling evolves. Elaborating career problem (Chapter 2) is critical first step. A problem is gap between client's actual state of affairs and his or her desired state. Counsellor and client must form working alliance, which includes agreement on purpose, agreement on means, and bond of relationship. The techniques of elaboration might include vocational card sort, construct laddering, drawing, testing, and the exploration of stories or anecdotes. Chapter 3 covers the next episode, the composition of the client's life history. This includes assessment as well as active intervention on the part of the counsellor. A counsellor intervenes to correct distortion, improve coherence, enhance agency, consolidate identity, and to prepare the client for other episodes concerned with founding future narrative. Several interview techniques to empower clients' narration are described: Life Line, Life Chapters, Success Experiences, Family Constellation, Role Models, and Early Recollections (pp. …