Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach

Canadian Psychology, May 2001 by Anne Marshall

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 a narrative approach to career counselling. The author specifically makes the distinction that this is a counselling approach, not a 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 a 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 a 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 a beginning, a middle, and an end into a whole. Career counselling is concerned with narratives that empasize the future. The individual must identify with the narrative envisioned. In adopting a career narrative, a person tries to match an ideal vision with the possibilities offered by available options. This is a 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 a 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 a 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 "episodes" (rather than steps): Elaborating a Career Problem, Composing a Life History, Founding a Future Narrative, Constructing Reality, Changing a Life Structure, Enacting a Role, and Crystallizing a Decision. These episodes are intended to enhance deciding and acting, practical wisdom, and a sense of agency. They are not meant to be followed in a rigid fashion: different clients require different episodes, or a different coordination and ordering of the episodes. Also, the arrangement of episodes might change as the course of counselling evolves.

Elaborating a career problem (Chapter 2) is a critical first step. A problem is a gap between a client's actual state of affairs and his or her desired state. Counsellor and client must form a working alliance, which includes agreement on a purpose, agreement on means, and a bond of relationship. The techniques of elaboration might include a 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 a 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. 73-78).

Founding a future narrative is the episode presented in Chapter 4. Cochran asserts that a career decision is not really about desires, strengths, and values in themselves, but rather about an evaluation of these. This evaluation is what Taylor (1985) terms second order evaluation, and requires the development of perspective. Client and counsellor focus on the differentiation and evaluation of rival narratives. The client's "old story" becomes background, and is refrained as a new story. This new narrative then structures the client's world in which career decisions, adjustments, and solutions take place. A collaborative two-part procedure is described, involving a written report and a narrative of the report. The author also addresses a number of interpretive difficulties (e.g., vagueness and conflicting scripts) that can impede the construction of an effective future narrative.

In Chapter 5, three major episodes of action are described: Reality Construction, Changing a Life Structure, and Enacting a Role. These three episodes are interdependent, and prepare a client for making a career decision. The client continually cycles through action mini-sequences and setbacks on the way. The final episode is Crystallizing a Decision, a stabilization of a more ideal career narrative. Counsellors can facilitate Crystallization by helping clients to identify barriers, actualize their stories, and reflect on their decisions.