Career Construction Theory and Life Writing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12648995 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hywel Dix (0000-0002-3584-5199, Bournemouth University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-7 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Life Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1448-4528 • E-ISSN: 1751-2964 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14484528.2020.1712853 |
| OpenAlex | W3003504138 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 5 |
In the introduction to a 2017 special issue (14.3) of this journal devoted to the 'limits' of life writing, David McCooey suggested that an increasing degree of theoretical investigation into the properties of the autobiographical genre over the past two decades resulted in the term autobiography gradually being superseded by the more flexible one, life writing.This process was characterised, he argued, by an expansion of the object of study, becoming less strongly focused on literary texts and genres and more critically interested in other forms of life writing more generally: testimony, autoethnography, the representation of the self in digital media including social media, and so on.In a sense, the current volume about Career Construction Theory and Life Writing can be seen as an extension of that process.Career construction theory emerged during the final decades of the twentieth century, which was a period when fundamental changes to people's patterns of work and life had caused large numbers of people to seek new forms of vocational guidance to equip them to negotiate those changes.Whereas previous forms of professional guidance had employed aptitude tests, statistical profiling and other forms of quantitative analysis, career construction takes a far more qualitative approach to employment counselling.By encouraging clients to see their careers as stories of which they are both the metaphorical authors and the main protagonists, career construction counsellors enable them to envisage the next chapter in those stories.Periods of troubling change or uncertainty, when people do not know what to do next in their lives, are thus treated as experiences akin to 'writer's block', experiences which can be overcome first by imagining new character arcs, then by narrating them and finally by performing them.Larry Cochran (1997) defines career construction theory as a narrative based practice
Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Degree (music · Epistemology · Life writing · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · History · Identity, Memory, and Therapy · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Representations and Identity
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |