The Ongoing Social Construction of the Counseling for Work and Relationship Perspective

Putting Old Wine in New Bottles or Something New?

Can something be both old and new at the same time? I certainly hope so, because the counseling for work and relationship perspective is both deeply indebted to the work of others who have preceded me and, I believe, proposes some radically different directions for the future. Most notably, with respect to the past, this perspective is indebted to Donald Super, my teacher and mentor in the early stages of my professional trajectory. In his reaction, Lent (2012) states that he sees little difference between this perspective and the life-space, life-span theory of Super (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) and that he prefers Super’s version. In fact, in my article, I state that the holism of the counseling for work and relationship perspective “represents a contemporary social constructionist interpretation of Super’s (1980) life-span, life-space theory of career development.” So this is what is old.

The roots of the counseling for work and relationship perspective are even older than I thought when I wrote the words quoted above. Although Super (1980; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) wrote two versions of his life-space, life-span theory of career development, most scholars, myself included, tend to refer to the 1996 version, co-authored with Mark Savickas and his son, Charles Super, as the most recent and definitive expression of his theory. When, in the process of writing a review for The Counseling Psychologist, I went back to compare these two versions of Super’s theory, I realized, much to my surprise and chagrin, that Super had not only been totally holistic in 1980, defining career as life, and career development as life development, he had also predated the contemporary move to shift discourse from career to work by referring to the work we do for pay as work and not as career. By 1996 his discourse had shifted back to the use of career for work we do for pay with career development having to do with the developmental progression of this aspect of our lives. Career was no longer synonymous with life in this later version. Although it is most interesting to consider why Super changed his discourse between 1980 and 1996, the point here is that, early on, Super was fully holistic and had begun to talk about work instead of career when referring to the work we do for pay. Given its early roots and the fact that social constructionism is not new to vocational psychology, as Lent (2012) so rightly states, the question he raises is most cogent. What is really new here? In response, I elaborate on the influence of contextualism and the delineation of new categories of social contexts and a new language or discourse for these categories.

The Meaning of Care Work

I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to elaborate on what I mean by care work. First, in the spirit of the ongoing social construction of this perspective, I am grateful to a colleague in Australia who, following a presentation of some of these ideas, suggested to me that personal care work is not the best discourse or language to use for unpaid care work. It implies that care work is for one’s personal self when, in fact, unpaid care work is mostly about the care work we do for others in private domains of life. I agree with this critique and therefore have changed my discourse to refer to unpaid care work. Also, in order to more closely align myself with Tronto’s (1993, 2006, 2009) expanded definition of care work, I define care work here as work done to care for people (self and dependents), relationships, institutions/communities, and the physical world/environment.

Second, I briefly revisit the historical background that gave rise to work and family discourse. Prior to the industrial revolution, most social systems were characterized by a household economy in which men, women, and children worked together to earn a living (Boris & Lewis, 2006). The prototypical example of the household economy model was the family. With the industrial revolution, this social world was torn in two as earning a living required leaving the household to work for pay in the proliferating industries and occupations that characterized industrialized economies. At the same time, the tearing apart of the social world was gendered with the help of social theorists such as Parsons (Parsons, 1964; Parsons & Bales, 1955), who described the social world as two complementary domains of work and family, with work as the domain of men and family as the domain of women. In this process, unpaid care work disappeared as work. It was subsumed or buried in the family and in gender roles.

As women have increasingly participated in market work, our system for combining work and family has evolved over the past 80 years or so. It has moved from a male breadwinner/female caregiver model in which men were expected to specialize in market work and women to stay home caring for family to a dual breadwinner/female caregiver model in which both men and women were expected to do market work with women taking major responsibility for caregiving. The most recent permutation is a single adult worker model in which all men and women, who are able, are expected to participate in market work for most of their adult lives (Boris & Lewis, 2006; Lewis, 2001).

This radical restructuring of social life and the problems that ensued for both men and women in the struggle to do both breadwinning and caregiving enabled the emergence of a new understanding of the social world. This new understanding posits that economic production and social reproduction are two essential and complementary societal functions required for a successful and sustainable society. While I refer to this understanding in my article (Richardson, 2012), I don’t fully explain it.

Care work is located in the realm of social reproduction. Fisher and Tronto define care work most globally as:

a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life-sustaining web. (Tronto, 1993, p. 103)

More specifically, and in relation to economic production, people have to work to make money to pay for the goods and services they need: They also have to care for people (selves and dependents), relationships, institutions/communities, and the physical world/environment in order to be able to reproduce themselves and the social world that, in turn, enables them to participate effectively in the market economy. The significance of social reproduction for a functional society becomes apparent through the social changes that have occurred and that have made social reproduction problematic. It is not that anyone deliberately minimized or ignored care work. The point here is that the values of a capitalist economy emphasized economic production and failed to recognize the complementary need for social reproduction. As capitalist economies mature, the need for social reproduction becomes more apparent. As I mention in my article (Richardson, 2012), GNP is not the only or necessarily the best indicator of societal progress or of a good society. Blustein et al. (2012) make a similar point.

It is this understanding of the importance of social reproduction that leads to the broad definition of unpaid care work in the counseling for work and relationship perspective. Lent’s (2012) problems with putting “jogging, doing the laundry, and caring for my elderly mother” in the same category or context resides, I think, in the extent to which most of us in our market-driven economy fail to perceive, understand, and value the significance of social reproduction. In fact, “jogging, doing the laundry, and caring for my elderly mother” are all important aspects of social reproduction. Hopefully, the designation of unpaid care work as one of four major life contexts will contribute to raising consciousness about the significance of social reproduction for both men and women. It is also important to note that this definition of unpaid care work applies to all, not just to those who care for dependent others for a limited number of years. It provides the basis for a dual model of working (i.e., market work and unpaid care work) applicable to all across the life span (Richardson & Schaeffer, in press).

Left out of this discussion so far is the issue of paid care work (i.e., care work that is part of the market economy). One of the ways that our social system has adapted to the strains of accomplishing both economic production and social reproduction has been to increase the numbers of people who are paid to do care work. Indeed, the job of home health aide, usually referring to someone who is taking care of the sick or the elderly, is one of the fastest growing job categories in our economy. Although the commodification or marketization of care work (Razavi, 2007) is one way our social system has tried to adapt to the upending of our social lives, it produces other problems having to do with equity for those who do paid care work. It also has limits in a world with limited resources. Even more importantly, the value of caring is central to the vision of a moral social order addressed by Blustein et al. (2012) and is best supported by an acknowledgment that care work is a critical social function for all, not just for those who are paid to care.

Extending the Boundaries of the Counseling for Work and Relationship Perspective

I am indeed indebted to both Blustein et al. (2012) and Byars-Winston (2012) for shining the light of a critical psychology lens on the counseling for work and relationship perspective and, thereby, helping to push its boundaries to support a broader set of values regarding diversity and social justice. Byars-Winston’s explication of self-affirmation theory and its relevance for diverse groups in relation to each of the four major social contexts I identify is invaluable. It helps to clearly illustrate the ways in which this new lens for viewing the social world enables us to perceive and value the ways in which different life contexts offer opportunities for affirmation for diverse groups.

Even more importantly, Byars-Winston (2012) recommends a further decentering in inquiry and intervention practices from a focus on the normative or privileged to a focus on marginalized groups. Whereas the decentering that drives the counseling for work and relationship perspective is principally due to gender, Byars-Winston recommends the more variegated lens of diversity. In so doing, she has made a major contribution to extending the potential of the counseling for work and relationship perspective for producing knowledge and interventions practices that will be useful for those typically underrepresented in our work.

Finally, both Blustein et al. (2012) and Byars-Winston (2012) raise questions and push the boundaries regarding the need to critically examine the values that inform the counseling for work and relationship perspective. Blustein et al. specifically refers to the work of Prilleltensky (1997), who addresses the moral basis of psychological practices. While I am quite straightforward with some of my values, Blustein et al. and Byars-Winston challenge me to consider further the ways that other values may, at the same time, be limiting this perspective. In the process of contemplating their critique and challenge, three issues occur to me, each one framed by Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky’s (2003) conceptualization of three spheres of values of wellness and liberation—values having to do with the personal, the relational, and the collective.

With regard to the personal, the counseling for work and relationship perspective challenges vocational psychology to move beyond helping people adapt to prevailing market conditions and the traditional barometers of success and satisfaction to helping people co-construct psychologically healthy lives. While this fits neatly within contemporary discourse regarding positive psychology, it is also culturally located in the Western experience and the Western commitment to individualism. The poles of happiness and meaning that typically are ensconced in conceptions of psychological health are essentially individualistic values, as Christopher (1999) most cogently argued. These are not the values of all cultures and all diverse groups. It is most helpful then, following Christopher, to acknowledge the cultural embeddedness of this aspect of the counseling for work and relationship perspective in order to make room for other, culturally diverse, moral visions of developmental goals.

In the relational domain, in my effort to delineate four different social contexts through which people co-construct their lives and to highlight that, in the process of co-constructing lives, the relationships we pursue are just as important as the work that we do, it may be that the extent to which the boundaries between contexts of work and relationship are overlapping and interpenetrating and the extent to which work and relationship trajectories are interdependent have been minimized. The point I want to make is that what we do (market work and unpaid care work) and the people we “hang out” with (personal relationships and market work relationships) are both important contexts through which we co-construct our lives. I do not mean to imply that they are not closely connected, or as Lent (2012) puts it, “stripping work from its relational context is a little like expecting fish to swim in midair” (p. 274). I simply want to make it clear that, while we are always in a relationship of one kind or another, what we do and whom we do it with are conceptually separate ideas even though both reference highly interdependent contexts of development. It is precisely this interdependence of work and relationship that is a major contribution of the vocational relational theorists (Blustein, 2011; Schultheiss, 2003, 2007). My seeming neglect of this interdependence perhaps accounts for Blustein et al.’s designation of a “relationship and work” paradigm rather than a “work and relationship” paradigm. Certainly with respect to relational values, the significance of relationships is central to the counseling for work and relationship perspective.

Finally, Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky’s (2003) designation of the importance of collective values—that is, those values that bring us together as citizens in relation to needs for “economic security, shelter, and structural safety nets” (p. 274) and that interface with “values of social justice, equality, and emancipation” (p. 274)—suggests that special attention be focused on unpaid care work that has to do with institutions/community and the physical world/environment. This is work that essentially constitutes democratic and civic participation with others above and beyond personal and family relationships. It is this broader participation with others that provides the basis for communal action in support of social justice (Schaeffer, personal communication, August 2011).

Conclusion

To conclude, I reiterate my thanks to the editor, reviewers, and reactors to my article on the counseling for work and relationship perspective (Richardson, 2012). As is apparent in my rejoinder, this perspective is a work in progress: These individuals have contributed immeasurably to this progress.