Call for Manuscripts: Narrative career counselling: A tension between potential,popular appeal,and proof

Narrative career counselling has been widely adopted in career development in the more than two decades since Savickas (1993) exhorted the field to move from scores to stories in his seminal article “Career counseling in the postmodern era.” The pioneering works of Cochran (1997), Peavy (1997), and Amundson (1998) provided examples of “how to do” narrative career counselling and since then, much has been written on new and innovative approaches, resulting in Hartung’s (2013) claim that the field has taken a “narrative turn” (p. 30). Examples of interview processes and qualitative career assessment instruments provide practitioners with a broad range of options. By injecting “news of difference” (Bateson, 1979, p. 228) into career counselling, narrative approaches revitalised the field by placing emphasis on the client–counsellor relationship and the dialogue in which they engaged, privileging the voices of clients as well as their ability to construct their futures, and taking an “individual in context” (McMahon, Watson, & Patton, 2014, p. 30) perspective of clients. Moreover, narrative career counselling was widely hoped to offer solutions to concerns about the cultural relevance of practice and its capacity to cope with complexity. Narrative career counselling, however, is in its embryonic stages in practice and research (Di Fabio, 2016), particularly in research where both the process of narrative career counselling and its outcomes need to be better understood; there remains a need for the evidence base for narrative career counselling to be strengthened.

Almost 25 years since Savickas’ prophetic words, it is time to take stock of narrative career counselling. For example, despite its popular appeal, has narrative career counselling achieved the potential envisaged for it and has it built an evidence base that attests to its processes and outcomes? This special issue, Narrative Career Counselling: A tension between potential, popular appeal, and evidence, invites contributors to consider the status quo of narrative career counselling and its way forward. The special issue will conclude with a synthesis of views from the contributions that offers a future agenda for narrative career counselling.