Advocating Workers‐Within‐Environment: A Critical Perspective for Addressing Career Concerns

The author provides a critical analysis of career theory and practice before presenting a theory of counseling for career concerns. The critical analysis identifies 3 core critiques of current career counseling approaches. The advocating workers-within-environment theory is described as a humanistic social justice approach focusing on critical consciousness development. ********** Critical theory provides a framework for a reflective critique of societal and cultural phenomena with the expressed purpose "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them" (Horkheimer, 1982, p. 244). More specifically, postmodern critical theory embraces the instability of meaning and power ascribed to sociopolitical structures that enslave or oppress and proposes that such structures should be open to debate, reflection, or intellectual deconstruction. Postmodern critical theory is a politicized perspective that encourages criticism as a means of focusing on social problems and systems with the purpose of changing structures so that they become more humanizing and just. This article includes a postmodern critique of current career counseling practice in an effort to break the chains of conformity engendered by career counseling's history. Career concerns, presented in this article as work-related concerns manifested within counseling practice regardless of the counseling type or modality, have been considered relevant within the fields of counseling and psychology since the origins of these professions. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, described the goal of therapy as being to help the patient find meaning through both work and love (Erikson, 1963). Frank Parsons (1909) is often claimed to hold two titles: father of counseling and father of career counseling theory. The vestiges of these pioneers' work have remained salient throughout the 20th century as the fields of career counseling and vocational psychology have grown (Holland, 1997; Krumboltz, Mitchell, & Jones, 1976; Savickas, 2005; Super, 1957). Structurally, career counseling and vocational psychology have been both part of and separated from the broader professional counseling and psychology organizations in the decades since their genesis. This has resulted in the consistent, and oftentimes insular, development of career-specific theories, models, techniques, assessments, and resources in addition to the professional identity of the career counselor. Despite any perceived schism between counseling and career counseling work, the broader trends in the latter neatly mirror the former over time, including periods focused on measurement and diagnosis (e.g., Holland, 1997), social learning and cognitive approaches (e.g., social cognitive career theory [Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994]; cognitive information processing [Peterson, Sampson, Lenz, & Reardon, 2002]), and postmodernism (career construction theory [Savickas, 2005]; chaos theory of careers [Bright & Pryor, 2005]). Finally, recent theoretical work that focused on justice and egalitarianism (e.g., psychology of working [Blustein, 2013]) reflects initial efforts to critically explore career counseling approaches with the goal of making them more humane and humanizing. Despite recent efforts and similar developmental trajectories, career counseling has largely escaped the critical lens diligently applied to psychology (e.g., Prilleltensky, 1997) and multicultural counseling (e.g., Goodman & Gorski, 2015). There is a need for critical reflection of career counseling theory and practice. Critical consciousness concepts should be incorporated within the provision of counseling services for client career concerns. Freire (1970) defined critical consciousness (or conscientizacao) as "learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality" (p. 35). For the theory proposed later in this article, advocating workers-within-environment (AWE), critical consciousness is a core conceptual idea designed to illuminate systems of oppression perpetuated by the world of work. …