A Comment on “The Strategy of Occupational Choice: Recruitment to Dentistry”

In their article in Social Forces,Sherlock and Cohen review two approaches to occupational choice. They call these adventitious patterns and putrposive patterns. They adopt the second pattern. My wvork was cited in connection with the first.2 Briefly, the authors describe the adventitious pattern as emphasizing the "nonrational spontaneous" factors where "situational pressures" predominate. The purposive pattern, on the one hand, is seen as a "compromise between an individual's desires and the occupational opportunities available to him"; here a degree of deliberate calculation predominates as the individual weighs his own desires against the available opportunities. It seems to me that the two approaches are not poles apart in their conceptual focus. They both seem to center on a "situational" approach. But methodologically they do differ; this has produced confusion. On the conceptual side, the term "adventitious" does not do justice to what is essentially a field-theory approaclh. The fundamental question in this perspective to occupational choice is: what social forces actually impinge on the individual as he makes his decisions? The answer is that his "occupational" choice may be made up of a variety of particular adaptations to his social circumstances which, cumulatively, result in his entering an occupaion. Some of these adaptations may be explicit long-term occupational calculations. Others may be largely unrelated to the "occupation" itself but, nonetheless, influence entry into a particular occupation. The authors themselves cite Caplow's statement that ". . . The bases for decisions are often trivial.... A high school sophomore transfers from the academic sequence to the clerical course to be with her best friend . . ." (p. 303) Here the girl may have made a decision that will greatly affect her occupational future, but she did this without considering occupational goals. The authors claim that in the adventitious perspective "rational considerations play a minor or absent role." I dispute this. To be sure the adaptations may not be rationally geared to occupational choice but may, instead, be addressed to other problems that seem to be more pressing at the time. This may be irrational, or nonrational, as far as occupational choice is concerned, but entirely rational as far as coping with immediate circumstances. The nub of the adventitious formulation is that immediate situational adaptations can constitute the pathway of entry into a particular occupation. One emergent fact is that there seem to be pathways to occupations that include no deliberate subjective commitment to these occupations. If one wants to discover the real, de facto, subjective commitment involved in such modes of entry into an occupation one needs a thorough understanding of the pathways that lead to entry. This raises methodological problems. Sherlock and Cohen analyze their own data in terms of situational forces that impinge on the individual who makes decisions. Such items as father's status, income, situs and the perceptions about access to the occupation are taken as ingredients that influence the individual's choices. On methodological grounds such items as so1 Basil Sherlock and Alan Cohen, "The Strategy of Occupational Choice: Recruitment to Dentistry," Social Forces, 44 (March 1966), pp. 303-313. 2 Fred E. Katz and Harry W. Martin, "Career Choice Processes," Social Forces, 41 (December 1962), pp. 149-154.