Our society has become characterized by individuals' struggle for personal meaning and by their feelings of increasing powerlessness. If those who have studied the world of work are to be believed, the sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness is probably most intense on the job. As Green (1968) has put it: "We have learned to view work as the way in which a man defines for himself who he is and what he shall do with his life. The difficulty is, however, that today men must do this increasingly in a society that lists among its primary purposes the efficient production of goods and services rather than the celebration of human dignity. They have to undertake their self definition in an environment that has purposes of its own and for that reason does not necessarily have room for individuals to express their own purposes".
Vocational psychologists have centered their theories of vocational decision making on the individual. They have assumed an open market, the dignity of all work, and, as Stubbins (1973) has put it, the person's "ability to operate free of environmental constraints... The vocational psychologist operates in a world that economics and political science have long since discarded a perspective that ignores the fact that the [person's] world has already taught him that socioeconomic status, racial origin, and power are more determinative than aptitude or interests". As leading advocates of populism and romantic individualism, vocational theorists have concentrated their attention almost exclusively on those characteristics of the individual that can be exploited in the individual's search for self realization. This perspective has blinded them to the realities of the social forces swirling through the society in general and the world of work in particular. Vocational theorists and counselors ignore the fact that, in the American work world, "What is wanted is not the person but the fulfillment of a function, not the human capacity for work but the human potential for labor" (Green 1968).
With their attention focused on improving the efficiency of input to the work force, counselors appear to those outside the profession as not only the major supporters of the status quo but also the key to the entire educational credentialing system, which depends for its effectiveness on the counselor's assigned functions of guiding, selecting, and sorting. "In short, the role of the guidance counselor is strategic because of its importance in reinforcing the tendency to couch the language of teaching, schools and schooling increasingly in terms of output and product... The fundamental work metaphor is strong: the school is a productive institution, its productive work is in the hands of teachers, its quality control in the hands of the guidance staff" (Green 1968).
Vocational theories are almost uniformly grounded on the proposition that jobs are intrinsically satisfying. The person need only find that job which offers an outlet for personal abilities, interests, values, and personality traits (Holland 1973; Super et al. 1957; Tiedeman and Schmidt 1970). That jobs within the American economy are designed to meet the needs of production and profit or bureaucratic relationships and not to meet the personal needs of the people who fill those jobs has not been included as a contingency factor in the theoretical structures. Little attention has been paid to the fact that over the past few decades the power of individual workers in their work situations and their control over their work activities have been significantly diminished, although these are critical factors in the worker's ability to express personal characteristics.
This reduction of human expression in work is not restricted to the poorly trained or poorly educated; Denitch (1974) has commented, in regard to college graduates: "Whole generations trained to think in terms of societal issues are offered roles as powerless, if well paid employees. Those with specific skills find their work compartmentalized and routinized. The shift in the authority of engineers and skilled scientists in industry also reduces them to a new highly trained working class". But nowhere in the vocational theories is there even an allusion to the steady reduction of power and control in jobs at all levels of the American economy. "What dominates our type of society is not the internal contradictions of the various social systems but the contradictions between the needs of these social systems and the needs of individuals. This can be interpreted in moral terms, which has aroused scant sociological interest because there is nothing more confused than the defense of individualism against the social machinery" (Touraine 1974).
Vocational theorists too have avoided the moral issues related to the individual's struggle with the social system of work. "There is considerable interest among the theorists in classifying, stratifying, compartmentalizing and, more recently, computerizing. While purporting to have as its major purpose the facilitation of a person's educational vocational planning, its effect is to stabilize the economic system by offering hope that there are reasonable logical paths through the maze of the occupational structure to the one best job that can make each individual happy and satisfied" (Warnath 1973). Ostensibly, vocational counseling is a humanistic enterprise. Its theories, however, are designed to explain principles concerning the process of occupational decision making and vocational adjustment to the end that the individual's behavior might be predicted and controlled (Super 1957). These goals are softened by the humanistic affirmation of human potentials, which the theories through their application by counselors will presumably assist individuals to discover and exploit. Counselors have defined themselves as humanists on the basis of their stated purpose of helping clients make maximum use of their potentials through a process in which the counselor expresses personal qualities of warmth, empathy, and authenticity.
But neither theorists nor counselors come to grips with conflict between the needs of the people who are the objects of their attention and the needs of the economic system which are the needs that determine the operations of the world of work. On the contrary, the romantic individualism inherent in both theory and practice leaves the individual isolated and exposed by its proposition that the person alone is responsible for his or her fate, that only an unwillingness to be sufficiently motivated or to discover and use some unique talent stands in the way of the individual's finding a self fulfilling work situation. Neither theorists nor counselors address themselves to the world of work as experienced by most workers or, for that matter, to the contradiction pointed out by Aronowitz (1974) between the rising level of education of larger numbers of workers and the increasingly restricted scope of their labor.
Both vocational theorists and counselors are engaged in a basically amoral activity, operating on the premise that the working world is just and is guided by rational principles in regard to those employed in work despite the fact that the system within which those workers are engaged responds to factors quite unrelated to the welfare of the individual worker and can fulfill the needs of individuals only insofar as those needs support the needs of the organization.
