Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world: creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling. Issue 5 (19th October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Reid, Hazel; West, Linden
• Is Part Of: British journal of guidance & counselling. Volume 44:Issue 5(2016)
• Page Start: 562
• Page End: 575
• Publication Date: 2016-10-19
• Subjects: Career development -- auto/biographical -- narrative career counselling -- creativity -- reflexivity -- psychosocial; Educational counseling -- Great Britain -- Periodicals; Vocational guidance -- Great Britain -- Periodicals; 371.4
• DOI: 10.1080/03069885.2016.1145014
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0306-9885

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the constraints to innovative, creative and reflexive careers counselling in an uncertain neo-liberal world. We draw on previously reported research into practitioners' use of a narrative model for career counselling interviews in England and a Europe-wide auto/biographical narrative study of non-traditional learners in universities. The latter draws on a number of narrative interviews with an asylum seeker, to debate whether such a way of working with people, 'in a clinical style', offers contextualised insight into people's struggles to construct a career and a methodology for doing so. The paper also examines the difficulties of creating a 'good enough' professional, psychosocial space for experimentation with creative approaches in a marketised guidance world, where more is expected from less.