JOURNAL OF VOCATIONAL BEHAVIOR

ARTICLE NO.

52, 275288 (1998)

VB971629

Emotion: An Absent Presence in Career Theory

Jennifer M. Kidd
Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College,
University of London, United Kingdom
This article couples a review of some of the recent UK literature on careers and career
interventions with arguments for greater attention to be given to the role of emotion in
career development. In the United Kingdom, changes in the employment context have led
career theory to become more concerned with understanding adult work-role transitions,
and somewhat less emphasis is now given to initial occupational entry. Accordingly, the
aims of career interventions have been extended to promote career management skills
as well as career decision-making skills. It is argued that ideas from the literature on
emotion can be employed to elaborate current notions of career management to take more
account of the feelings and emotions underlying career transitions. In particular, examining sequences of cognition, affect, and behavior seems to be a promising way forward
in further understanding changes to individuals psychological contracts with their employing organizations. The literature on emotion generally and on emotional labor also has
potential in understanding the dynamics of career counseling and in developing narrative
approaches to counseling. An examination of the provision of career interventions in
organizations shows how attending to the emotional dimensions of practice highlights
some of the challenging political issues inherent in this context. 1998 Academic Press

Until recently, theories of occupational choice and career development

were largely driven by the assumption of rationality in behavior at work.
However, in several areas of career theory it is possible to detect moves
toward an acknowledgment of the powerful role of emotional experience and
expression in career development. This article has two objectives. First, I will
attempt to outline recent themes within the UK literature on careers and
identify some of the main preoccupations of writers in the area. Not surprisingly, much of the British literature has been heavily influenced by North
American theory and research, but I will try to show how some of our
concerns are distinct. My second objective is to argue for a greater emphasis
on the role of emotions in career development and to show how the rapidly
developing literature on emotion at work can be applied to extend career
theory and also the theory informing career interventions.
The author thanks Dr. Rob Briner for his guidance on the literature on emotion at work and for
sharing his ideas on emotion. Correspondence and reprint requests should be sent to Jennifer M. Kidd,
Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street,
London, WC1E 7HX, UK. E-mail: j.kidd@org-psych.bbk.ac.uk.
275
0001-8791/98 $25.00
Copyright 1998 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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JENNIFER M. KIDD

Over the past few years, British writing on careers has been dominated by
analyses of the impact of the changing employment context on working life. In
many respects the UK experience is similar to changes taking place in many other
Western countries: globalization of business activity, technological innovation,
and the decline of manufacturing industries have led to changes in employment
patterns and higher levels of unemployment (Jackson et al., 1996; Killeen,
1996a). Other changes may be less widely experienced in other countries. In
many sectors in the United Kingdom the state is withdrawing its ownership
responsibility and services are being privatized (the rail network is an example),
and in others internal markets are being introduced (for example the National
Health Service). Pressures for cost reduction and the growth of external specialist
suppliers have led to the downsizing and delayering of organizational structures
and the outsourcing of certain functions. These changes have also increased
unemployment, increased employees feelings of uncertainty and career insecurity, and, arguably, are leading to a greater diversity of career patterns and
experiences (Jackson et al., 1996).
A further consequence of these contextual changes is that careers are becoming more difficult to describe, explain, and predict. The emphasis on initial
occupational choice in traditional career theories is now plainly inadequate, since
careers of the future will be characterized by sequences of decisions and workrole transitions throughout life. Furthermore, as Collin and Watts (1996) pointed
out, the development in Britain of competency-based qualifications should make
it much easier for individuals to move between occupations and develop work
and professional identities which bridge traditional occupational categories. In
the United Kingdom, we always had problems with the notion of occupational
choice (see, for example, debates between psychologists and sociologists in the
1970s and 1980s in Watts et al., 1981) but arguments about the existence of
choice have now been augmented by concerns about the focus on occupation as
the unit of analysis. Decisions about organizational choice, which skills to
develop, and how to balance work and other life roles will become increasingly
important in a context of greater employment mobility.
Largely in response to these contextual changes, recent UK literature emphasises the dynamic, interactive nature of organizational careers, and, somewhat
paradoxically, the importance of the individual actors perspective. Recognizing
subjective views of careers is, it is argued, the only way to find any coherence in
working lives as the bureaucratic career disappears and individuals should
therefore take more responsibility for managing their own careers (Collin &
Watts, 1996).
If individuals are to develop skills in career management, however, they need
to have access to career counseling and guidance throughout their lives. Watts
(1994) has argued for a three-pronged strategy so that guidance becomes an
integral part of all educational and employment provisions and so that all
individuals have continuous access to guidance from a neutral base. Some of the
most significant developments in this area have been within organizational career

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management provisions. Many large organizations have begun to respond to the

challenge of helping employees assume more control over their career development by expanding their career management activities and introducing new
initiatives (Kidd, 1996a).
Some of the main themes in the recent UK literature on careers, therefore, are
as follows. Career theory has become more contextualized, both inside and
outside organizations. This has led to a greater concern with understanding adult
work-related transitions and a move toward more interactive theories of career.
Individuals are seen as needing to become more self-reliant in managing their
own careers, and the ways organizations might help employees to do this are
much debated.
This article will discuss these issues in a little more depth and examine some
of the recent literature in each area. In addition, I will argue that underlying many
recent analyses of career development is an acknowledgment that affect, as well
as cognition, is an important determinant of behavior. However, the roles of
feelings and emotions such as anger, worry, enthusiasm, hurt, and so forth are
rarely elaborated in any detail in theories of career. This is also the case in
occupational and organizational psychology more generally. Many organizations
continue to be based on the bureaucratic form advanced by Weber (1947) and its
continuing emphasis on rational and impersonal processes has meant that emotional processes are neglected, if not purposely omitted. Significantly, perhaps,
Weber proposed the bureaucratic form as an alternative to the highly personalized nature of feudal and family-type organizations, where personal taste, nepotism, favouritism, and other emotional considerations were seen to create
dysfunctional organizations. Fineman (1993) spoke of individuals being portrayed as emotionally anorexic: they have attitudes, interests, and satisfactions, and may feel committed, alienated, or stressed, but these general states
hardly capture the range, richness, and intensity of emotional tones at work. In
what follows, I will draw upon ideas about emotion from both inside and outside
work psychology to suggest ways in which current notions of career development
and career management might be extended to embrace feelings.
CAREER TRANSITIONSINTEGRATING EMOTION AND COGNITION
As noted earlier, the changing employment context has led writers and
researchers to pay more attention to adult work-role transitions and less attention
to initial occupational entry. Indeed, Ballantine (1993) argued that because most
career decisions are concerned with individuals experience of the relationships
they have with their employing organizations, mid-career changes should be seen
as fundamental and the initial entry into work as the special case. Writers still
interested in the entry into employment, however, have, in various ways, commented upon how young peoples behavior contradicts some of the assumptions
of rational decision-making theories. Hodkinson & Sparkes (1993), for example,
in a study of young people about to leave school, showed how the career
decision-making process was at odds with the implicit assumptions about deci-

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JENNIFER M. KIDD

sion making built into the action-planning component of the career guidance they
received. Although the majority of the young people they interviewed described
rational reasons for their choices, they were rational in what the authors call a
restrictedly pragmatic way. The decisions were based on partial, localized
information, being rooted in what was familiar and known. Furthermore, the
decisions could only be understood in the context of the respondents family
background and culture. Preferences and choices were often based on opportunistic experiences and contacts and the timing of the decisions was sporadic, as
the young person reacted to opportunities encountered. Also, decisions appeared
to be only partially rational, since many respondents referred to feelings and
emotions in describing how their choices were made.
Moirs (1993) study was also concerned with reported reasons for choice. The
research question here was how do respondents attempt to produce coherent
and credible accounts of their occupational choices?, and analysis centered on
the conversational patterns used by young people in discussions about aspirations
and choices. Moir interpreted respondents claims about reasons for preferences
as attempts to meet the demands of the interviewer by presenting decision
making in a credible manner, rather than as evidence for underlying personality
types or career maturity. So-called rationality in decision making, therefore,
may be merely a product of the ability to define retrospectively a rational basis
for a decision, thus meeting cultural and contextual expectations of rational
behavior. This suggests the need for a greater understanding of clients expectations and social influence within the interview and of the processes by which
career discourses are learned (Grey, 1994).
Other British work has focused on graduates entering employment for the first
time. Studies by Arnold and Nicholson (1991) and Fournier and Payne (1994)
both examined self-concept change in the early months and years of employment.
Findings from both studies suggested that significant changes in self-concept
occurred but these varied considerably between individuals. Although most of
the work in this area in both Britain and North America takes a cognitive
approach to sense making and information seeking, earlier work by Arnold
(1985) took more account of newcomers affective reactions to their first job.
Extending some of Louis (1980) ideas, Arnold showed how graduates were
often pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of their co-workers and the informality of the workplace. They were rarely surprised by the nature of the work and
their own feelings and reactions, but the surprises they did experience about the
work itself tended to be unpleasant. Overall, the least pleasant surprise was the
chaotic and political way organizations handled communications and decision
making. In the context of the argument proposed here, one merit of this research
is its attention to both the cognitive and affective experience in the transition to
work and the interdependence of each experience on the other. It may be that one
way of elaborating and extending analyses of newcomers experiences is to use
appraisal theories of emotion (e.g., Lazarus, 1991) to examine in more detail how

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emotions are activated by the cognitive-evaluative processes engaged in by

newcomers to organizations.
One unfortunate consequence of the previous emphasis on initial career
decision making has been the lack of attention given to the outcomes of choice.
Traditional theories of career development viewed outcomes as unproblematic;
traitfactor theories, for example, saw the outcomes of sound decision making as
success, satisfaction, and adjustment at work. Much effort has been given to
measuring these general states, particularly job satisfaction, but as Fineman
(1993) argued, these global appraisals often obscure richness of feeling and are
more properly construed as attitudes about work, rather than experiences of
work. Another consequence of the focus on initial choice has been a preoccupation with models of career which view individual characteristics, attitudes, and
experiences as predictors and job and career attitudes and success as outcomes.
Shifting the focus to mid-career decisions leads to a need to examine sequences
of attitudes, feelings, and behaviors as experience in one work role affects the
way the next is prepared for and encountered. In this way, feelings of career
success and satisfaction come to be seen as the spur to action and predictors of
later behavior, as Dawis and Lofquist (1984) have suggested. It would also mean
that more account could be taken of other affect-laden experiences such as
postdecisional regret (Janis & Mann, 1977). Several writers have begun to
examine these sequences, and it is to these that we now turn.
In line with the move toward a more dynamic approach to careers, Nicholson
(1990) has proposed the transition cycle as a framework for analyzing
work-role transitions. The preparation stage describes the period before taking
on a new work role. Common problems at this stage are unrealistic expectations,
unreadiness, and fearfulness. At the next stage, encounter, the early days and
weeks in a new role are characterized by sense-making, and shock, rejection, and
regret are often experienced. Adjustment involves finding ones own way of
doing the job and the personal and the role development which takes place to
reduce personjob misfit. During the stabilization stage, both employee and
organization are more free to concentrate on performance and the preparation for
future change begins. Common problems here, though, are failure, boredom, and
stagnation. One important feature of the cycle is the interdependence of the
stages; another is the inclusion of emotional states and reactions in the model.
However, little attention is given to positive emotions and the impact of these on
future behavior.
It may be significant that one recent development in career theory which
has attracted considerable interest in the United Kingdom is the conceptualization of careers as sequences of renegotiations of the psychological
contract (Herriot, 1992). Perhaps the main strength of this model is the
interactive and dynamic framework it provides for explaining organizational
careers, but it also holds considerable promise for understanding how events
in the workplace set up causal chains of judgments, affect, and behavior
which affect career development.

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The term psychological contract was first introduced by Argyris (1960),

Levinson et al. (1962), and Schein (1978). Since then, precise definitions
have varied, but the concept is generally accepted as referring to perceptions
of and expectations about the reciprocal obligations held by the two parties
in the employment relationshipthe employee and the organization. At the
heart of Herriot and Pembertons (1996) model of psychological contracting
is the process of negotiation, whereby each partys wants are cognitively
matched with the others offers. Once the capacity of each party to match the
others wants has been established, each will have some understanding of the
nature of the contract. Perceptions of the contract from both sides will vary
in accuracy and the contracting process may be more or less explicit. Many
of the terms of the psychological contract will be established either implicitly
or explicitly at the stage of recruitment and selection, but expectations will
change as the employment relationship evolves and obligations may or may
not be formally renegotiated.
One important feature of Herriot and Pembertons model is the attention given
to the consequences of contract violation. These vary depending on whether the
contract is primarily relational, implying mutual commitment, or transactional,
involving purely instrumental exchange between the parties (e.g., pay for performance). Violation of relational contracts, they suggest, is more likely to lead
to feelings of anger, mistrust, and grief, and these feelings are likely to be
interpreted in such a way as to prompt a renegotiation of psychological contract
in purely transactional terms.
Because notions of change and transition are at the heart of current thinking
about careers, explanations of careers require explanations of the causes and
consequences of change. Ideas of careers as work-role transitions and as psychological contract negotiations are able to incorporate change better than earlier
career theories, and, arguably, they contain more scope for an analysis of the role
of emotion in careers. The precise role of affect needs further development,
however, and possible ways forward are suggested by two separate theoretical
perspectives developed in the United States by Morrison and Robinson (1997)
and Weiss and Cropanzano (1996). Both link affective states to specific precipitating work events and examine sequences of cognition, affect, and behavior.
Morrison and Robinsons work is directly concerned with psychological
contract violation. They make a distinction, however, between violation and
perceived breach of contract which is consistent with the literature which
views emotions as based on cognitive appraisals of specific events (e.g., Lazarus,
1991). Perceived breach refers to the cognition that the organization has failed to
honor its promises. This process does not require conscious awareness or deliberate reflection. The term violation, on the other hand, is reserved for the
emotional reaction to the perceived breach; this is typically a combination of
anger and disappointment. The meaning the employee attaches to the breach
determines whether a breach leads to violation, so the model incorporates an
interpretation process through which the employee attempts to make sense of the

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event that has taken place. The model is developed to account for why some
instances of contract breach lead to little sense of violation, while others lead to
extreme reactions of distress and anger.
The model proposed by Weiss and Cropanzano (1996) also views affect as a
central component of experience and behavior at work. Their affective events
theory characterizes emotions as discrete reactions to specific work events.
Following Frijda (1993) they speak of emotion episodes: the ebb and flow
of emotional experience over time. What is important here is the way in which
individual events of emotional significance lead to a series of subevents, which
take on an increased, and perhaps unwarranted, emotional significance. Being
turned down for a promised promotion, for example, leads to anger and resentment, which in turn lead to a deterioration in performance, which then produces
critical remarks from colleagues. By overreacting to these remarks, the employee
experiences feelings of guilt and isolation, organizational commitment decreases,
and she begins to look for a new job. Weiss and Cropanzano argue that it is
coherent episodes like these which should be the unit of analysis, rather than the
stable characteristics of people and situations.
As well as enhancing our understanding of voluntary transitions these ideas
would seem to have potential in interpreting other career phenomena, such as
reactions to redundancy and what has come to be called survivor syndrome
(Brockner, 1988): the shock, feelings of betrayal, and animosity toward management experienced by the survivors of downsizing programs which, coupled with fear and uncertainty about the future, result in decreased trust and
loyalty to the organization. They may also be of value in furthering a general
understanding of the greater individualization of biographies which has been
commented upon by several writers recently (see, for example, Roberts, 1997)
and in helping individuals make sense of their subjective career.
CAREER INTERVENTIONSEMOTIONAL
AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES
This section discusses some recent themes in the UK literature on career interventions. First, I will describe some of the work on the career counseling process.
This is followed by a summary of some of the recent literature on the objectives and
outcomes of career interventions and a discussion of some aspects of provision in one
particular sectorwork organizations. Throughout, I will try to show how further
progress in understanding and improving practice requires a greater understanding of
the role of emotion in career development and career interventions and, as a
consequence, an acknowledgment of the power relations operating within the context
of the intervention. I shall use the term career interventions to refer to the
collection of activities associated with careers work and reserve the term career
counselling for interventions at the individual level.
Process. Until recently, much of the UK literature on the career counseling
process has been purely prescriptive in that it has been concerned primarily with
offering guidelines for best practice. However, there have been several attempts

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over the past few years to understand the dynamics of career counseling in
greater depth. Clarke (1994), for example, showed how careers advisers use
information cues and heuristics to cope with time constraints in the interview,
and Wilden and La Gro (1998) examined how meanings are negotiated and
interpreted within the interview. Ideas about ways forward in relation to practice
have been influenced by American work on narrative approaches to career
counseling (e.g., Savickas, 1993). Collin and Watts (1996), for example, argued
for more attention to be given to constructivist approaches, where the key tasks
are to help people give meaning to their careers by identifying themes and
tensions, to help them construct a coherent story, and to learn the skills for future
career management. They suggest that emphasizing the individual actors construction of career has several advantages. It allows fragmented work-lives to be
conceptualized more coherently and it can accommodate discontinuities within
these work-lives as well as experiences outside formal employment, in the home
or community, for example. One danger with these approaches, though, is that
they could have the effect of further privatizing and depoliticizing careers and so
divert attention from analyses of structural constraints on choice and opportunity.
Significantly, perhaps, similar criticisms have been proposed of the prevailing
individualistic discourse of stress in organizations (e.g., Newton et al., 1995).
However, client-centered approaches to career counseling have always relied on
helping clients tell their stories, and narrative, constructivist perspectives do
not in themselves preclude a more radical approach which helps people see their
situation in political terms and work collectively toward social change. Much will
depend on the skill of the practitioner in challenging and interpreting clients
accounts, and on the sociopolitical model within which the practitioner is
working (Watts, 1996).
What distinguishes a more subjective approach to career counseling from more
traditional positivist techniques, of course, is the greater attention given to the
clients purposes and passions. Feelings and emotions will be central features of
any narrative in several senses. Emotions felt in the past will be described and to
some extent relived and changed in the telling, and the counseling intervention
itself, with its implicit feeling and display rules will determine and constrain
the emotions expressed in the session. The psychological literature on emotion,
particularly that which emphasizes its communicative function, has considerable
potential in further developing narrative approaches to career counseling, and,
indeed, counseling in general. Parkinsons (1995) approach to emotion, for
example, sees it essentially as an interpersonal phenomenon. He argues that the
way we describe and express emotions depends crucially on the interpersonal
context. His proposition about the role of audience attunement, for instance,
which suggests that the emotion communicated is often determined by the effects
the sender anticipates having on the receiver, seems particularly apposite to
understanding the dynamics of narrative within the counseling session, and,
perhaps, the transference process in psychotherapy.
Ideas from the literature on emotional labor could also be applied to career

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counseling. This term originates from Hochschilds study of the work of flight
attendants. She defined emotional labor as the management of feeling to create
a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a
wage and therefore has exchange value (Hochschild, 1983, p.7). As Briner
(1995) has argued, the idea of emotional labor raises important questions about
the regulation of the expression and experience of emotion at work. One key
ethical question, for example, is to what extent should we expect employees to
display or feel certain emotions in their day-to-day activities? Career counselors,
along with other workers in the helping professions, are paid for their skill in
emotion management, and these ideas raise a number of issues in relation to the
work of career practitioners specifically. What is the relationship between displayed and felt warmth, for example? And how do career counselors cope with
what must appear to be contradictory requirements for the experience and
expression of emotion within their role: empathizing with the helplessness
experienced by an unemployed client, for example, whilst at the same time
conveying a sense of hope for the future?
Objectives and outcomes. Not surprisingly, given its influence on practice,
developmentalism has also been the predominant paradigm in the evaluation of
the effectiveness of career interventions in the United Kingdom. As Kidd and
Killeens (1992) review of US and UK evaluation literature showed, the move
toward an educative, developmental approach to career interventions has meant
that learning outcomes (such as self-awareness and decision-making skills) have
largely displaced career outcomes (such as success and satisfaction) in the
evaluation of their effectiveness.
However, debates about the changing career context and the emergence of
more interactive models of career are leading to a further change in emphasis in
the aims of career interventions. This suggests that, as well as career decisionmaking skills, individuals need more proactive career management skills and the
emotional capacity to cope with insecurity and uncertainty. This leads to a
three-fold model of effective career development (Kidd, 1996b): incorporating
career decision making skills, career management skills, and what could be
called, after London (1993), career resilience (though the term is used more
broadly here). Career decision making involves the specific knowledge and skills
to relate self- and opportunity awareness. Career management is viewed as a
metaskill involving identity clarification, ongoing assessment of values and
goals, monitoring and exploring self and situation, and the interpersonal and
negotiating skills to manage organizational career systems. Career resilience is
seen as primarily attitudinal and emotional: concerned with tolerating uncertainty
and developing flexible aspirations as well as optimism, self-esteem and selfreliance.
Career interventions of the future will need to attend to all these dimensions of
career development. Some career decision making, for example have been
written about extensively in the United Kingdom (see Killeen, 1996b), and there
has been considerable interest recently in the thought processes underlying

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career learning. Law (1996a) has proposed a framework for career development which proceeds through four capacitiessensing, sifting, focusing, and
understandingand sets out clear implications of the model for career education
in schools. Arnold (1997a), meanwhile, drew on the adult cognitive development
literature to derive 19 propositions about effective thinking for career management in a turbulent world.
Much less attention has been given to the emotional aspects of effective career
development and the ways in which career practitioners might promote career
resilience, however. This is not to say that the likely emotional impact of the new
culture of the self-managed career has not been analyzed. As noted earlier,
writers on survivor syndrome (e.g., Brockner (1988) in the United States and
Doherty (1996) in the United Kingdom) have vividly described the insecurity and
guilt experienced by employees remaining in an organization after a period of
redundancies, and others have explored the ways in which the predicted changes
in the employment context are likely to create anxiety and frustration (e.g.,
Sonnenberg, 1997). But we know very little about what career resilience feels
like and how career interventions might help individuals develop it. Career
practitioners may need to consider to what extent early career education can
lessen the likelihood of the deep sense of loss experienced by those made
redundant or in what ways career interventions can (or should) encourage hope
in the future when we know that for many the future will become less secure.
Provision. I want to move on now to examine career interventions in work
organizations and explore how some of the problems in practice and provision in
that sector can be understood from a emotional and political perspective. As
noted earlier, organizations are increasingly beginning to pay more attention to
helping employees manage their own careers. What is often underestimated,
however, is the extent of cultural change that these kinds of career management
initiatives require (Hirsh et al., 1995; Kidd, 1996a). This may be particularly the
case in unitary organizations, where employees and management are assumed
to be cooperating harmoniously in the achievement of common purposes and
goals and any hint of dissent may be viewed as a source of trouble. An effective
strategy for developing a career management initiative will need to anticipate and
work with the emotionally loaded resistance within the organization stemming
from, for example, self-interest, lack of trust in the idea or the person proposing
it, fear of the unknown, anxiety about untried ideas, and resentment of the threat
to autonomy. In short, much resistance will be concerned with doubt about the
proposed developments and fear of their consequences (Law, 1996b).
The term organizational career interventions covers a wide range of initiatives. Arnold (1997b) made a useful distinction between interventions that are
closely connected with employees day-to-day work (such as developmental
appraisals and mentoring) and those that take place separately from the work
itself (for example, career planning workshops and individual career counseling).
Each type has its strengths and weaknesses. The more employee-centered interventions may be less effective in promoting development within the organization

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because of their marginal relationship to human resource systems and processes

(Iles & Mabey, 1993), and many of these, in their emphasis on the process of
decision making, pay scant attention to helping people implement decisions.
Those more firmly anchored into human resource systems, on the other hand,
may give employees insufficient opportunities to explore values and goals,
particularly when they diverge from opportunities offered by the organization.
Other problems may emerge too. How much, for example, will employees feel
able to disclose their concerns about their development, perceived weaknesses,
deeply held values, and so forth in a performance culture which emphasises
the need for regular appraisal and rigorous performance management. Development centers may be particularly problematic here. A recent study showed how
some organizations in the United Kingdom seem not to respect the confidentiality
of information produced by employees taking part in development centers
(Jackson & Yeates, 1993). To what extent can people be expected to confide in
their line manager when that manager also conducts their appraisals? And what
conflicts are produced when the organizations display rules change: when, as
a participant in a career planning workshop, an employee is expected to engage
in honest self-disclosure, and the following day, he is required to conceal his
feelings of boredom in a meeting and display the expected persona of an
energetic and enthusiastic marketing manager?
Many of the difficulties inherent in the provision of career interventions in
organizations arise because offering employees opportunities to disclose their
needs and identify their goals necessarily raises awareness of the differing and
conflicting values and interests of employees and management. Also, people are
more able to see what they have previously taken for granted when they are
shaken out of the frame (Fineman, 1995) as when career interventions are
introduced in a delayered and downsized organization to encourage employees to consider lateral moves or moves outside the organization. It is naive
and unrealistic to expect employees to clamor for opportunities to renegotiate
their psychological contract in regular discussions with line managers, or,
indeed, flock to career planning workshops, when power relations and feeling
rules within the organization serve only to preserve managerial control. As
Borrill and Kidd (1994) showed in a study of parents returning to work after the
birth of their first child, employees may be all too aware that making changed
needs and expectations explicit may be interpreted as reflecting lack of commitment and may be anxious that the position they have achieved may be undermined if they were unsuccessful in renegotiating responsibilities and expectations. Again, ideas from the literature on emotion at work, particularly that on
emotional labor, could be applied to inform understanding of these tensions and
dilemmas, particularly their political dimensions.
The criticism, expressed earlier, of narrative approaches to career counseling
could also be applied to organizational career interventions in that they could
have the effect of individualizing career experiences, particularly negative ones,
in a similar way that stress management interventions have been argued to do

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(Newton et al., 1995). An organizations collective problems with succession,

training, development, and so forth may come to be portrayed as individual
difficulties, and as long as shared experience is marginalized and denied, career
interventions will continue to reinforce the sociopolitical status quo.
CONCLUSION
I have attempted here to make a case for career theorists, researchers, and
practitioners to engage in their own emotional labor. This means attending to
and exploring new ways of understanding emotional experience, expression, and
communication in career development. The way forward, it seems, is to take a
more holistic and dynamic approach to the field. It appears to be unhelpful to
isolate the emotionalities of career from cognitions and behavior, since recent
work on emotion emphasizes the complex interplay between judgments, feelings,
and action. More powerful explanations for change and transition may be found
in sequences of events rather than in discrete, stable characteristics of individuals
and situations. Conceptual frameworks of emotion as interpersonal phenomena
are in line with this view in that they view emotion as a social process rather than
an individual attribute, and the idea of emotion having communicative purposes
has considerable potential in further understanding the dynamics of the career
counseling process.
It is also clear that attending to the emotional realities of the setting in which
career interventions take place brings the sociopolitical tensions and dilemmas
inherent within provision into sharp relief. If, as seems likely, people are to have
greater access to career counseling throughout their lives, it is crucial that they
trust the providers of these services to be an impartial source of support. Many
issues need to be resolved before this is the case with organizational career
interventions.
REFERENCES
Argyris, C. P. (1960). Understanding organizational behavior. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.
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