Counselling individuals and society models: Contexts, goals and guidance practices

Guidance counselling practices develop against specific economic, social and technical backgrounds. They are also encompassed by certain ideological frameworks. These same practices also have complex relations with the problematics of human sciences. Current research in these fields proffers a far more complicated portrait of subjects, occupations and their relations than that previously envisaged. The subject is seen as a multivocal social actor who can find in the occupational field social forms of identification and as an individual, the organisation of who's mind is - at least in part - the product of internalisation of various social relations structures. The concept of a dialectic relation between occupational identity, occupational interactions and work system implies a need for considerable caution when using guidance software programs or questionnaires about interests, values or types. However, counselling processes appear to be influenced above all by implied or explicit social, political and ethical goals. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.