Individual differences and institutional constraints

Abstract

This article develops a multilevel examination of the structural changes in schooling and employment counselling that are necessitated by rapidly evolving conditions in the job markets of postindustrial as well as developing economies. International and national macro-structures appear increasingly fluid in the altered political and commercial environments of the 1990s. These alterations place wrenching constraints on national and regional institutions as well as the individuals who are seeking a job niche that is not only personally satisfying and rewarding but stable. Distinct regional and provincial structures need to be understood idiographically and modified as global changes amplify at all levels. At the school and jobseeking end of this continuum are the legions of confused individuals of widely varying aptitudes, competencies, and interests who avail themselves of govemment programs of an educational, counselling, and retraining character. Major developmental and career psychology issues that flow from these conditions and structural changes are addressed. Issues seen to be of major importance that will be examined are (among others): correspondence between the demand characteristics of schools and regional job markets; discrepancies between the givens of physical anthropology and institutional demands on both children and adults, poorness of fit between individuals and the institutions in which they work and are trained, and the threat of a cultural entropy that banalizes institutions and standardizes all dimensions of life. Human diversityMuch of the excitement and beauty of life springs from the diversity which we find in the world about us, a diversity that we prize as much in people as in the marketplace, in art as in nature. My concern, which I will attempt to persuade you to share, is that uniformity and entropy are in the ascendancy, and that those of us who serve as counsellors to adults as well as to youths are pressured to collaborate with the dominant institutions of our societies in assimilating them into an increasingly banal and standardized world culture and economic order. My gravest fears spring from the excessive institutionalization of our lives -and especially the lives of our children in a place called school.The ideas that I present are meant to continue a long-term and passionate debate. The argument that will unfold will focus on the peculiar order and