A Person‐Centered Perspective to Welfare‐to‐Work Services: In Pursuit of the Elusive and the Unattainable

Because of changes in legislation regarding the U.S. welfare system, there is an urgency now that has never before existed, except perhaps during the Great Depression, for career counselors to advocate for those of their clients who are on welfare and for their minor dependents. E. B. Lent (2001) has revitalized the debate over the role Rogers's person‐centered perspective should play in career development with welfare‐to‐work (WTW) clients. The usefulness of such an approach with today's clients was explored within the context of inherent limitations of Rogers's person‐centered perspective. Potential ethical conflicts for career counselors working with WTW clients were identified.     

Negotiating the Boundaries of Voluntarism: Values in the Indian NGO Sector

Values are an essential part of the identity of non-government organizations (NGOs), distinguishing them from other sectors and contributing to their legitimacy. Values are neither uncontested nor wholly self-determined, but rather are products of the broader social and political environment. The meaning of values must be negotiated with multiple actors, such as funding agencies, the state, and the general public including their “clients.” This paper looks at the ways that the meaning of a particular NGO value—voluntarism—is negotiated and contested in India. I argue that conceptualizations of voluntarism are neither singular, nor static, and that NGOs draw on these to claim legitimacy, or contest them through counter-narratives. These struggles over the meaning of voluntarism are in themselves productive, shaping organizational identity, and functioning. Values can thereby be a useful analytical tool to understanding NGOs.     

Developmental Transitions of Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual-Affirmative,Heterosexual Career Counselors

This article proposes parallels between gay, lesbian, and bisexual identity development and the professional development of gay/lesbian/bisexual-affirmative, heterosexual career counselors. This perspective gives a developmental framework for understanding the changing feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and actions that accompany the professional, personal, and political growth of heterosexual career counselors who are seeking to become affirmative to career and life planning issues associated with sexual orientation.     

‘Coming Out Tales’: Adult Sons and Daughters' Feelings About Their Gay Father's Sexual Identity

Coming out to their children is a dilemma that concerns many gay, bisexual, and lesbian parents with children from previous heterosexual relationships. How children found out about having a father who identified himself as gay, and their feelings about their father's sexual identity, were explored through qualitative analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 36 sons and daughters (aged 19 to 36 years) whose gay fathers participated in the Gay & Bisexual Parenting Survey (Barrett and Tasker, 2001). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis revealed that awareness of their father's sexual identity was often left unspoken for various reasons, and that acceptance came about through gradual understanding as well as direct discussion. Interview data indicated the complexity of the relationship between the young adult's personal acceptance of their father's gay identity and their consideration of social context when deciding how open to be to others about their father's sexual identity. This research has varied implications for therapeutic work with gay and bisexual fathers coming out to their children from previous heterosexual relationships.     

Helpers “Here on the Front Lines”: Welfare‐to‐Work Managers' Moral Identity Work

Using data drawn from telephone interviews with Ohio Works First program managers (N = 69), we examine managers' moral identity work. This work included using militarized rhetoric to evoke moral identities as honorable workers. It also involved signifying helper/helpful moral identities by defining what it means to be helpful, legitimating their helper identity through connections to caseworkers, and affirming their identity through telling success stories. Additionally, managers implicitly othered clients they viewed as needy and politicians they considered to be out‐of‐touch. Our research contributes to the literature on welfare‐to‐work, but also more broadly to our understanding of moral identity work and implicit othering.     

Advertising morality: maintaining moral worth in a stigmatized profession

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands.     

Appraising Cultural Identity in Career-Development Assessment and Counseling

Career-Development Assessment and Counseling (C-DAC) systematically bridges career theory and practice. Integrating differential, developmental, and phenomenological methods, the C-DAC model uses a comprehensive career assessment battery to help clients explore their roles, developmental stages and tasks, career attitudes and knowledge, values, and interests within their unique life contexts. The authors recommend elaborating the C-DAC model to formally appraise cultural identity in step one of the model and to consider cultural identity concerns throughout the C-DAC process. This should help counselors more clearly understand how cultural factors influence people's career development and vocational behavior.     

Saint Paul and Divorce

Many divorced Christians believe that in divorce they have betrayed their Christian faith. Counselors and ministers can help divorced Christians to understand that (a) not all human troubles are the consequence of moral failure, (b) the apostle Paul's strict teachings on divorce can be evaluated in light of his other teachings, (c) Paul's strict view of divorce had the surprising consequence of advancing women's rights, and (d) Paul and the Church have themselves not been able to escape contributing to dissension and estrangement. The purpose of this paper is to encourage divorce counselors to help their disturbed Christian clients to appreciate Saint Paul's doctrine of divorce in historical perspective.     

Moral Identity in Friendships between Gay,Lesbian, and Bisexual Students and Straight Students in College

People construct moral identities for being a supportive affiliate of stigmatized groups. To extend past research that focused on such identities within formal organizations, this study seeks to identify the process of moral identity construction in a personal setting—friendships between gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) people and straight people. Analyzing data from in‐depth interviews with college students, we show that straight students claim moral worth by emphasizing their deliberate decisions to develop and sustain friendships with GLB people and by highlighting how the friendships led them to personal enlightenment and political engagement. GLB students, as a stigmatized group, also claim moral worth by emphasizing their ability to transcend the community boundary and to be accepted in the larger society. Students make such claims as they strategically link these aspects of cross‐orientation friendships to existing moral discourses in the larger society and draw on resources available in the organizational and life course contexts.     

Career Counseling in the Future: Constructing,Collaborating, Advocating

Helping individuals adapt to changing environments is a major strength of career development practice. Additional strengths are a solid theoretical framework, effective assessment tools and technology, and a clear professional identity. Areas of weakness include the lack of integration of contextual factors into career intervention strategies, poor communication between practitioners and researchers, insufficient attention to underserved populations, and inadequate training in counselor education programs. Changes in the economy and in social structures require that people possess adaptive skills; therefore, career counselors should expand their efforts to help clients construct their lives, collaborate with other professionals, and advocate for clients.     

Counselors' Perspectives on Using the Career Style Interview With Clients

The authors investigated counselors' perspectives on using the Career Style Interview (CSI) with clients who had career concerns. Participants were a purposive sample of 34 counselors who had been trained in and who had used the CSI with clients. The findings indicated that the counselors viewed the CSI as a helpful and positive career counseling intervention. It was most effective at identifying clients' life themes and assisted them with making meaningful career decisions. Implications of these findings for career counseling practice and research are also discussed.     

“Basically,I look at it like combat”: Reflections on moral injury by parents involved with child protection services

This study considers any “moral injury” occurring among parents involved with the Child Protection System (CPS). Moral injury refers to the lasting psychological, spiritual and social harm caused by one's own or another's actions in a high stakes situation that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. The existing literature focuses on military contexts, but moral injury also may play a role in increasing the vulnerability of CPS clients who are threatened with loss of their parental rights and dissolution of their families. We administered a modified version of the Moral Injury Events Scale (MIES) (Nash et al., 2013) to 10 CPS involved parents. We then conducted in-depth, semi-structured, audio recorded individual interviews with parents to elaborate their responses to the MIES. Parents' MIES scores and interview elaborations suggest that some CPS-involved parents do experience moral injury. Moral injury was reported as a result of their own parenting behaviors, but also as a result of parents' involvement with professionals and within social systems that are charged with providing assistance to struggling families. For instance, some parents perceived professionals to be shaming, social services to be harmful and legal proceedings stigmatizing. Parents' reported reactions to morally injurious events included lasting feelings of guilt, shame and anger; and loss of trust in professionals. These responses impeded their perceived abilities to fully engage in services. If involvement in CPS places parents at increased risk of moral injury, then moral injury is a critically important construct for child welfare policy makers and workers to understand and address in the conduct of effective, ethical child welfare practice.     

Career Counseling Is Personal Counseling

Despite many changes that have occurred in the field of career counseling, counselors continue to rely on models of counseling that emphasize the rational, informational aspects of career decision making. The author argues that career counselors need to pay more attention to the affective, psychological issues confronting clients with career problems. The impact of significant psychological variables that influence career decision making are discussed: developmental stages and tasks, identity formation and status, self-concept, psychological needs, and internal barriers.     

Educate or serve: the paradox of “professional service” and the image of the west in legitimacy battles of post-socialist advertising

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital.     

Hidden Eating Disorders: Attachment and Affect Regulation in the Therapeutic Relationship

From the time I began working at a clinic that specialized in therapy with individuals with eating disorders, I have repeatedly encountered cases of clients hiding these symptoms from their therapists. When they finally do reveal the disorder, their therapists often worry that their clients are more disturbed than they thought and that, they, the therapists, did something wrong in the therapy. Although some therapeutic rupture can be part of the picture, I have found that these disclosures often reflect a client’s growing trust in the therapist’s presence and ability to help with feelings that have been, until now, dealt with through the eating behaviors themselves. In my attempts to understand what happens before and after an individual shares a hidden eating disorder with a therapist, I have found ideas from attachment theory, in particular those that explore links between attachment, affect regulation, and self-reflection, to be very helpful. Many authors have noted that eating disorders are related to problems with attachment, loss and separation, and affect regulation. Difficulties in these areas make it hard for clients to be self-reflective or use insight productively. In this article, I discuss my experience with the integration of these dynamics, which I have found to be key to successful psychotherapy with clients who hide their eating disorders.

D’Augelli’s Model of LGB Identity Development: A Critical Analysis

The authors critically analyzed D’Augelli’s model of LGB identity development, a common identity development model used in counselor and higher education as well as multicultural training, using a postmodern lens. An anecdotal review will be supported by empirical evidence to identify controversies encompassing D’Augelli’s theory. Additionally, this evaluation offers an interpretation of studies surrounding D’Augelli’s model in hopes of uncovering strengths and challenges to this identity development model. Findings of this critical analysis indicate that D’Augelli’s model can be a useful tool for counselors and counselor educators in their practice and teaching as long as clients are provided space for a more fluid, nonlinear identity development process.     

“Basically it's the Usual Whole Teen Girl Thing”: Stage‐of‐Life Categories on a Children and Young People's Helpline

This article explores the practices of membership categorization in the interactions of clients and counselors on a national Australian helpline (Kids Helpline [KHL]) for children and young persons. Our focus is on membership categories drawn from three membership category devices (MCDs): stage‐of‐life (SOL), age, and family. Analysis draws on data across different contact modalities—email and web‐counseling sessions—to examine how category‐generated features are relevantly occasioned, attended to, and managed by the parties in the course of interaction. This shows clients' use of MCDs in presenting their trouble and building a relevant case for their grievance. By examining counselors' subsequent receipts of the clients' complaints, we are able to trace some of the cultural knowledge that the clients' categorizations make relevant to the counselors. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates how the inherent flexibility of MCDs allows counselors to exploit these same categorial resources and to re‐specify the clients' trouble in a more positive fashion to accomplish counseling work. In explicating how taken‐for‐granted notions of the lifespan as well as of family relations are mobilized by participants in KHL's sessions, the findings contribute to previous studies of social interaction in counseling, and to research on social identity and categorization more broadly.     

The Meaning of Work and Love: Career Issues and Interventions

Examining concepts about work and love can help people increase their career success and life satisfaction. Career counselors may initiate this examination by eliciting clients' concepts about work and love. After hearing a client's ideas about work and love, counselors can compare this personal meaning to the social meaning of work and love. When this comparison reveals dysfunctional beliefs about work and love, counselors can link these beliefs to their client's career concerns. Such a linkage typically provokes a cognitive dissonance that motivates clients to modify their beliefs. Counselors can facilitate meaning modification by using client-centered and social influence techniques.     

What are Homes Made of? Building Materials,DIY and the Homeyness of Homes

This article considers the meanings that are attached to, and outcomes produced by, the things that houses are built from. It reflects on the meanings attached to the “robustness” of building materials for people who carry out DIY (Do-It-Yourself) projects. DIY is important to some people as a way to build relationships and perform a culturally valued identity. For interviewees in New Zealand, working on their own homes was an important aspect of their lives, and more malleable building materials allowed such work and had positive connotations and produced feelings of homeyness in contrast to more robust “permanent” materials. The article thus raises questions about how the built material of home relates to our feelings about it as well as highlighting the diverse practices and relationships that—literally—construct homes.