Week 6 Complexity

          

The Bloch (2005) article brought me back to what we started talking in the beginning of the course about.  Bloch (2005) starts out commenting on that career counselors have taken on the mission of helping people move from “stuck” to finding work that leads them to work that supplies them with meaning in life.  The course began with talking about finding meaning in the work that an individual does.  I want to talk a little about this topic and perhaps where our society has taken the meaning of different jobs.  I think that today’s society has taken the meaning out of some jobs for people that may have once found the job meaningful.  I say this because our society often looks down on some jobs and views them as menial and therefore discourages those job holders from feeling meaningful in their particular line of work.  I liked that Bloch (2005) mentioned that career counselors work with people at every stage of life.  This suggests that individuals are constantly developing their careers in every stage of their life starting very young until death.  I think that at a very young stage of life a child that has fantasies about what they will be when they grow up, even if influenced by parents or role models, is helping the child orient themselves towards their interests and different career options.

Bloch (2005) discusses autopiesis or self-regulation that people continuously reinvent their careers, moving freely among, within, and outside the roles previously identified.  When I was younger people used to tell me that people change their careers like 5 times throughout their life.  I used to think that this was crazy because there is not enough time to keep going back to school and picking totally different careers.  I think that Bloch (2005) has a point that people reinvent their careers and move around their roles that once defined their current position.  I think that many people find career fields that they like and do not always find the job that they want but with the hope of this they can hopefully find meaning in a career.  I found Bloch’s (2005) phase transitions between order and chaos important because I think that this relates to me because at this point in my life I was in a fixed state then thrown into change.  I think that it is interesting that careers are part of relational networks and the networks are in continual open exchange so career changes occur.  I think that most people continuously go through order and then chaos because there are many transitions in a person’s life.

Reference

Bloch, D. P. (2005). Complexity, Chaos, and Nonlinear Dynamics: A New Perspective on Career Development Theory. The Career Development Quarterly, 53(3), 194-207.