Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education [1st ed.] 9783030600457, 9783030600464

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Sustainable Development Goals Series Quality Education

Laura Nota Salvatore Soresi Ilaria Di Maggio Sara Santilli Maria Cristina Ginevra

Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education

Sustainable Development Goals Series

World leaders adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Providing in-depth knowledge, this series fosters comprehensive research on these global targets to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change. The sustainability of our planet is currently a major concern for the global community and has been a central theme for a number of major global initiatives in recent years. Perceiving a dire need for concrete benchmarks toward sustainable development, the United Nations and world leaders formulated the targets that make up the seventeen goals. The SDGs call for action by all countries to promote prosperity while protecting Earth and its life support systems. This series on the Sustainable Development Goals aims to provide a comprehensive platform for scientific, teaching and research communities working on various global issues in the field of geography, earth sciences, environmental science, social sciences, engineering, policy, planning, and human geosciences in order to contribute knowledge towards achieving the current 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This Series is organized into eighteen subseries: one based around each of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, and an eighteenth subseries, “Connecting the Goals,” which serves as a home for volumes addressing multiple goals or studying the SDGs as a whole. Each subseries is guided by an expert Subseries Advisor. Contributions are welcome from scientists, policy makers and researchers working in fields related to any of the SDGs. If you are interested in contributing to the series, please contact the Publisher: Zachary Romano [[email protected]].

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15486

Laura Nota Salvatore Soresi Ilaria Di Maggio Sara Santilli Maria Cristina Ginevra •

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Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education

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Laura Nota Larios Laboratory University of Padua Padova, Italy

Salvatore Soresi Larios Laboratory University of Padua Padova, Italy

Ilaria Di Maggio Larios Laboratory University of Padua Padova, Italy

Sara Santilli Larios Laboratory University of Padua Padova, Italy

Maria Cristina Ginevra Larios Laboratory University of Padua Padova, Italy

ISSN 2523-3084 ISSN 2523-3092 (electronic) Sustainable Development Goals Series ISBN 978-3-030-60045-7 ISBN 978-3-030-60046-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction

Nowadays, we have to deal with the future, the time that has yet to come, as the French say, happen and occur, for ourselves and our sons and daughters, for the people we care about, even if it is very difficult to predict it and describe it with enough precision. The future, as we know, also concerns the working activities that young people and the new generations will be involved in. These people are already considering what is going to happen to the world of work, their dreams, their wishes, and they are looking for new meanings and interpretations. All these aspects cannot be ignored by people in the field of career counselling and vocational designing. For quite some time, it has been become clear that, even in these fields, it is not possible to avoid admitting that we are living in very different times with respect to the ‘80s and ‘90s, characterized by high growth rates, wide professional opportunities and a standard employment model with permanent fulltime contracts of indefinite duration, until retirement. Today, unlike the past, the combinations that used to define the topic of choice and professional inclusion, such as qualification and job, choice and decision, personal profile and placement, supply and demand, age and professional stability and so on, seem to not be effective anymore, giving room to other definitely more worrying combinations, such as uncertainty and insecurity, flexibility and precariousness, market and competition and so on. Today, people in the field of career counselling and vocational designing have to take into consideration that dealing with the future is the management of the paradoxical requests, despite everything above mentioned, to become more competitive, more resilient, to ‘constantly’ be ready and adequate for unexpected opportunities, to be self-employed even without an actual capital to put into play. It implies also help to reflect on the ways to face some global threats such as increasing inequalities, wealth and job polarization, increasing migration rates, the destruction of natural resources, the impact of technology on the world of work and quality of life, and the presence of more and more precarious and less and less stable working conditions. Despite the different nature of these threats, they all seem to be connected. Together they create a growing global crisis, so that many international institutions such as the United Nations are preparing to face this crisis by defining plans of action. The most recent one, ‘Transforming our World, The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, was adopted in 2015 by the UN General Assembly. This Agenda defines 5 critical areas for the future of mankind and of the planet, 17 sustainable development goals and v

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169 targets. The risk is that, if this UN Agenda remains unheeded, people planning their personal and career life may ignore both the consequences of the growing global crises for themselves and their communities, and also the main lines of action defined in this Agenda (Guichard, 2018). Educational and career choices, in particular, not only represent an important psychological function in the lives of the individuals, as they can contribute to the satisfaction of personal needs and bring to self-fulfillment, but can also acquire an important social dimension—functioning as a bridge between the individual and the social context, from ‘I’ to ‘us’ to the ‘Earth’, aiming at the realization of more inclusive and sustainable life conditions and contexts (Međugorac, Šverko & Babarović, 2019). It seems clear that career counselling and vocational designing, in these times of change and transition, cannot rely on matching theories, on the rudimentary models based on the comparison and classification of people, of coupling personal and professional contexts’ characteristics, because these approaches are superficial, not to say ordinary and harmful. Career counselling and vocational designing have to go beyond, leaving the past behind, focusing on new trajectories in order to manage the challenges that we are facing, working to promote the growth of the individuals and social development, ‘moving’ from a mainly individualistic view of growth and of people’s realization, to a more markedly contextualistic view, focused on a representation of the future that involves a high attention focused on the ‘social’, on the common good and on sustainable development. In order to do this, according to us, career counselling and vocational designing have to understand that they are ‘children of the time’ in which they operate, they have to become able to analyse contexts and realities at different levels, to be more conscious and to detect the modalities that can better help people to face the times they live in. We know that the context is a collection of circumstances that characterize living environments and people’s functioning that relationships are intertwined and depending on other relations among macro-, meso- and microsystems. The macrosystem regards the social and cultural conditions, politics, socio-economic conditions and the way to conceptualize vulnerabilities. The mesosystem regards the areas of life, cities, towns, communities and organizations where there are professional and educational lives and the support of the services. The microsystem regards the individual and his/her family (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). It seems clear that, when analysing the situation of an individual, it is necessary to avoid simplifications and banalizations. On the contrary, it is important to take into consideration the highest number of aspects possible and the fact that there can be opposite requests coming simultaneously from different individuals and contexts, as the idea that the entanglements we are talking about tend, even unpredictably, to change in faster and closer times. It will soon appear clear that career counselling and vocational designing should be a more and more important part of the disciplines that practice and underline the so-called ‘alethic right’. The term ‘alethic’ comes from the Greek and it means ‘truth’: ‘Aletheia’ is a concept that in its semantic deepness concerns the intention to ‘reveal’ in order to touch the ‘reality’ and encourage a form of knowledge ‘made out of facts’, able to highlight ‘the

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way in which things are’. This is about building a ‘strong’ truth in order to create a society in which the truth does not have to suffer the dictatorship of the individual subjectivity, that is to say, to be individualistically and subjectively intended and understood (Milanesi, 2020). Thus, with this volume, we wanted to follow a path that could help us to understand that career counselling and vocational designing have been, as a matter of fact, a result and an expression of the time, as a response to specific needs of professional and social contexts, with the purpose to encourage a reflection on the role that today they can have, in light of the socio-economic conditions that characterize us. More specifically, this volume will contribute to an in-depth understanding of the relationship between inclusion, sustainability, social justice, career counselling and career guidance, with particular attention to Sustainable Development Goal 4 ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’, Sustainable Development Goal 8 ‘promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all’ and Sustainable Development Goal 12 ‘ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’. The Chap. 1 analyses two main historical periods: the first goes from the beginning of 1900 until World War II and the second is called the ‘Glorious Thirty’ or Keynesian period which goes from the end of World War II until the ‘70s, characterized by the birth of career counselling and vocational designing. In the first, career counselling is both a field of research and psychosocial intervention, in the second it expands and strengthens, in particular in Western countries, in relation to the increasing educational and professional possibilities. Overall, we can define this historical period ‘the golden age of career counselling and vocational designing’ in which, even if in response to the needs coming from the economic world, it seems clear that, since its origins, career counselling aimed at having a socially relevant role regarding the relationships between the professional, personal and social well-being. The Chap. 2 focuses on some socio-economic conditions that evolved in the last few decades until our times, highlighting what is considered to be a neoliberal ideology, with phenomena associated to it that seem to be the basis of constant economic crises, the destruction of natural resources and the increase of inequalities. In the field of career counselling and vocational designing, there has been a return to old ways of operating, such as those focused on the idea of the right man in the right place, or those that suggested the concept that the responsibility of what happens in one’s future only depends on him/herself. The absence of reflexivity and of analyses of the conditions that revolve around people’s lives, in particular around problematic ones, leads us to denounce the fact that this way of operating is only able to maintain the status quo, damaging the majority of the population. Even in this field, we need a new deal, a rainbow one rather than green. These colours should help us to remember that we should reshape new economic, cosmopolitan processes, aimed at the expansion of rights and social justice.

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The Chap. 3 wants to help the reader to take into consideration alternative ways to those that have hitherto been practiced because of an unprecedent complexity that also affects people’s projects about their future. It starts from the work carried out by the Life Designing International Research Group, from the trajectories outlined in the 2009 position paper (Savickas et al., 2009), to the latest reflections that push us to carefully consider the issues of sustainable development. Therefore, we move on to the deepening of the concepts of inclusion, sustainability and social justice, which are gaining more and more value in the latest literature, and also to career counselling and vocational designing that, since they suggest work paths essential to ensure our presence on the Earth, can no longer avoid to consider the growth of communities, the well-being of all people and a qualitative professional future designing. Less ‘ego-centric’ professional designs that are more focused on building inclusive, sustainable and social justice-based contexts require new forms of thought, resources and skills that encourage greater attention to the general context and to the community’s well-being. The Chap. 4 is focused on cosmopolitanism and on the abilities one has of designing his/her own future, while taking into account both local and global phenomena, curiosity and imagination, in order to favour critical and conscious decisions about the future. This chapter also focuses on the courage to design the future, despite the sense of discomfort that current times can create, and on activism, in order to work for different futures. In dealing with these constructs, assessment instruments and suggestions for their promotion in schools are presented as part of specific laboratory activities. Lastly, the Chap. 5 aims at giving the reader ideas for career education interventions focused on supporting young people in vocational designing processes. These interventions have to be based on inclusion, sustainability and social justice, allowing people to give voice to their aspirations and to think of the challenges they might consider in their future in order to improve their future and also the well-being of humanity and the world in which we live in general. The project ‘Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant’ is introduced. It is developed by the Laboratory of Research and Intervention in Vocational Designing and Career Counselling (Laboratorio di Ricerca e Intervento per l’Orientamento alle Scelte) LaRIOS of the University of Padova as an example of laboratory action to train young people to identify the intentions, responsibilities and their 'mission possible' for the future. This has to be realized with the collaboration of professionals able to fully share the goals described. In reading the various chapters, it should be clear to the reader that in our pages there is a fil rouge that, at least in our intentions, aims at bringing out the close relationship between career counselling and vocational designing and the context, or between career counselling and the socio-economic realities, in which it develops. It is necessary and urgent for careful considerations of present times to become useful instruments to build a better world and an inclusive and sustainable future for everyone. A future that seems to be waiting to be decisively started, built and, in many ways, still imagined. Career counselling and vocational designing we are considering propose educational and training opportunities capable of mobilizing

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thoughts and reflections, emotions and behaviours, aspirations and perspectives, that is to say, in one single expression, people’s agenticity, also in order to support the pursuit of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. In this perspective, a different career guidance, a ‘positive’ and quality one, that is not aimed at training the homo adaptus, ‘the right man at the right place’ who promptly responds to calls and demands in his/her contexts, not the homo economicus mostly worried to be and to be perceived as attractive and competitive in the market and in the world of education and production. The homo sapiens we have in mind, in the context of a career counselling and vocational designing that aims at an equal, sustainable and inclusive future, is the one that is recognized as reciprocus, solidalis and prospectus (mutual, supportive, future-aimed) for the attention he/she gives to the well-being of the community and for his/her inclination in favouring the future, for his/her ‘mania’ to try to anticipate what will happen and to regulate, in this regard, agenticity. For all these reasons, career counselling and vocational designing should help people, especially the younger generations, to designing their future in an agentic way, in emerging from the ‘fog of the present’, to project themselves in the future we should build, together with the world of research and the most accredited international institutions, from an inclusive and sustainable perspective, ‘coming out from their own backyard’ and ‘taking care of the common garden’, in order to ensure a better future for everyone.

References Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Ecological Systems Theory (1992). In U. Bronfenbrenner (Ed.), Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development (pp. 106–173). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Ltd. Guichard, J. (2018). Life Design Interventions and the Issue of Work. In V. Cohen Scali, J. P. Pouyaud, M., Drabik Podgorna, G., Aisenson, J. L Bernaud, ... J.V Guichard, (Eds.), Interventions in career design and education: Transformation for sustainable development and decent work (pp. 15–28). Paris, France: Springer, Cham. Međugorac, V., Šverko, I., & Babarović, T. (2019). Careers in sustainability: an application of social cognitive career theory. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 1–23. Milanesi, V. (2020). Prefazione [Preface]. In L. Nota (Ed.), La passione per la verità. Come contrastare fake news e manipolazioni e costruire un sapere inclusivo (pp. 11–24). Roma: Franco Angeli. Savickas, M. L., Nota, L., Rossier, J., Dauwalder, J. P., Duarte, M. E., Guichard, J., ... & Van Vianen, A. E. (2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century. Journal of vocational behavior, 75(3), 239–250.

Contents

1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins to the End of the Last Century: The Moment of Maximum Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 From the Early 1900s Until World War II and the Birth of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The ‘Glorious Thirty’ or Keynesian Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 The Growth and the Contribution of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Conclusions: Social Significance… in Favor of a Part of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction: From the Recent Past to Present Times . . . . . . 2.2 Neoliberal Ideological Derivations of the Present Era . . . . . . 2.3 And Again: Globalization, Precariousness, Competition, Financialization, Migration, Robotization, Outsourcing, Externalization, Privatization, Exploitation of Natural Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The Myths of the Current Period: Meritocracy and Self-employment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Conclusions: What About Career Counseling and Vocational Designing? Could They Be a Tool for a ‘Rainbow New Deal’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Life Designing for an Inclusive, Sustainable and Equitable Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Complexity in Career Counseling and in Professional Designing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Life Design International Research Group . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Towards Life Design Processes in Order to Build Inclusive and Sustainable Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Inclusion and Sustainability to Build the Future . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

3.6 Rediscovering Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 New Dimensions Instruments for An Inclusive Career Counseling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Cosmopolitanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Curiosity and Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Courage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Activism for Our Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Conclusions: Acting and Demonstrating for Sustainable and Socially Just Future . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant, Etc.” : An Example of Operational Paths and Trajectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Give a Voice to People and Promote Inclusive and Sustainable ‘Aspirations’ Towards the Future . . . . . . . . 5.3 Today’s Adolescents and the Necessity to Encourage Aspirations Towards an Inclusive and Sustainable Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing Workshops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Doing Basic Workshops with High School Students . . . . . . 5.7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Appendix C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Appendix D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Appendix E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Appendix F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Appendix G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

1

Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins to the End of the Last Century: The Moment of Maximum Possibilities

1.1

Introduction

When preparing this chapter, we thought about the stories of people who stood out in culture, sports, arts, show business, science, politics. People who gave a large contribution to the above-mentioned fields, and they experienced levels of satisfaction, recently described by a colleague in a volume (Scandella, 2019). When reading those professional life stories and looking also at other narrations of people that today are between 50 and 70 years old, we thought that it is quite possible that these stories revolve around the pairing of interests and abilities, and are often the result of unintentional initiatives of different actors, belonging to family, social and working contexts. In contrast to what is often seen today, those stories do not present high levels of discomfort coming from worries associated with the topics of unemployment, underemployment, precariousness, mobility and professional retraining (Soresi, 2019). Moreover, in those stories passions play a central role: these activities are considered interesting, pleasant, able to ‘absorb’, they make time pass faster and they allow people to experience a sense of happiness and wellbeing. It is important to distinguish between ‘positive’ passions, the ones that encourage to act and to deepen topics productively, and ‘negative’ passions, the ones that should be controlled in order to avoid worrying addictions which are bad for health and for life quality. Passions tend to

combine with interests and abilities, the abovementioned pairing: all these phenomena owe their existence to elements that are present in people’s life contexts and are able to encourage and foster them (Vallerand, 2010). The beautiful professional life stories of middle-aged people could be the result of extraordinary personal talents, of particularly ‘rich and inspiring’ environments, of unique situations, or, more simply, of a particular historical period, the one between the ‘60s and ‘80s (Soresi, 2019). This period is characterized by very different working conditions with respect to the ones we are experiencing nowadays and that young people who are in school today will live. In order to give birth to ambitious professional projects, young people will have to learn how to not be inhibited by social pressures, by rules, by the desire to obtain satisfaction and fulfillment in the present, in the here and now, in the short term. With this chapter we would like to let the readers ‘jump into the past’, in order to encourage them to consider the historical periods that precede the current one, from the early 1900s until World War II and ‘The Glorious Thirty’, that is to say from the end of World War II to the ‘70s. This examination of history will allow understanding why the majority of young people during ‘50s and ‘60s experienced the abovementioned stories and how career counseling and vocational designing were born to face the requests of specific periods, detecting

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4_1

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1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

procedures, tools and operational tracks useful for the past ages, taking up this social significant role. The emphasis on all these aspects should help us to underline that what was good in that moment of the past and could have supported the construction of satisfying professional lives is nowadays inadequate, also in a perspective that, in a fairer way, takes into consideration the people and the lands of those who do not come from Western countries.

1.2

From the Early 1900s Until World War II and the Birth of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing

Western history is characterized in many respects by the rise of capitalism, which shaped our way of acting, thinking, doing. This word means “the economic system based on the use of capital— composed of money and physical goods—with the purpose of developing activities aimed at producing goods and provide a profit to whom employed the capital. The owners of capital are called capitalists. The capitalistic development happens when capitalists, after having bought machines and raw materials for their businesses, after having paid workers’ salaries, after having sold the goods, and after having received a personal gain, make a profit. This surplus enlarges and improves the production process” (Treccani Vocabulary). The origins of capitalism can be found during the Middle Ages. During that period, Europe has seen an increase in trading, a more consistent monetary circulation, higher consumptions and the emergence of professional figures such as bankers and merchants. In addition, many geographical discoveries have been made during the XV and XVI centuries, which permitted import, at the expense of the colonized lands, raw materials, gold, and silver, making commercial trade easier. Thanks to bankers and merchantsentrepreneurs, capitals were used to buy raw materials, in order to give them to small businesses and to finally bring the produced goods on the marketplace.

Arrighi (1994) states that the economic practices tend to become ‘institutionalized’ in Europe between the XIV and XV centuries and concern the possibility to buy or sell, in a free market, goods, capitals, and work: the so-called factors of production. All of this is associated with the spread of Adam Smith’s thought. Smith is considered the father of the economic thought and his concept of the ‘invisible hand’ is the cornerstone of the liberal doctrine of laissezfaire: “following their egoistic preferences, the owners of capital prefer to invest in activities located in their own country, creating in this way benefits for it and its society, even if this was not their intention”. The basic concept is that, in following their personal interests, individuals manage to create social order and to develop, even if in an unintentional way, a context that is not free from government policies but it is from unproductive activities (Mazzuccato, 2018). Many factors contributed to the expansion of modern capitalism: the industrial revolution, the invention of steam machines, larger factories, mass production, the expansion of the market on an international scale and the adoption of more efficient accounting criteria. As a consequence, capitalism spread in England first and in the United States after, which in the early 1900s become the most important industrial power. From the Early 1900s until World War II. During the first decades of 1900, mostly in the United States, there was a period of prosperity and socio-economic progress driven by the automotive sector, which functioned as a stimulus for the development of other sectors such as metallurgical, rubber, transport and construction industries. During the ‘20s, the American economy experienced a constant and fast growth thanks to industry and agriculture, sectors that exported a good part of production towards Europe, since in the old continent production facilities were still in the phase of post-war reconstruction (Milanovic, 2017). In this period of economic expansion, the concept of Laissez-faire took shape, intended as the idea that the State should not interfere with economy and society. Companies, industries and so on were put at the center of the scene, with

1.2 From the Early 1900s Until World War II and the Birth of Career …

specific necessities such as workforce: people who can deal with specific tasks that do not require high qualification. The arrival of immigrants covered the necessities of workforce for low qualified jobs. After World War I and with the completion of the reconstruction, it began a progressive overproduction, most of all in the field of agriculture. This caused a general price drop and, as a consequence, a return to protectionism. After this period, there is the so-called ‘Crash of 1929’ and the Great Depression: overproduction and Wall Street Crash of 1929 caused a structural crisis, companies stopped to invest, there was a production drop and the raise of unemployment. The crisis that hit the United States rapidly spread to the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, the United States were the most important financial center in the world. During the ‘20s, American investment in Europe constantly grew, most of all towards Germany. With the Wall Street Crash, this flow of capitals was interrupted, jeopardizing Western economies. The greatest crisis was obviously in Germany, where, in addition to the economic crisis, there also was an institutional one that overwhelmed the weak Weimer Republic and brought to the power Hitler’s National Socialists. The recession pushed the countries to go towards protectionism and to underline both economic and military contrasts, which became the premises for World War II. Galbraith (2009) pointed out that the biggest problems of this period of capitalistic management regarded a bad income distribution, inadequate companies’ management and a scarce efficacy of banking and financial systems, excessive speculative loans and the mistakes made by economists who aimed at keeping the State outside the economy, because it was considered a penalizing factor. All these problems created a historical period with high rates of inequality both in terms of income and richness. In order to face the difficult situation of the time, the economic programs, that is to say the public spending, were essentially based on rearmament and colonialism, avoiding the international treaties that forbade it. As a matter of fact,

3

capitalists needed to find a profitable use of their saving surplus outside their countries, so they opened new doors to ‘colonialism’. This process was characterized by the physical control of the place and by a kind of a ‘colonial contract’ for local development so that colonies could trade exclusively with the colonizer country and could not produce finished products. There was some sort of division, since some European countries aimed at colonizing Africa, Russia aimed at Siberia and the United States at Mexico (Milanovic, 2017). The crisis, the economic difficulties of the majority of the population and the perceived inequalities determined a delegitimization of capitalism and of its abilities to prevent unemployment. The doubts increased, even if it was hard to think about something else, as the words of Keynes show: “Capitalism is not smart, beautiful, fair, virtuous and does not keep promises. In short, we do not like it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder about what to put in its place, we are extremely puzzled” (Keynes, 1933). As time went by, people realized that, by raising productivity and lowering salaries, capitalism creates inequalities, reduces consumption capacity and creates a surplus of goods that have no market. During the ‘30s, there was a need to overcome the crisis and look for prevention methods. The economists of the time, led by John Maynard Keynes, begin to state that capitalism should be subjected to regulation. Solutions needed to be applied with the intervention of the State, that allows to reduce unemployment, raise salaries and encourage goods’ demands by consumers, in order to guarantee a constant economic growth and social wellbeing, giving birth to a compromise between capital and work (Hickel, 2012). At the turn of this period and the consecutive one, there was also what Milanovic (2017) calls First Kuznets Wave, which goes from the industrial revolution until more or less the ‘80s, and that is associated with the growth of inequality. The greatest levels are observed between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, with the following decreasing until more or less the ‘70s/’80s.

4

1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

The Birth of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing. Taking into consideration the expansionary moments of the above-mentioned historical periods and thinking about the birth of career counseling and vocational designing, we should focus our attention on what happened first of all in the United States. More precisely, we should focus on the mass arrival of people coming from Europe: they were desperate, deprived of everything, encouraged to leave and go somewhere else, towards a country that needed workforce to support its industrial development (Pallante, 2018). There, in that period, the first ‘counseling’ actions are observed. Back then, European people did not have an elevated culture: the most frequent condition was illiteracy, which tends to be associated with a higher difficulty to perform introspective analysis and to highlight what could be more adequate for them from a professional point of view. It begins to be obvious that something needs to be done in order to help people who are looking for a job and, more importantly, for a means of support. They should be helped to detect a ‘solution’ that suits their own characteristics. This is how the first steps in the fields of career counseling and vocational designing have been made: in 1909 the work by Frank Parsons, engineer, marks the birth of career counseling. He introduced tools to detect ‘the inclinations’ and to support the detection of the ‘most suitable’ workplace to this multitude of individuals without specific abilities. This is how the ‘matching model’ is born, which consists of matching the person’s characteristics and working context’s ones. At that time, different instruments focused on sensorial and perceptive abilities and reaction times started to be used. These tools came from the field of the rising psychological studies and of psychophysiology and were used in order to verify if the individual could operate specific working performances regarding most of all assembly line actions. With the development of psychological studies, in particular of psychometry, during the ‘30s and ‘40s, interests started to be taken into

consideration, that is to say, the affective/cognitive component of working performances. For this purpose, we can mention the work by Strong with his Vocational Interest Blank and the work by Kuder with his Kuder Preference Record Vocational at the end of the ‘30s (Crites, 1974; Soresi & Nota, 2000). It should be underlined that all of this, at that time, could be considered innovative. As a matter of fact, before this historical period, people were ‘trapped’ into their social class, they were not ‘used’ to choose a job, there were no jobs to be chosen or to be prepared for. The school itself was constructed as a ‘status confirmation’ system, that aimed at keeping the existing differences between higher social classes and lower ones that had a basic education (Collins, 1979). On one hand we can say that matching was useful for companies interested in finding ‘suitable’ people, on the other hand we can also say that these ‘counseling’ activities were useful for individuals, in particular for those with the biggest vulnerabilities, who, for the first time, were asked what they were able to do and what they preferred to do. Vocational designing was ‘placed between the company and the individual’, giving space to the individual and gaining social importance (Fig. 1.1).

1.3

The ‘Glorious Thirty’ or Keynesian Period

It is a period that goes from the end of World War II to the ‘70s, characterized by an expansionary stage and by a recession, with its distinctive features. In this period counseling models are born, aimed at helping people to detect a satisfying option for their educational and professional life, having many different possibilities. Expansionary Stage. In Western societies, there was a delegitimization of unbridled capitalism and of its abilities to prevent unemployment and the social crises that brought to World War II. At the same time, there was The Great

1.3 The ‘Glorious Thirty’ or Keynesian Period Fig. 1.1 The origins of career counseling and vocational designing

5

Beginning of 1900

World War II

1909 Parson The right place Matching ‘Attitudes’ Sensorial, perceptive aspects and reaction times

Leveling, born in socialist countries and associated with the idea that it was necessary to create economic management systems that were partially not capitalist, with public investments. In these countries, most of the companies were nationalized, simplifying a different richness distribution and the compression of salaries. Moreover, the nationalization of production means implicated the abolition of business incomes and of incomes coming from patrimonial estates, since companies were banned. In addition, there were guaranteed job opportunities, the absence of unemployment, pensions and the presence of basic products. Basically, education and property, two essential elements in market-economies, became irrelevant. In this way, the ‘prize for education’ is also reduced, since the salaries of low qualified workers were quite high, and the salaries of high qualified workers were quite low. There was a certain amount of hostility towards technology and little attention was given to innovation. This will create problems in the long run: Milanovic (2017) states that there has been an excessive push to equality that discouraged people in terms of commitment to work, education, and innovation. Thanks to this and to the work done by the left-wing parties, the consensus towards socialist forms of economic management spread among European and American working classes, even if with authoritarian turns. It became necessary to create conditions that could limit this consensus by investing in more balanced relationships

Psychometry Development Affective/Cognitive Components Interests Vocational Interest Blank- Strong. 1927, 1938 Kuder Preference Record Vocational Kuder, 1938-1941

between workers and capitalists. As a consequence, rich classes tended to accept measures able to create a wide middle class, because of the fear of new socialist movements and capital expropriations. It is also important to underline that, thanks to the effect of investments and to scientific discoveries, in Western countries there was a second expansion of the manufacturing and commercial sectors. This expansion is associated with the manpower transfer from agriculture to manufacturing, from the rural areas to urban ones. It is also associated with the reduction of the gap between urban and rural contexts and of the respective inequalities. The population was gradually becoming older, with much higher numbers with respect to the past, which implicates a higher demand for social services such as social welfare and healthcare. Moreover, education was extended to the majority of the population: this implicates, also in Western contexts, a reduction of the prize for education (Goldin & Katz, 2008). School took on two goals: supporting upward social mobility and preparing a qualified workforce. For the first time school is considered a resource of social policies, aimed at overcoming, rather than confirming, the existing social divisions. This change of pace regarding education is related to the spread of social rights but also to a considerable demand for a more qualified workforce as concerns the clerical and technical sectors. Education started to be perceived as what could support the national economy. For Italy in

6

1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

particular, Ricuperati (1995, p. 732) stated that “if in the fifteen-year period that was about to come there had not been the correct preparation for the over 700.000 graduates needed, the almost 3 million technicians and qualified employees, the economic development would have been stopped or irreparably damaged”. In Italy, these visions are the foundation of laws that establish compulsory education until 14 years old, middle school education in 1962 and the liberalization of University in 1969. As can be seen, space has been given to politics that hold together socialist visions and less extreme visions of capitalism, so that the State has to set goals such as full employment, economic growth and citizens’ wellbeing. State power has to act freely next to market mechanisms, also by replacing them when necessary, in order to achieve its goals. This is how Keynesian economic policies take shape: Keynes is an English economist who leaves the neoclassical tradition and proposes a new economic model called Keynesian theory, which is different from the previous one, based in a more significant way on Laissez-faire. According to him, the biggest failure of the free market consists of the inability to offer a permanent workplace to those who want it. When the demand for products is not high and implicates an excess of unsold goods that have no market, businesses need to reduce their activity with consequences on the number of employees. In order to limit this phenomenon and reduce the waste of human and social resources during mass unemployment situations, the intervention of a third subject is necessary. This subject is the State, which is external to the market and needs to provide full employment. The State needs to rebalance markets and rule them in order to avoid wastes and inefficiencies (Pallante, 2018). The essential task is to manage public spending in order to increase demand. By increasing public spending and the demand for goods and services, the production of businesses can be increased too, and, as a consequence, so is employment. The three cornerstones of economic policies are public investments, progressive taxation, and social protection. Keynes proposed public works

as the antidote to the crisis: from that moment the construction of streets, railways and houses began. He also proposed changes in the economic policies which favored rich people, based on what above-mentioned, with higher taxes for rich people in order to finance better social cohesion and the creation of different welfare systems (healthcare, education and so on). It is important to consider that all of this did not mean, in Keynes’s opinion, to abolish the old paradigm or reverse the forms of private capitalism, but, on the contrary, to save them through the “widening of the functions of the government […], the only possible way to avoid the complete destruction of the existing economic powers, and also the condition of a satisfying functioning of individual initiative” (Keynes, 2006, p. 338). As a matter of fact, the State participates at an unprecedented level, in order to re-establish a consensus spirit and the collaboration by workers. Regarding the market’s processes and entrepreneurial/business activities, a new condition is created, called ‘embedded liberalism’. This condition involves social and political restrictions and a series of rules aimed at limiting, sometimes at guiding, the economic and industrial strategies. There was the will to guarantee a dignified family salary in exchange for a submissive and productive workforce, providing to the middle class the means to consume essential goods of industrial production. All of this was obviously supported by Western countries’ governments, which imagined that in this way it was possible to guarantee global economic stability and social wellness, and to prevent another World War. The Bretton Woods1 institutions were created, that is to say, the ones that later became the World Bank, the 1

The Bretton Woods Agreement is the result of a series of negotiations made from the 1st to the 22nd of July 1944, in Bretton Woods near Carroll, New Hampshire (the socalled Bretton Woods Conference). On that occasion, different rules were written. These rules regarded business and financial international relationships among the main industrialized Western countries. As a matter of fact, they are the first example of a ‘monetary order’ negotiated among States, aimed at characterizing their monetary relationships.

1.3 The ‘Glorious Thirty’ or Keynesian Period

International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, in order to solve the problems regarding the balance of payments and to foster the reconstruction and the development of a war-torn Europe (Hickel, 2012). At the same time, there was higher attention towards rights, with an extension of social rights (Milanovic, 2017). The first generation of rights, that goes back to French and American revolutions, brings civil freedoms such as the freedom of religion, expression, residence, and trade. The second generation brings into societies social rights such as healthcare, social services, and assistance. The Welfare State was born, which aimed at policies created to protect individuals from the so-called ‘five giants’: misery, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, through the creation of national healthcare, public education, public housing and full employment policies (Beveridge, 2010). On one hand, this social change can be the result of a ‘political strategy’ to limit the socialist wave, but on the other hand, people are now able to strive for a minimum social status level, that involves education, health, social safety, jobs, and houses. On one hand, as Kennedy stated, all of this was useful in order to limit the growing threat that a more combined and powerful working-class movement represented for the constant accumulation of capital, on the other hand, it is clear that social rights become citizenship rights and no longer represent charitable actions (Popkewitz, 1991). Recession Stage. In the late ‘60s, embedded liberalism started to split apart, both on a national and international level, for different reasons such as the rise of inflation and the reduction of State tax revenues for social spending. Moreover, there was a merging between working-class movements and urban social ones, that gave the impression of a stronger socialist alternative to the social compromise between capital and work, that successfully formed the basis for post-war capital accumulation. Communist and socialist parties gained ground and were about to succeed in a large part of Europe and in the United States. Popular forces were mobilizing for an extension of

7

reforms and State interventions. The concern for the above-mentioned situation is associated (or gives birth to) with the upswing of the work of a small group of thinkers: Mont Pélerin Society, founded in 1947. It takes its name from the Swiss thermal location where there was the first meeting between economists, historians, philosophers, scholars, who gathered around the famous Austrian philosopher and economist Friedrich von Hayek. Among them, there were Ludwig von Mises, the economist Milton Friedman and, at least once, the famous philosopher Karl Popper. They called themselves ‘liberals’, as a reference to the liberalism of the European tradition, for their essential commitment in favor of the ideals of personal freedom. They aimed at reintroducing the importance of setting the economy according to capitalistic rules and without forms of control (Harvey, 2007).

1.4

The Growth and the Contribution of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing

Thinking about people and their professional life in Western countries, we may say that some of the most important elements in this historical period are the following: – The spreading of education; – Population aging; – The increase of job opportunities in the manufacturing and clerical sectors; – The increase of educational options; – The possibility to start a ‘career’; – A higher ‘specialization’ of professional contexts. A growing labor demand is observed. Qualified performances are required, both in the technical and in the clerical sectors, so that education becomes an investment for the overall economic development. Rights are extended, and closer attention is given to population wellness levels. Citizens are gradually more educated, and they can choose which professional path to take.

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1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

Greater attention is given to individual requests, to professional fulfillment, and the idea of ‘career’ gets into the thoughts regarding professional life. Choices, reflections on the best option, the analysis of one’s own desires, etc. acquire great importance in this scenario. Vocational designing processes, in line with the development of psychological and social sciences studies, begin to take into consideration all of this (Brown, 2003). Interests become important because they were no longer considered as mere preferences, but as traits, personality aspects. If interests are ‘satisfied’ in working contexts, that is to say, if they are cultivated thanks to specific working environments that allow doing so, they facilitate career satisfaction along with career performance. Holland’s Work and RIASEC types. In this context, it is important to keep in mind as the person that makes a professional choice ‘looks for’ the situations that respect his/her counseling hierarchy” (Holland, 1959). The choice becomes something that involves many different personal features: motivation, knowledge, abilities, and personality. Different instruments are created in order to measure interests, classify contexts, check congruency and so on, validated by hundreds of researches. From these researches, it stands out as the majority of people can be described using one of the ‘types’ that Holland himself detected and clarified through decades of research and counseling regarding vocational designing. These types are: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. Likewise, also the working environments can be differentiated using the same types. The implied hypothesis of this approach consists of considering career choices as the expression of an individual’s personality. People doing the same jobs would be characterized by similar personality traits and life stories (Swanson & Fouad, 1999; Soresi & Nota, 2000). Congruency levels between the person and the environment are based on the adaptation between personality and interests and the type of working environment in which the individual is put or aspires to. Social Cognitive Career Theory. During the ‘80s, there are the first ideas that question the

concept that supported the existence of a linear relationship between personal characteristics and environmental ones. Between the person and the context, there are much more complex relations than those traditionally hypothesized: both of these elements are often characterized in terms of emphasized flexibility and variability (Hackett & Betz, 1981). On the basis of Bandura’s works regarding his construct of self-efficacy (1977) and his theories of social learning (Bandura, 1984, 1986), other dimensions of the ‘self’ gain importance, such as work motivation, professional values, and efficacy beliefs. All these elements refer to the opinions that a person has regarding his/her own abilities of organizing and accomplishing everything that is necessary in order to learn how to carry out specific tasks, included professional ones. The person has also to know the factors that can foster these abilities, in the belief, supported by data, that keeping in mind these variables during decision-making processes allows more accurate decisions (Hackett & Lent, 1992). An important model is the one created by Lent, Brown, & Hackett, (1994), the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), that consists in three intertwined models that focus on (a) interests’ development, (b) choice and (c) performances and persistence in educational and professional paths (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Hundreds of researches have been made, highlighting how the beliefs that people have on their abilities are formed, what the determiners of those beliefs are, and the consequences in terms of preferences for specific actions, motivation, commitment, etc. These researchers question the solidity of some traditional and ‘objective’ measures, giving particular relevance to markedly ‘private and subjective’ dimensions (such as self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations). Importance has been given to how much people think they are able to perform specific actions, that is to say, how many efficacy selfbeliefs they have for specific tasks and actions, as we would say in technical words, in the awareness that a lack of confidence is associated with a lack of investment. For example, a lack of selfconfidence regarding mathematical skills is

1.4 The Growth and the Contribution of Career Counseling …

associated with a minor effort in this subject. The origins of efficacy beliefs have been deeply analyzed, along with the range of activities and gratifications to which every person is exposed since a very young age. Through the ‘repetition’ of certain actions, the presence of models and feedbacks given by important people, children and adolescents gradually develop their abilities and interests. They also promote self-efficacy in different tasks, along with a series of expectations regarding what could happen if they are able to use and take advantage of these abilities also through specific professional preferences (Nota & Soresi, 2000). Researches clearly underline that all the cognitive and social predictors together represent from the 37% to the 67% of interests’ variance and from the 46% to the 75% of choice goals (Sheu et al., 2010); the 43% of choice actions (in the STEM degree; Lent et al., 2018); and the 20% of professional performances (Brown, Lent, Telander, & Tramayne, 2011), the 19% of academic performances and the 28% of academic persistence (Brown et al., 2008). Learning experiences arrive at 36% and 42%, respectively, of self-efficacy variance and outcome expectations. Making Decisions, Managing Indecision, Supporting Career Development. Because of the fact that people have to choose educational paths and professional fields, decisional models start to be examined. It is important to mention the research and practical studies by Itamar Gati, who studied the modalities in which individuals make decisions about their future and how these can be facilitated. In this context, the works regarding compensatory and non-compensatory decision-making strategies and PIC model (Prescreening; In-depth exploration; Choice) for professional choice have been of particular relevance. This prescriptive model helps to detect a small number of promising options, to perform a deep exploration of these options in order to identify the most suitable ones, and then choose the best alternative (Gati, 2013). These studies examine when and how much people use effective decision-making strategies and if they use adaptive or maladaptive decisional styles, such as

9

avoiding difficult decisions, postpone them to the last minute, delegate them to others. On the other hand, people can make an effort in the choosing process by analyzing the options, gathering information, comparing them and so on, with the awareness that the maladaptive strategies reduce effort but bring, more probably, to less advantageous solutions (Nota, Mann, Soresi, & Friedman, 2002). Another career theory that should be considered is the so-called ‘Planned happenstance’ that, thanks most of all to John Krumboltz (1996), recognizes fundamental importance, mostly in presence of choices and successful professional planning, to people’s ability to seize events and unplanned opportunities. It is important to grasp and take advantage of these random events, also in favor of the construction of the ‘professional career’. Being in the right place at the right moment, being in a particular situation, facing an unpredicted and surprising meeting, getting to know an unexpected information: all these situations would not be, according to this theory, just a matter of ‘luck’, but the proof of the existence of a series of advanced cognitive and emotional skills, that would enable people to consider the effects of these events and to facilitate their happening. In the presence of a lack of these skills, the task of vocational designing would be to train people to handle unexpected events, with coping strategies that help to look for directions and goals perceived as interesting and attractive. We have to mention also the work by Peterson, Sampson, Reardon, and Lenz (1996), who reconsidered the cognitive theory concepts regarding information processing and created a specific theoretical framework focused on the career problem. This particular problem regards the difficulty to make decisions in the presence of a situation perceived as ambiguous, not clear, that gives little information that can help to find an immediate and efficient solution. They offer a well-structured series of cognitive operations, the so-called ‘career problem solving’, regarding the recognition of a state of indecision, the analysis of its causes, the formulation of solving hypotheses, the detection of different alternatives

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1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

and the choice of the most suitable and convenient option for each individual (Nota et al. 2002). Even if we are aware that we are reducing a summary that is already too brief with respect to the existing work of many colleagues and that it should include many more perspectives than those we have examined so far, we would like to take into consideration another aspect. During the ‘50s, the world of work has allowed a certain number of people (today we still would say ‘a minority’), usually Caucasian males, to professionally evolve. In terms of career, they moved from an inferior working position to a superior one, with greater responsibilities and a better salary. The concepts of career and professional development begin to appear. They were included in the ‘human being development field’, similarly as other fields (linguistic, motoric, etc.), that bring forward the idea that as time goes by it is preferable to support, in career counseling activities, inclinations, and skills that help people to make advantageous choices, to ‘move’ better among different possible options, and to pass from an inferior level to a superior one in working contexts, that is to say, to build a career. One of the most important scholars is Donald Super, who has the merit of collocating career development into the life cycle and of providing a series of useful suggestions both for ‘practical uses’ and for research in the field of professional psychology. His ‘Life Career Rainbow’ (Super, 1957, 1974) is very famous. Super’s work is extended, enlarged and renewed by Mark Savickas, who introduced, during the ‘90s, the Theory of Career Construction (2005, 2011). Career counseling and vocational guidance take into account the work of these researches and aim at fostering the individual, at highlighting dimensions and skills that characterize the choice decision-making process, that are many and intertwined. These dimensions and skills involve motivations, interests and professional values, decisional efficacy beliefs, professional problem-solving skills, visualizing professional goals, decisional strategies, social skills connected to choice and so on. There are remarkable studies, tools, invitations to foster these skills.

Starting from a ‘macro-systemic’ view, we mention, in line with Milanovic (2017), that in this period it is essential to aim at the construction of a wide middle class that allows to absorb industrial productions from an economic point of view, and to have a stronghold with respect to a collectivistic and socialist society, to establish a sort of control from a social point of view. Career counseling and vocational guidance, with their activities, placing themselves on the person’s side, tried to ‘enrich the self’, to give space to the individual in order to improve his/her life quality through his/her working experience. We would like to say that, even in this historical period, in Western countries, career counseling is able to keep faith to its mission and to the possibility to have social relevance, especially when carried out strictly. From this perspective, vocational designing is characterized as a process that strengthens the possibility to make convenient professional choices, as we also used to affirm in Larios Laboratory at University of Padova, defining it as a process that involves the supply of assistance aimed at supporting the individual in the actions concerning the gathering, processing and use of educational and professional information, in planning decisions in this field aiming, as far as possible, at the improvement of the skills involved in this process” (Soresi, 2000) (Fig. 1.2).

1.5

Conclusions: Social Significance… in Favor of a Part of the World

This chapter highlighted how career counseling and vocational designing processes, their instruments, their practices, are basically the result of the times in which they are born, created by people that cannot avoid being influenced by the historical period they are living. It seems clear that, at the early stages, there was the belief that it is possible and convenient to use congruency measures between people’s characteristics and the educational and professional contexts’ expectations, that is to say, the matching paradigm. As time went by, there appeared new

1.5 Conclusions: Social Significance… in Favor of a Part of the World

Between 1950

and 1970

11

80s – 90s

Holland’s Model

Super’s Professional

Betz, Hackett and

Pic-Gati’s Model

Motivations and

Development Model

Lent’s Social

Aspects for the

Personality Traits

Life Career Rainbow

Cognitive Career

professional choice

Life roles

Theory Efficacy Beliefs,

Savickas’ Model

interests, values,

of Career

determiners

Construction Environmental

Compensatory and

Peterson and

non-compensatory

Sampson’s IPP

decision-making strategies

requests Introspection

Model Indecision and professional problems Irrational ideas

Fig. 1.2 The development of career counseling during the ‘Glorious Thirty’

possibilities and opportunities for many people, for example, young people who were studying both in high school and at University. It became possible to be neutral, impartial, to mediate between demand and offer, between Person’s necessities and the Environments’ ones, the P-E model, born with Parsons (1909) and developed and enriched over time with the works and studies of many colleagues, as we tried to underline, who opened the way to reflections regarding education, development, skills’ improvement, inclinations, beliefs and so on. It was important for us to underline that, in the previous century, all of this has been possible since things went definitely well. In that period, it was still possible to make quite accurate predictions, thanks to the fact that both people and educational/professional environments were relatively stable and predictable, to the point that these environments ensured, more or less for everyone, to have the possibility to be safe and improve careers, remaining in the same

workplace. Furthermore, both people and professional environments could be ‘explored’, analyzed, evaluated and described by using the same guidelines (inclinations, interests, owned skills) facilitating, at least theoretically, the mythical need to match demand and offer. Career counseling and vocational designing could develop and improve people’s lives, having, in most cases, as a social discipline, a social value. This discipline tried to make people think, plan, look to the future, considering what they cared about the most, their wishes, their interests, their ambitions. These elements would have fostered, if practiced and nurtured, higher levels of professional satisfaction, a higher investment and commitment and, as a consequence, also a higher efficacy in the working contexts that received them. Regardless of the theoretical approaches supported, there is a general agreement on the fact that career counseling finds its validation in the idea that all the people have the right to choose

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1 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing, from the Origins …

regarding their educational-professional future. In the world of work, people can have the opportunity to show their characteristics, interests, values, ambitions by expressing, in this way, their own selves. Based on these concepts, vocational designing built a sort of bridge, able to connect people and educational and professional environments. It probably contributed to the general wellbeing, at least in Western countries, mostly when counselors who practiced career counseling worked in a professional way, with a proper education, on the people’s side, as the charter of the Italian Career Counseling Association, born in 2000, states in its article 3: “The vocational designing expert considers his/her goal to provide assistance aimed at allowing informed educational-professional choices and decisions. In order to reach this goal, as a consequence, there can be both educational and support interventions, for the person that requires them, regarding the actions of gathering, processing and using the educational-professional information, of planning and realizing decisions, aiming at the development of the client’s skills, with the goal to foster an independent and informed choice. This because every person is considered able to evaluate the result of his/her behavior and to act in order to modify the environment in which he/she lives, through the acquisition and/or development of higher awareness levels and useful skills in order to foster and predict interactions with others, respecting and supporting, at the same time, one’s own developmental path”. On the basis of everything above-mentioned, and in particular with the conviction that career counseling and vocational designing are useful means to improve people’s skills to build a significant future, we as well, in Larios Laboratory, have studied, have done researches and have created materials. With our studies, volumes, training, portfolios, that we developed, realized, tested, our goal was this: fostering abilities and skills regarding the satisfying management of professional life, in particular for those who had lower levers of choice possibility and of selfexpression. The data we gathered allowed us to

highlight remarkable differences. Some people thought about their future in a superficial way, perceiving an elevated sense of worry, even thinking to not have goals to achieve, to have few perspectives and little hope. Other people perceived that their future job would not have represented a satisfying expression of their characteristics and possibilities. We believed that career counseling and vocational designing had most of all to facilitate the learning of new abilities, interests, beliefs, values, working habits and personal qualities that allow every client to build a satisfying life in a constantly changing working (Nota & Soresi, 2000, 2004). However, things have greatly changed nowadays, as we will try to examine in the following chapter, and how many colleagues are confirming, among which Lent (2018) who states that economists’ predictions can no longer be trusted, as much as the tendency to use measures able to suggest high adaptability profiles, suitability and, employability in this or that professional field. Development models and future models that are envisaged, present contrasting prediction rates, to the point that there are few predictions left to be promoted with enough certainty. We cannot omit the fact that what is written in this chapter, in terms of possibilities and wellness, regards the Western countries and the illusion, maybe unconscious, maybe fostered, that this kind of prosperity was something infinite. What we have experienced in terms of options, means, goods, welfare, increase of life quality, developed on the shoulders of actions that can be defined ‘imperialistic’, colonialist, of ecological and resources destruction of almost every other part of the Earth, with rural poverty, famine, conflicts, the uncontrolled increase of illegal and informal activities, shantytowns, oppression and discrimination forms (Marshall, 1972; Mingione, 2019). The ideas about the fact that nature did not have limits and that the fossilfuel age and the possibility to exploit resources would have not ended, (have) fostered in Western countries a sort of production and consumption acceleration. These were a source of life improvement for many people, without caring about anyone else, without asking questions,

1.5 Conclusions: Social Significance… in Favor of a Part of the World

without reflecting on what was going on in other parts of the planet (Pallante, 2018; Rifkin, 2019). The way of thinking “based on profits’ extraction and on unlimited growth is never questioned” stated De Rosa (2019, p. 227). Now we may say that we have been absorbed in a self-centered bubble, in which almost every discipline has been trapped, including career counseling and vocational designing, creating, despite the good intentions, a series of prerequisites for the living conditions we are experiencing. According to us, we can no longer keep offering the same models and practices of the past. We need to change course, as we will underline in the following chapters, most of all if we want to be useful and socially relevant, with a broader vision that involves the entire humanity and the planet we live in.

References Arrighi, G. (1994). The long XX century. Money, power and the origins of our time. London: Verso. Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Bandura, A. (1984). Recycling misconceptions of perceived self-efficacy. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 8(3), 231–255. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Clitfs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Beveridge, W. (2010). Alle origini del welfare state. Il rapporto su assicurazioni sociali e servizi assistenziali [To the origins of the welfare state. The report on social security and welfare services]. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Brown, D. (2003). Career information, career counseling, and career development. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Brown, S. D., Lent, R. W., Telander, K., & Tramayne, S. (2011). Social cognitive career theory, conscientiousness, and work performance: A meta-analytic path analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79(1), 81– 90. Brown, S. D., Tramayne, S., Hoxha, D., Telander, K., Fan, X., & Lent, R. W. (2008). Social cognitive predictors of college students’ academic performance and persistence: A meta-analytic path analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 72(3), 298–308. Collins, R. (1979). The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification. Waltman: Academic Press.

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Crites, J. O. (1974). Major contribution career counseling: A review of major approaches. The Counseling Psychologist, 4(3), 3–23. De Rosa, S. P. (2019). Trasformare il mondo: ecologia politica e conflitti ambientali [Transforming the world: Political ecology and environmental conflicts]. In C. Amadeo, et al. (Eds.), Dieci idee per ripensare il capitalismo (pp. 209–228). Milano: Feltrinelli. Galbraith, J. R. (2009). The great crash 1929. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. Gati, I. (2013). Advances in career decision making. In W. B. Walsh, M. L. Savickas, & P. J. Hartung (Eds.), Handbook of vocational psychology (pp. 199– 232). New York, NY: Routledge. Goldin, C., & Katz, L. F. (2008). The race between education and technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hackett, G., & Betz, N. E. (1981). A self-efficacy approach to the career development of women. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 18(3), 326–339. Hackett, G., & Lent, R. W. (1992). Theoretical advances and current inquiry in career psychology. Handbook of Counseling Psychology, 2, 419–452. Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hickel, J. (2012). A short history of neoliberalism (and how we can fix it). New left project. Holland, J. L. (1959). A theory of vocational choice. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 6(1), 35–45. Keynes, J. M. (2006). The general theory of employment, interest and money. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1933). National self-sufficiency. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 177–193. Krumboltz, J. D. (1996). A learning theory of career counseling. In M. L. Savickas & W. B. Walsh (Eds.), Handbook of career counseling theory and practice (pp. 55–80). Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Publishing. Lent, R. W. (2018). Future of work in the digital world: Preparing for instability and opportunity. The Development Quarterly, 66(3), 205–219. Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79–122. Lent, R. W., Sheu, H. B., Miller, M. J., Cusick, M. E., Penn, L. T., & Truong, N. N. (2018). Predictors of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics choice options: A meta-analytic path analysis of the social–cognitive choice model by gender and race/ethnicity. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65 (1), 17–35. Marshall, T. H. (1972). Value problems of welfarecapitalism. Journal of Social Policy, 1(1), 15–32. Mazzuccato, M. (2018). Il valore di tutto. Chi lo produce e chi lo sottrae nell’economia globale. [The value of everything. Who produces it and who subtracts it in the global economy]. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Milanovic, B. (2017). Ingiustizia globale: migrazioni, disuguaglianze e il futuro della classe media. [Global

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injustice: Migrations, inequalities and the future of the middle class]. Roma: LUISS University Press. Mingione, E. (2019). Introduzione. Capitalismo di ieri, capitalismo di domani. [Introduction. Yesterday’s capitalism, tomorrow’s capitalism]. In C. Amadeo et al., (Eds.), Dieci idee per ripensare il capitalismo (pp. 11–35). Milano: Feltrinelli. Nota, L., & Soresi, S. (2000). Autoefficacia nelle scelte: la visione sociocognitiva dell’orientamento. [Selfefficacy and school-career choice: The sociocognitive perspective of orientation]. Firenze: GiuntiOrganizzazioni speciali. Nota, L., & Soresi, S. (2004). Improving the problemsolving and decision-making skills of a high indecision group of young adolescents: A test of the “Difficult: No Problem!” training. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 4(1), 3–21. Nota, L., Mann, L., Soresi, S., & Friedman, I. (2002). Decisioni e Scelte.[Decisions and choices]. Firenze: Iter-Organizzazioni Speciali. Pallante, M. (2018). Sostenibilità, Equità, Solidarietà. Un manifesto politico e culturale. [Sustainability, Equity, Solidarity. A political and cultural manifesto]. Torino: Lindau. Parsons, F. (1909). Choosing a vocation. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Peterson, G. W., Sampson, J. P. Jr, Reardon, R. C., & Lenz, J. C. (1996). A cognitive information processing approach to career problem solving and decision making. In D. Brown, L. Brooks (Eds.), Career choice and development (3° ed, pp. 423–475). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Popkewitz, T. S. (1991). A political sociology of educational reform: Power/knowledge in teaching, teacher education, and research. New York: Teachers College Press. Ricuperati, G. (1995). La politica scolastica. [The school policy] In F. Barbagallo (Eds.), Storia dell’Italia repubblicana: II. La trasformazione dell’Italia: sviluppo e squilibri. Torino: Einaudi. Rifkin, J. (2019). Un Green New Deal globale. [A global Green New Deal]. Milano: Mondadori.

Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work, 1, 42–70. Savickas, M. L. (2011). Career counseling (Vol. 74). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Scandella, O. (2019). Il futuro oggi. Storie per orientarsi tra studi e lavori. [The future today. Stories to orient among studies and works]. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Sheu, H. B., Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., Miller, M. J., Hennessy, K. D., & Duffy, R. D. (2010). Testing the choice model of social cognitive career theory across Holland themes: A meta-analytic path analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 76(2), 252–264. Soresi, S. (2019). Per un orientamento di qualità a vantaggio di uno sviluppo equo e sostenibile per tutti. [For quality guidance for the benefit of equitable and sustainable development for all]. In O. Scandella (Eds.), Il futuro oggi. Storie per orientarsi tra studi e lavori. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Soresi, S. (2000). Orientamenti per l’orientamento: ricerche ed applicazione dell’orientamento scolasticoprofessionale. [Orientations for orientation: Research and application of school-professional orientation]. Firenze: Giunti-Organizzazioni Speciali. Soresi, S., & Nota, L. (2000). Interessi e scelte: come si evolvono e si rilevano le preferenze professionali. [Interests and choices: How to evolve and detect professional preferences]. Firenze: GiuntiOrganizzazioni Speciali. Super, D. E. (1957). The psychology of careers; An introduction to vocational development. New York: Harper & Brothers. Super, D. E. (1974). Measuring vocational maturity for counseling and evaluation. Washington, DC: National Vocational Guidance Association. Swanson, J. L., & Fouad, N. A. (1999). Applying theories of person-environment fit to the transition from school to work. The Career Development Quarterly, 47(4), 337–347. Vallerand, R. J. (2010). On passion for life activities: The dualistic model of passion. In Mark P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 97– 193). New York: Academic Press.

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Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing

2.1

Introduction: From the Recent Past to Present Times

As we already had the opportunity to highlight, the ‘Glorious Thirty’ has been a period of social progress for the Western context. During the said period, sectors of society that used to have a passive role began mobilizing making their instances clear, widening and spreading rights. From an economic standpoint, financial institutions were entrusted with the task of fostering opportunity with the circulation of resources and using a regulatory system to which banks were required to join. These regulations involved currency speculation and the export of capital. Differentiation between commercial banks and investment institutions was included in the above-mentioned regulations. As a result, risky investments were limited, especially the ones that could have led to negative outcomes for the citizens. Companies mostly operated in order to favor productive processes, having their best interest in the state of health of said companies, from which derived the general well-being. This led to a mostly well-rounded development that hinted at the possibility of sharing the same process with the poorest populations. Everything was fine because the richest kept having their slice of pie and their wealth remained untouched. Things changed in the ‘70s, when the growth stopped. Wealth loss was immediately blatant, and the holders of capital tried to exploit the crisis as an excuse to dismantle the embedded

capitalism (Hickel, 2012). During the late ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s an offensive was launched in order to counter the egalitarian actions and to support the idea that it is necessary to safeguard both rights and freedoms, with particular attention to that of ‘being rich’. The belief that people were starting to belittle richness begun and, in some instances, it was possible to witness cases of ‘persecution’ against people who had it. A push toward a different social model was recorded and neoliberal policies started to acquire shape. This happened thanks to phenomena such as globalization and technological advancements (Galli & Caligiuro, 2017). In this chapter, we are keen to draw the reader’s attention to the different conditions that characterize our times. With the awareness that, on one hand, we are carrying out a simple summary of topics that deserve an in-depth analysis and study of the work of different colleagues from different disciplines. On the other hand, it is important to have an initial form of awareness of what is happening so that we can find the strength to create new operational paths.

2.2

Neoliberal Ideological Derivations of the Present Era

Some authors (e.g., Adams & Markus, 2004) affirm that during these last decades there has been the spreading of a different cultural approach that has its origins in a political-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4_2

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economic movement named ‘neoliberalism’. This movement is characterized by ideas, behaviors, and beliefs that deeply affected social and institutional structures, not always in a positive way (Adams & Markus, 2004). We are taking into account a sort of ‘philosophical belief’, a vision of reality that, albeit its elaboration derives from a potpourri of different economic and political doctrines that differ depending on the places and circumstances, has outlined modalities of conceiving the individual and social life that led to the spreading of vulnerabilities (Beattie, 2019). We are well aware, together with other scholars, that the term is being overused (Hooley, Sultana, & Thompson, 2017). Furthermore, while considering this cultural pattern, it would be naïve of us to think that behind all of this there is the work of a ‘specter’ that operates behind our backs in order to deliberately give birth to the social problems of the present day. The society in which we live is complex, it requires an articulated network between wealth redistribution processes and the creation of the said wealth. It requires inclination to stability and social status quo and to social openness. These factors are to be connected every time with different socio-economic conditions, even mediated, aimed at the softening of problems (Mingardi, 2019). Anyway, a big amount of data is supporting the fact that during these last decades we had the opportunity to witness the work of multinationals distributed on a global scale and stronger and stronger business groups that wanted to favor global markets. In order to be able to produce at the lowest possible costs and without any regard for the human factor, they used operations of delocalization and unregulated capital movement. The focus of the economy shifted away from a production-centered situation, typical of the previous historic context, to one that had its main interest in financialization. This is linked to complex exploitation of capital, aimed at benefitting personal enrichment and at the expense of long-term economic investment and that strives

to depletion and destruction of natural resources when in absence of rules and controls (Gidron & Hall, 2017; Mazzucato, 2018). In recent times, since the 2008 crisis, in Western countries, we have witnessed actions on public spending that had the purpose of saving funded institutions and banks considered to be ‘too big’ to fail. This has to be put in relation to the large and often uncollectable debt of households and businesses that were caught in the stranglehold of consumerism and credit practices (Mazzucato & Jacobs 2017). Nowadays, we have the inclination to maintain a certain state intervention that has the ability to repurpose forms of banking and financial regulation and to outline an environmental regulation that charges polluting companies. This inclination seems to be associated, among those who have considerable interests to safeguard, with the idea that globalization does not help to maintain wealth and that maybe a sort of ‘national neoliberalism’ is necessary (Colantone & Stanig, 2019). Leaving transformations and chameleon-like formulas aside, what gives these trajectories a proper characterization is the idea that economy is the core of everything and that it may “divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn’t have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility” in order to support markets (Nevrakadis & Giroux, 2015, p. 450). In name of the economy, there has probably been an exceed of deregulation of professional and environmental protection, fueled by the idea that privatization is the only successful strategy. The thought that the individual wellbeing is strictly connected to a series of objects and their functionality and consumption started to spread. We assisted to commercialization processes and the spreading of market laws in a lot of fields of our lives that even concern public water supplies and dating. Constant improvement is essential; there is tireless research for new products, new markets, and new ideas. Competition and rivalry are what allow this, the ‘source of social progress’, to the benefit of the individual (Dardot &

2.2 Neoliberal Ideological Derivations of the Present Era

Laval, 2013; Galli & Caligiuri, 2017; Nevrakadis & Giroux 2015); Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher, considers neoliberalism a doctrine in which “you are free to do anything, as long as it involves shopping” (2008, p. 51), and that makes us consider the push that derives from the economic, financial and entrepreneurial world. Said push was given to worldwide politics in order to give space to property, free markets, free trades, to the re-interpretation of the role of the State. This should be considered in the same way as an institution that creates cultural and fiscal basis to support all of this. We have the impression that what was born to defend the values of liberalism, of the free market, became something that is everything but free, based on monopolies, financial speculations and tricks created to preserve the wealth of those who already have it (Mason, 2019). Birth and Spreading of Neoliberalism. The birth of neoliberalism as a partially organized intellectual and politic movement conventionally dates back to 1947, date of the constitution of Mont Pelerin Society and to its actual blooming in 1970, with the works of the School of Chicago started by some professors of the University of Chicago. They integrated the neoclassic economy with some elements of the Austrian School. During the course of time, this school, because of the above-mentioned worries, begins to receive financial and political backing, from the United States in particular, on behalf of billionaires and companies’ big executives that were against every form of intervention and regulation of the State in the economic processes. The movement started to gain the spotlight, especially in the United States and in Great Britain, supported by various think tanks that were well-funded by prestigious institutions like the London Institute of Economic Affairs and the Washington Heritage Foundation. It also synergistically worked with the academic world institutions, among which we have to highlight the role of the University of Chicago where Milton Friedman, an important figure of the above-mentioned approach, covered a role of paramount importance. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, just a few years after the one

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that was given to Hayek in 1974, that highlighted the neoliberalist thought (Harvey, 2007).1 Friedman’s receipt contain three main ingredients: (a) deregulation, intended as the elimination of the rules that regulate economic life and that can limit profits; (b) privatization, intended as the replacement of public services with private services, giving advantage to the latter; (c) reduction of social expenses, particularly true for the pension system, healthcare, and unemployment support. The market needs a bigger space, given its ability of autoregulation and of giving birth to an exact number of products at the right price, created by workers that receive salaries that are sufficient to buy those same products: a perfect world of full employment, creativity and, more importantly, perpetual growth. Once these ideas begin to take shape, we assist to a process of ‘planetarization’, with ‘experiments’ and actions in different parts of the world that determine an assumption of these policies at a global level. It is important to recall, in this frame, that only the commitment of the British Conservative Party in the late ‘70s starts policies marked by neoliberalism. The same applies for what Ronald Reagan did in the late ‘80s with the Republican Party in the United States: implementing measures to contain trade unions, to deregulate industry, agriculture, and exploitation of resources, and to liberalize financial activities at a national and world level. Reagan was also sure that giving more money to the rich was a way to stimulate economic growth, assuming that they would invest their finances in the improvement of production capacity, creating additional profits that would gradually “trickle” down towards the remaining society (trickledown theory). Supporters of the neoliberal shift began occupying largely dominant positions in research and education, especially in Universities and wealthy private research institutions, in 1

Harvey (2007) underlines that the prize for economics, even if it carries the name ‘Nobel’ with it, is officially a Swedish Bank prize for economic sciences, in the memory of Alfred Nobel, that has nothing to deal with the other prizes that are called with the same name, and that is under the strict control of the Swedish banking élite.

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2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

media, in key State structures, such as treasury ministries and central banks, and in international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, which regulate global finance and trade. Around the year 1990, much of the economics departments of major Universities as well as business management schools were dominated by neoliberal thinking. The big economicfinancial groups ran the press and the media; the economic-financial press, with the Wall Street Journal in the lead, adopted these ideas and openly supported neoliberalism as a necessary solution to everything that was wrong with the economy. Even in politics, both the right and left party accepted these basic ideas: the slogan « less state, more market » , especially since the 1990s, saw a partial political convergence between the major conservative and progressive parties in Europe and the United States. In the field of political communication, the left party emphasized the modernizing and egalitarian action of the market, while the right party put emphasis on the idea of negative freedom inherited from free-thinking (Harvey, 2007).2 Élites, Plutocracy, and Plutonomy. It starts to be clear that economic élites are the ones that hold the real power. In these élites, the predominant place is the one occupied by the great American dynasties that established multiple connections with whom occupies relevant positions at a governmental and administrative level, through the use of the so-called ‘liquid relations’, difficult to see for the majority of the population. They are very rich people who have been rich for generations, just a few of them come from the lower middle classes. In addition, there are also the great leaders who occupy the two or three

2

Negative Freedom is the non-interference of State power on individual actions: the less the State regulates the individual’s life, the more he/she is free. On the less the State regulates his/her life Kant’s footsteps, there is the distinction between freedom ‘of’ (positive) and freedom ‘from’ (negative).

positions at the top of a hundred of the most powerful economic groups, for example from the oil sector or from the industrial, commercial and semi-public sectors, the top management of the multinationals, and those responsible for some Universities and large publishing groups, which, as we all know, can affect public opinion both directly and indirectly. Some of the managers of the ‘core’ companies have studied in the most prestigious Universities, among which some belong to the famous top ten Universities and sometimes have even taught or teach in these same institutions of economics and law. They have the ability to create a certain union between élites and the academic world (Galli & Caligiuro, 2017). We are considering, obviously, a large private élite, which presents itself as a center of power with a concentration of private capital in its hands, capable of guiding the global economic system. Vitali, Battiston, and Glattfelder (2011) come to the conclusion that there are about fifty ‘global’ societies that represent the heart of the world economy, with about 65 people, unknown to the majority of the population, with very consistent powers, that supported ‘electoral campaigns’ with care, in order to obtain advantages like laws that have their main focus on deregulation. Helping politicians from both the left and the right wings, creating a vicious circle. These élites are not elected and the managerial positions seem to be assigned not following moral virtues or actual merits; we are taking into consideration co-opted subjects, that have the right characteristic to keep the system standing, like the inclination to create lobbies and to sometimes act in an immoral way. It is possible to find people that are involved in episodes of tax evasion, illicit trafficking and so on, without losing any power; these people share the same educational paths and the same worldview. These are people with the tendency to personal enrichment, leaving aside every interest for the nation and, sometimes, even for their own companies, as the Enron and Lehman Brothers scandals have shown (Chomsky, 2017). This élite has evolved in a sort of global élite, a community, that has its meetings in the World Economic Forum, crossing the now narrow

2.2 Neoliberal Ideological Derivations of the Present Era

national borders.3 The heads of technology have joined them, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. This poses at the center of our thoughts more questions connected to the management of the gigantic amount of ‘private’ and ‘personal’ information owned, to the business models focused on the commercialization of said data, collected from single subjects that renounce to their own privacy to have access to the internet, and to the manipulations that they can do creating deceiving effects that affect the comprehension of reality (Mazzucato, 2019; Nota, 2019). Not by chance, the Internet is also known as ‘propaganda ministry’, capable of weakening the democratic structure of our society. It is managed by people that, working in harmony with what we have mentioned above, are considered to be ‘tax evasion top-rankers’, that have the inclination not to pay the due fees (Galli & Caligiuro, 2017). These companies and multinationals create cohesion between them, an unity of intent, forging tight relations with banks and financial institutions, thanks to what is known as the ‘interlocking directorate’, or in other words the holding of different positions, for example in different administrative boards, by ‘the same people’. This reduces the possibility of controls and new entries. Carboni (2008) talks about ‘revolving doors’ between the world of business, politics, professions, councils of private and public administration, with the movement of the same individuals from one position to another, mostly linked to the relationships that they have. The economic power handled in this way is enormous and to describe these situations we talk about ‘plutocracy’, or power detained by the rich, and of ‘plutonomy’, or the fellowship of those that have extraordinary wealth, that are at

3

This system shows a contradiction with liberalism theoretical statements: it is a system in which decisions are taken by a restricted number of people, in contrast to the free market theory that involves an actual competition and a higher number of economic operators.

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the top of multinationals or financial institutions or big industrial systems.4 The Idea of State. These multinationals, financial institutions, commercial empires, banks and their multiple connections, have high economic power. A power that is probably bigger of the one held by governmental institutions. This power seems to be characterized by a scarcity of patriotism, a low sense of social responsibility and it seems to be attracted mostly by its own interest and gain. For those, it needs specific conditions that should be granted by the State. Firstly, it is fundamental to have a ‘docile government’, capable of managing basic emergencies like the ones connected to land protection and of providing ideas for innovation, supporting research and development (Galli & Caligiuro, 2017). Another fundamental task is to help communities to face the difficulties often connected with recklessness aimed at obtaining bigger and bigger profit, like failure or workforce reduction. Let us think at banks: nowadays they are a concentration of power so big that it sustains itself. They are ‘too big to fail’, but even too big for someone to go to prison in order to pay the consequences for their inappropriate behavior. We have been able to observe that banks are kept safe while citizens are left stranding, in the almost total impunity of who has created the

4

In order to give an example, we would like to report an excerpt of a dossier published by one of the big American banking institutions, the Citigroup, in which the followers are encouraged to particularly focus on these categories of people, in order to create a ‘specific investment portfolio’ (October 16, 2005): “The World is dividing into two blocs —the Plutonomy and the rest. The U.S., UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies—economies powered by the wealthy […]. In plutonomies the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy and have a massive impact on reported aggregate numbers like savings rates, current account deficits, consumption levels, etc. This imbalance in inequality expresses itself in the standard scary “global imbalances”. […]In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

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2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

problems, with a ‘nanny state’ ready to intervene (Chomsky, 2017). We should keep in mind that these groups have so much power than even politicians are in debt with them for the received support or for being between those who can go through the revolving doors; this leads to the probability of having a biased writing of rules, regulations, a draft of laws, specifically financial ones. Hacher and Loewentheil (2012) affirm that neoliberalism’s greatest desire, for which ‘market should rule everything’, is for the government to be excluded from the elaboration of economic policies, from the management of acquired rights and from the welfare system. The contradiction appears to be evident and obvious: the State has to help the rich and has to be ready to save them, but this is not true for poor people. In this case, the construction of the tax system requires attention. This system should be created in a way that slightly involves rich people while focusing on a big part of the population with payroll and consumption taxes that involve everyone, avoiding the stock dividends, great wealth and so on. It becomes useful a State that: (a) allows the exploitation of natural resources in order to have cheap raw material, spaces, and areas to deprive in order to advantage nowadays’ profit. This is done without thinking about the fact that this process puts our grandchildren’s possibility of living on a healthy Earth at stake; (b) creates the right condition for the others to accept the reduction of rights, precariousness, and exploitation; (c) reduces the ‘thinking abilities’ of women and men of science, filling their activities with bureaucratic-administrative actions end emphasizing the attention to assessments. Students should pay higher tuition fees, the State should reduce the space they use to gather, to organize, to make their voice be heard. The same should be done also for State schools, for teachers and their pupils, occupying their time with tests and evaluations. There is the need for a State that helps to reduce social cohesion, promoting through messages, schoolbooks, and media, the idea that selfcare is the only thing that matters and that we should not care about the others. Solidarity, at the

welfare’s root, should be fought since it presupposes the fact that we should care about the others, that we should pay taxes so that who is experiencing difficulties in life has the possibility of sustaining him/herself. People who own great wealth consider this as something disadvantageous, and therefore they require a tax reduction, even if this brings to a reduction of public services. On the other hand, they promote private services, because they have the possibility of becoming a source of new wealth. The same approach is applied to education: if the welfare needs everyone to pay taxes so that every citizen, even those in financial difficulty, can have access to education, neoliberal thought requires less public investment, fewer taxes to favor public education, promoting, at the same time, the privatization of the educational services. There is the need for a State that helps demonizing public support and welfare (Chomsky, 2017). In addition, there is the need of a State that helps to weaken relations between workers and that attacks trade unions, in order to keep the few that hold privileges and power safe, saving them from the spotlight and public thinking. This is the reason why it is useful to reduce the use of such words as ‘class’, that should be considered as something that belongs to the past, and ‘profit’, that brings the attention to those who are wealthy. At the same time, those words should be replaced with expressions like ‘creating more jobs’, which apparently focus the attention on the citizens, but, in reality, hide the interest in delocalization and in making profits independently from the new jobs.5In conclusion, there is the need for a State that helps to build consent, that favor distraction from the ‘core’ topics, that creates desires and necessities so that irrational choices and consumptions can be advantageous, that steers anger, disappointment, and negative 5

In 2007, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve,Fed Alan Greenspan summarized the new era ideology in this way: “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largerly replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces” (interview for the Zurich paper Tages-Anzeiger).

2.2 Neoliberal Ideological Derivations of the Present Era

attention that are often connected with unpleasant situations lived, against the weakest and most vulnerable people. In this way, having a scapegoat, it would be easy not to think about the negative life conditions.

2.3

And Again: Globalization, Precariousness, Competition, Financialization, Migration, Robotization, Outsourcing, Externalization, Privatization, Exploitation of Natural Resources

These policies have been eased by different factors, by a thick and complex network of terms, some parts of which will be highlighted in the following pages. Globalization, Precariousness, Competition, Financialization, Migration. Globalization concerns the presence of international exchanges and investments on a global scale. During the course of the second half of the last century and during the first decades of the current one, these processes have become more frequent and favored a higher interdependence among national economies. This led to social, cultural, politic and technological interdependences as well and their positive outcome was and still is of global importance (Bauman, 2001). Globalization surely made possible the sharing of cultures, customs, thought, suggesting precious stimuli for worldly cultural processes. At the same time, it allowed an unregulated and free movement of capital, the consequent difficulty in taxing it, the development of large production networks that have ‘world workforce’ and, therefore, reduction of production costs (Chomsky, 2017; Crouch, 2019). Globalization is a complex phenomenon that articulates itself in at least four ‘waves’ starting from the end of the XIX century, that intertwines themselves with historical, social and economic events. They even mix with forms of imperialism, colonialism and international trades. We would like to focus on the so-called third and fourth wave (Crouch, 2019) or ‘High Globalization’. This period goes from the end of the ‘80s to the

21

first decade of the 2000s, from the fall of Berlin wall to the global financial crisis, characterized by financial deregulation processes. In this period, we can assist to changes in communication, commercial openings, and trades between people of different countries. Global economy became even more interdependent when counties like China, the Soviet Union, Eastern countries, and India came into play. The so-called peripheral markets opened: as a matter of fact, with the fall of Berlin wall there has been the reintegration of excommunist economies in the world economic system, adding about half billion people to the ones that already were in said system. At the same time, gradually, a billion people from China and a billion more from India came into play. Furthermore, in Western countries there has been a general population increase, leading to a workforce growth, beside the fact the in the so-called central countries’ markets there was the new possibility of hiring the workforce of the peripheral countries directly in situ because of the effects of migration (Milanovic, 2017). One of the phenomena that went side by side with globalization is delocalization, which has given its contribution in emptying nations’ productive ability, causing negative consequences for the environment and the hiring of workforce in different countries, since it has lower costs because of the almost total absence of basic standards that should guarantee health insurance and safety. Delocalization does not stop the entrepreneurs from getting richer and richer; they just do it somewhere else. This is a damaging process for poor Western populations in particular, but it is profitable for managers, executives, stakeholders. It is a process that expresses freedom exclusively associated with capitals and not with workers. There has definitely been a fostering of economic well-being in some other parts of the world. In relation to this, Milanovic (2017), besides stating that rich people coming from USA, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and Russia achieve the real triumph, underlines that the middle classes of emerging countries such as China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia are among the winners of this globalization process. Even if it is

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2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

important to underline that these winners have a lower income level than their Western counterparts. The losers belong to the Western countries’ middle/low-middle classes since they are experiencing stagnation. The impossibility to understand the basic rules of these conditions, the game that is played only to advantage the profit of the few, the superficial vision given, leads to the fact that the workers from all over the world perceive that they are one against each other. Here we encounter different scenarios, ranging from the American workers asking for duties, to the Chinese ones that are fighting, with major difficulties, for protection and rights. Furthermore, this way of acting exports all over the world the economic vision that is the base for everything described so far. A terrible one, based on wealth’s value, on exploitation and on the absence of rights. These values are still growing because of the freedom granted to ‘capital’ and to the ‘protection’ given to all of this. Another phenomenon that became popular is the labor market’s precariousness, or rather, the investment in precariousness. Alan Greenspan, an economist from the United States, President of the Federal Reserve, United States’ central bank, from 1987 to 2006, in a speech to the American Congress stated that the success in economic management is connected with workers’ insecurity.6 On February 26, 1997, he stated: “[…] Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff. The reluctance of workers to leave their jobs to seek other employment as the labor market tightened has provided further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor union contracts. For many decades, contracts rarely exceeded 3 years. Today, one can point to 5- and 6-year contracts— contracts that are commonly characterized by an emphasis on job security and that involve only modest wage increases. The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security. Thus, the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented.

The idea that the workers should be kept in a state of insecurity start to spread together with the idea that instilling the fear of losing what is yours is connected with a decrease in the inclination of asking for a better salary, decent work conditions, the right to free association and membership to a trade union (Saraceno, 2019). In this way, people will not have excessive demands, they will be content with a mediocre job, will not ask for raises or decent work conditions. It is even possible to ask for an increase in working hours, which represent another factor able of acting as a control system because of the fact that people will have less free time because of the number activities in which they are involved in and, consequently, less time to think and to act freely. Moreover, for society’s ‘sake’ we allowed competition to prevail, bringing the ‘everyone for him/herself’ idea. Everyone is prone to competition and looking for new ways to be even more competitive in the globalized markets, always finding ways to attract businesses, societies, and possibilities within their own borders. This is done with the lowering of incomes, or taxation reduction, or by increasing taxation on the most unfortunate people, searching forms of tax or social competition (for example the reduction of services’ expenses and subsequent privatization of them) imagining that it will obtain the same consequences that competition produces on markets all around the world.7 Unfortunately,

6

7

It is obvious that we have to keep in mind that markets are not ‘perfect’ and organized as in the most classic economic theories. Today we have ‘global’ companies, strong and powerful multinationals, that have monopolies that can jeopardize the original idea of competition, based on the hypothesis that economic agents should not have power on other economic agents. It is well known that these companies control the market to the advantage of their own profit, forbidding the development of similar activities. If a new company is trying to emerge, they buy it to prevent competition, reducing, as a matter of fact, the efficacy of the market. As evidence of their complete social insensitivity, multinationals aim at making States compete one against each other, encouraging them to modify their tax regimes, in order to have them in their territory. Some make ‘fiscal presents’ in the conviction that it is better to have companies that pay small taxes with respect to not having any. In Europe, as a consequence, there is an imbalance among countries, and this makes having a common tax policy even harder (Fitoussi, 2019).

2.3 And Again: Globalization, Precariousness, Competition …

one’s competition will stimulate others to adapt, creating fiscal and salary conditions that are advantageous for few like entrepreneurs and companies, but disadvantageous mostly in terms of poverty increase, services reduction and inequality increase. This creates a negative vicious circle, an overall game of diminishing returns. In this way, every form of compensation is eliminated from social life, having its roots in the fact that who has been favored should reward the unfortunate. The same applies to every form of solidarity, since it goes beyond the idea of the ‘fair return’ and requires to those who have more to give more, having its basis on the belief that social good needs an equal distribution in an equal way, or at least a redistribution of wealth, opportunities, rights, equity and well-being (Fotoussi, 2019). Chomsky (2017) underlines a moment that played, in his opinion, an essential role in all of this: when economy shifted from a productioncentered situation, typical of the previous period, to one that has its main focus on financialization and that is strictly connected to complex movement of capital. It is possible to observe how the top positions are occupied by people who have studied in business schools and that learned financial tricks, with the inclination to put themselves before the company, to make a career, to flaunt the quarter results in order to get a better bonus and to prepare ‘golden parachutes’ in case of failure. These are operations that do not work in harmony with long-term development projects. We gave value to the short-term and to immediate result, damaging long-term opportunities because of the inclination human beings have to give less values to future results. They are seen in an unclear way and their importance is diminished because of the creation of managers encouraged in the research of high dividends, even if this means to cut investments and not look at the future (Mazzucato & Jacobs, 2016). Resources have been used to increment wealth investing in money, in speculations and in fast and high-profit activities, with high risks and speculation, such as betting on dropping or rising prices. This leads to household indebtedness, to the extraction of profits that benefit managers and

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shareholders, using investment funds to buy companies in difficulty in order to make them more efficient, so that profit can be maximized. At the same time, they cut short-term costs by dismissing workers and reducing investments, in order to resell those same companies and create profit. This kind of finance subtracts value instead of creating it (Mazzucato, 2018). All of this is strictly connected with migratory phenomena. If on one hand, it is true that globalization allowed us to better understand other countries, their customs, eating habits and so on, on the other hand, it allowed people from the poorest regions to discover more about the wealthiest countries, to be even encouraged in an immoderate use of internet and television, to desire goods, products, and to migrate, so that some countries could grant themselves that service, or the exploitation, for working activities or political matters, of people that have already lost everything that enabled them to live better in their own home (Crouch, 2019). In this period, we are assisting to mass migration phenomena, with a growing trend, despite the debated and associated topics, in terms of inclusion, exclusion, hostility towards the foreigner, forms of economic exploitation, forms of xenophobia, while reflections on the actual causes are almost none. There is little coverage on the effects of Western countries on the non-Western populations, on the construction of enormous dams in order to satisfy the need for electric energy of predatory industrial facilities. The same is true for the control over fossil beds, for biodiversity destruction connected to the developmental helps given by Western chemical industries, for the abandonment of subsistence farming in order to favor monocultures, to satisfy the needs for exotic products and for the installation of an oil field, or of a dump of toxic waste. This creates environments, lands, and communities where living becomes impossible and, consequently, people are pushed to look for better living conditions in Western countries (Califano, 2019; Cerny, 2010; De Rosa, 2019; Irving, 2018; Pallante, 2018). Robotization. As we already know, we live in a postmodern society where digital, e-commerce,

24

2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

internet and technologies have a strong presence in our lives. Thanks to them, we can state that there has been an improvement in our living conditions, mostly in relation to better diagnostic possibilities, to the speed in communications and to the facilitation in the performance of human hard work. Social robots ease a series of educational processes, they help to manage the pain and make the performance of hospital therapies easier. Ambient Assisted Living gives a solution to people with disabilities in order to break down barriers so that they can live their life to the fullest (Canazza et al., 2019). We cannot avoid pointing out that the list of advantages given by robotics could be a lot longer. At the same time, it is true that there are some quite substantial downsides that are to be associated with the use of products and services and to employment. It is not by chance that this period is usually defined as ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (Schwab, 2016), or ‘third digital revolution’ (Gershenfeld, Gershenfeld, & Cutcher-Gershenfeld, 2017), or even ‘robotic apocalypse era’ (Mishel & Bivens, 2017). Concerning production and the fruition of products and services, with digital transformation came the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’. As a matter of fact, technological innovations tend to be ‘destructive’ since they radically change production, products, services, and their fruition, in short temporal spaces, determining, at the same time, the inclination of companies to constantly research ‘innovations’ and change in order to survive (Bertelè, 2014; Bower & Christensen 1996; Downes & Nunes, 2014). Let us recall the disruptive effect of smartphones and tablets and their possibility to offer, through the use of apps and low investments, a broad number of ‘services’ that led to the destruction of entire productive sectors (examples of this process are the editorial and photographic sectors). These fields, in order to have a future, need ongoing ‘innovation’ that reinforces the ‘shopping mindset’ (Bertelè, 2014; Soresi, 2016). As regards employment, we have to keep in mind that new technologies and their consequent spreading is associated with the substitution of the human workforce, with a process that, both in

past and in present times, is unbalanced. It promotes the highly qualified and disadvantages low qualified people. This process aims at the substitution of routine jobs by reducing the salary of those doing it (let us think about the role computers have in travel agencies), promoting the substitution of production factors that are relatively expensive. This being the case of the workforce in Western countries.8 What really differentiates the present period from the past ones can be summarized in two main concepts: (a) everything we described happens in a context in which the prices of capital goods (what is needed in order to produce) have already been lowered thanks to globalization and to the existence of a low-paid workforce in China and Asia; (b) artificial intelligence is starting to replace some tasks even in professional sectors that were once believed to be untouchable such as the medical, financial, journalistic, and legal ones, leading to further job losses (Frey & Osborne, 2017). In 2013, Frey and Osborne suggest some estimations indicating that 47% of the total employment of the United States was risking automatization in the very near future, that is to say, in two decades. We cannot underestimate the role of technological progress used as an expedient to ‘discipline the workers’, to impose strict rules, even implicit ones, and forms of exploitation in terms of working hours and conditions. Moore and Robinson (2016) state that the idea that robots could take the place of human beings push workers to ‘let out the last drops of blood they have’ and to promote the idea that they should work like computers. This is a well-known concept for Amazon employees. They pay the 8

In this sense, technological progress tends to act in a similar way to the past. During the first technological revolution, a similar trend has been observed, that involved high salaries that encouraged to look for a replacement of work with capital (Alana, 2013). It is also interesting to remember that the same problem existed in previous ages, for example in the Roman era. However, the existence of slaves was very advantageous, and this somehow avoided the consideration regarding how to replace them, despite the first steam machine was invented in Alessandria during the II century B.C. as a toy.

2.3 And Again: Globalization, Precariousness, Competition …

consequences of what above mentioned from a psychological and physical point of view. Wajcman (2017) underlines that nowadays we not only work 7 days out of 7 but we also do it usually for more than the classical 8 h a day. Moreover, the big names in technology (like Google) establish the basis of their brands on the work of employees that ‘clean up the data’, encode said data, and eliminate pornographic aspects, while being under ‘subcontracts’. This means that they rely on those who perform new, underpaid, ‘assembly line’ jobs. These workers respond to characteristics that are already known to us, such as gender, ethnicity, and social class. This is happening with no profit reduction for the companies and with an investment that keeps the jobs, but at the same causes the worsening of working conditions for a large number of people, the widening of the wage gap, and the polarization of wealth and of work itself (Ford, 2015). Outsourcing, Externalization, Privatization. In line with the above-mentioned phenomena, a workforce shift, mostly in the Western context, has been observed, from the manufacturing activities to the tertiary sector and services. Jones (1982), analyzing the theme of the tertiary sector, talks about the ‘quaternary sector’. That is to say, a sector that has its focus in human capital, in nurturing it (education, formation, and culture), in expanding it (scientific and technological research), in managing it (personnel management, mobility agencies, and job placement), in preserving and reproducing it (health, care, and free time industry), entertainment and culture industries, focused on knowledge. This means that we could have services in a lot of different fields: transport and communications, commercial services, tourism, insurance and banking services, management, administrative services, consultancy services (development, training, marketing, etc.), entertainment and culture, and other fields that focus on knowledge. This means that, beside deindustrialization, there has been the tertiary development of the economy that, in all honesty, helped to cope with the serious unemployment phenomena observed in Western countries. At the same time, together with the growing de-unionization, the concept of work in

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these fields is associated with precariousness (Crouch, 2019). It appears evident that the outsourcing we are taking into consideration is in line with the above-mentioned conditions, promoting the construction of neoliberal systems. As a matter of fact, the tertiary sector mostly requires activities that are characterized by customer relations that are always more frequent, but it also requires efficiency, efficacy, frequent updates, even more than in the industrial field. At the same time, people find themselves working in fields that are more heterogeneous than the manufacturing sector in terms of qualifications, tasks, activities, with a higher wage differentiation and, consequently, a greater division and less importance on a contractual level (Milanovic, 2017). Everything happens within a generalized austerity context that focuses in the reduction of public services while disadvantaging the families in which there are people that can not find jobs, that lost them because of globalization or that have precarious, unqualified and poorly paid jobs (Pallante, 2018). There is even more to be added: recently, when thinking about services, the term ‘fundamental economy’ comes up. This term refers to essential life aspects of people’s lives, such as the supply of energy, gas, water, education, care and support, wastewater and sewerage management, food supply, mobile network and telecommunications, property maintenance, residential construction, day-to-day banking, and public transport. These services are a social achievement, they are not to be taken for granted and can be subjected to deterioration, as happened in these last periods. At the same time, they require the involvement of a workforce ranging from 40 to 50% of that available, contrary to what happens to the more famous field named KIBS (Knowledge Intensive Business Services). That is to say, the field related to high-knowledge and high-tech industry services, where highly qualified professionals and scientists are employed. This is a field that, in the best-case scenario, manages to employ 10% of the total workforce. Unfortunately, in line with what we have already underlined, these services became subject to

26

2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

predation, in relation to the fact that they are ‘essential’ and sources of ‘constant income’. The tools used for this purpose are privatization, externalization and the use of various financial expedients aimed at compromising long-term strength and prosperity while benefitting a shortterm income. This is to be associated with the fact that private individuals have the inclination to: (a) when possible, like in cases where the service to the individual is taken into account, reduce remunerations and create more penalizing working conditions (increased working hours, work during holidays, flexibility, and so on), while increasing the costs for the State benefits; (b) put pressure on suppliers, like in the case of distribution, damaging processors, farmers and others more that have their profit margins decreased and, therefore, fail or have little to no possibility in investing and upgrading their activity; (c) make unclear and vague costs and benefits for citizens, like in the case of mobile networks, using confusing pricing actions that have the sole purpose of making real prices unclear, increasing the number of offers and tariffs, presenting them in a vague and confusing way, creating a broad margin for the increase of costs for users and fraud. It is obvious that a lot of sectors that originally were in the public field shifted to the private one. They enriched themselves, creating degradation, let us think about the decline concerning public railways, green areas and big areas with high population density. In addition to this, there has been an adjustment to this trend in the third sector. There has been the transformation of a portion of itself from sector able to work equally and in the market’s right side, to yet another exploitation field, thus completely entrusting the culture of exploitation (Collettivo per l’economia fondamentale [Collective for the Fundamental Economy], 2019). Natural Resources Exploitation and the End of Life on Earth. It is important to keep in mind that production of goods and ‘wellness’, especially in Western contexts and in ‘Westernization’ countries, is based on a vision of ‘resources exploitation’ and on politics that have led and still lead to a use of natural resources that

surpasses the offer, with countries that use way more of what their ecosystem is able to produce, damaging other countries in the process. Humanity is living in a non-sustainable way, using Earth’s limited resources more rapidly than it can create. An iconic example is climate change and the subsequent extreme weather conditions, temperature changes and rising sea levels. The effects of this change are experienced mostly by the poorest. This situation can create tough living conditions, but also increase poverty and diversity and compromise the possibility to live and reach developmental goals for future generations (Giovannini, 2018). Actually, as we already underlined, everything we mentioned is leading us into the abyss. Problems are becoming so great that environmental but also social and economic variation associated with them and to which we were and are subjected, can be associated with disastrous consequences for everyone. If the non-sustainability condition is met, if we go beyond Earth’s limit thresholds, we will find ourselves in a critical situation and life as a whole will be at risk. We will not have time to adapt our functions to new and changed conditions (Giovannini, 2018). We are facing what might be the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, with little awareness of the majority of the population, with more and more intense climatic events that will put life on the planet at risk, with radical changes in the hydrosphere, fundamental for all life forms and that is collapsing. “Our world is facing an unseen and terrifying future, different from any previous period in human history” (Rifkin, 2019, p. 7). Moreover, the experience associated to Coronavirus (Covid-19), the global pandemic, seems to be related also to a poor ecosystems management. As stated by the virologist Ilaria Capua, director of One Health Center of Excellence of the Florida University, already before everything happened (2012a), emergencies and pandemic, such as Coronavirus, will become more and more frequent in the future due to the lack of balance created in the ecosystems and to the poor ‘interaction’ between man and environment (Capua, 2012b). The virologist, more recently (Capua, 2020), emphasized the fact that

2.3 And Again: Globalization, Precariousness, Competition …

an improper and predatory invasion of natural life created favorable conditions for the so-called ’species leap’ of the viruses. All of this, together with life conditions worsened by inequalities and relations focused on extremely economic aspects, can only increase the negative consequences. The neoliberal vision we analyzed in this chapter emphasizes the ‘maximization of individual freedom and interest’ combination, the same is true for the privatization of resources, considered as the best form of protection against the ‘tragedy of common proprieties’. A lot of non-Western countries fell in a deathly trap because of the mineral resources at their disposal. They became dependent on their exploitation, with economies based on the control of areas in which deposits are present and on the extraction of said resources. Forests and habitats in general are being or have been destroyed and there have been different heated conflicts aimed at land control, further weakening fragile democracies and diminishing the already poor possibility of social, cultural and economic promotion in some countries (Crouch, 2019). The American biologist Hardin, in a 1968 article, clarified the long-term consequences of behaviors focused on an individualistic vision of reality where only low resources are available. He suggested the case of a rangeland open for everybody by a group of shepherds. If these shepherds focus on the pursuit of their own interest, an understandable choice made in name of personal freedom, then each one of them will try to take advantage of the situation and increase its usefulness. Each one will try, in other words, to increase the number of sheep in their herd, regardless of the social costs that intensive use of common resources may involve. Giving to the maximization of freedom and personal interest combination space to develop, is associated with a behavior that is rationally in line with all of this: increasing one’s herd with no regard for the gradual rangeland’s over-exploitation and deterioration, with socialization costs. As a matter of fact, the increase of a head of cattle increases the individual profit (+1), and it divides the costs among all the shepherds, being just a fraction of the same unit (−1). In the biologist’s opinion,

27

which is shared by a lot of other experts nowadays, this leads to tragedy: the absence of rules, of a normative that safeguards destination and use, because of the scarcity and of the selfish shepherd’s actions, puts common resources at stake and in a state of increasing depletion. Unfortunately, neoliberal vision demonized regulation, pushing everyone in the opposite direction. In this way, soil and water have to be transferred as much as possible to the private sphere in order to be deregulated and freed from public attention, the main obstacle for economic development. These resources have to be subjected to free competition because it eliminates unnecessary bureaucracy and improves efficiency in use and in productivity (Harvey, 2007). It is impossible for us not to consider what is called ‘the green growth lie’, that is to say, the idea that technological progress permits a decoupling between economic growth and the impact it has on the climate and natural resources. The Decoupling Debunked document published in July 2019 by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB, 2019), result of the work of an international research team with a network of more than 1443 organizations and with bases in more than 30 countries, highlights the risks and limits of these greedy actions. It also states that there is the need for a paradigmatic shift based on the complete revision of lifestyles that involve consumption and exploitation of fossil resources.

2.4

Inequalities

The conditions that characterize our times are associated with a phenomenon that is becoming of significant importance: inequality. The document redacted by Oxfam (2018) highlights that we are living in a period characterized by extreme inequalities, with great richness in the hands of few people, and the majority of the population living in precarious conditions, poverty, struggles, and difficulties. The belief that ‘the neoliberal system rewards avidity at the expense of our future’ becomes stronger, together with the ones that support the

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2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

idea that private services penalize poor people and favor élites, and that a ‘more human’ economy is needed, in order to avoid the collapse of the whole human society. In this society, fairness, justice, and inclusion have to be the base of economic prosperity, depending on public services that guarantee healthcare, education, and fiscal systems that allow the creation of the above-mentioned situation by taxing in a fair way richness and capitals and forbidding tax evasion by big corporations and rich individuals. Inequality is not unavoidable, it is the result of precise political choices and Stiglitz (2018) clearly claims that inequalities are the results of factors such as globalization and economy financialization, technological changes, the transition to a service economy, taxations that favor rich people, the contrast to workers’ influence and their possibility to show solidarity, the tendency to change the rules of the game, and favor laws to the benefit of rich people. Piketty (2013) affirmed that these choices involve consent management and the legitimization setup of inequalities themselves. Franzini and Pianta (2016) underlined that political withdraws and social fragmentation processes are focused on the exhausting and ruinous research of individual solutions for collective problems. All these factors positively foster the above-mentioned system. All of this is at the root of inequalities and of the expansion of social vulnerabilities in different strata of the population (Mingione, 2019; Muechlbach, 2012). What are inequalities? The word inequality means ‘disparity, being unequal, experiencing unfairness’ and the Forum disuguaglianze diversità [Inequalities and Diversity Forum] proposes a distinction between economic and social inequalities. Economic inequalities concern income differences (regarding work, business, capital) in private richness (financial, entrepreneurial and real estate richness), in work (having access to a work that is suitable to one’s abilities, incomes, risks, satisfaction and levels of independence). It also concerns the resulting material life conditions. Economic inequalities determine and make poverty situations chronic.” (Inequalities and Diversity Forum, December 20, 2019, www.forumdisuguaglianzediversita.org).

Social inequalities concern “differences regarding the access and the quality of essential services such as healthcare, education, social care, mobility, safety, the opportunity to live (because of the differences in living costs, houses, social/ethnic origins) in places where creativity and socialization are, and the possibility to use the common capital (healthy environments, places, culture). In addition to these inequalities, there is another one that interacts with them: status inequality and the differentiation that comes from power inequalities” (Inequalities and Diversity Forum, December 20, 2019, www. forumdisuguaglianzediversita.org). It seems obvious that all around the world, from the United States to Brazil, from Europe to Philippines, inequality contributes to the poisoning of political life, and that the most unfair societies are the ‘less happy’ ones, where there are even higher levels of stress and mental illnesses.Becchetti (2019) reminds us that all of this leads to consequences on life expectancy. For example, in San Paolo those who live in rich areas live up to 79 years, while those who live in poor areas aim at living up to 54 years, thus creating a gap of 25 years between the two areas. Pope Francis is another voice that is joining this denounce. In Evangelii Gaudium (2013) he criticizes the idea of the ‘trickle-down’, based on the assumption that those who have economic power and manage economic mechanisms are good people. Thanks to their richness, there could be a ‘trickledown’ that favors, in this way, more or less everybody. Becchetti (2019) reminds us that this theory is based on opinions, that it ‘has never been confirmed by facts’, that it is naïve, rough, unable to produce fairness and inclusion, able just to determine an inequality increase, while ‘excluded people are kept waiting’. Inequalities, particularly when taken to extremes, are associated with worse economic conditions, less efficient markets, the underproduction of valuable goods such as research, and the overproduction of others such as financial products, and opportunities reduction. Poor people cannot have high educational levels and possibilities to realize their potential, with limited intergenerational mobility, so that rich people are

2.4 Inequalities

the sons and daughters of rich people, and poor people are the sons and daughters of poor people, fostering a vicious circle (Stiglitz, 2018). Inequalities’ Consequences. Inequalities have different consequences, that are, most of the times, interconnected. The first consequence concerns poverty, that can be evaluated by taking into consideration living conditions such as severe material deprivation,9 or analyzing incomes that have to deal with monetary, absolute or relative poverty.10 Among the people who experience or have a chance of dealing with these situations, there is a considerable number of immigrants, also second-generation ones, workers of companies that are off the market with obsolete abilities, small commercial or rural entrepreneurs, or businessmen/women dealing with services that are not able to modernize, young marginal precarious workers, that have to accept even lower working conditions, old people excluded from families and communities, people with disabilities, with mental illnesses (Inequalities and Diversity Forum, December, 20, 2019), families that are under the 50% of richness distribution that barely have the money to face emergencies as a broken car, a disease and so on, that create a downward spiral. The inequalities that are closely associated with poverty are called private and common richness inequalities. Private inequalities concern 9

Material deprivation is observed in a family in which there are at least four of the following poverty symptoms: not being able to heat the house, to pay for an unexpected spending, to afford a high-protein meal at least twice a day, to have a week off away from home each year, to have an appliance such as a color TV, a washing machine, or a good such as a car, a mobile phone, not being up-todate with bills, rent, mortgage or other kinds of lending. 10 Absolute poverty concerns the percentage of individuals who live in families with a disposable income equal or lower to a limit defined as “monetary value, at current prices, of goods and services that are considered essential for each family, defined considering the age of its members, the geographical distribution and municipality of residence” (Italian Institute of Statistics [ISTAT], 2019). Relative poverty, or poverty risk, concerns the percentage of individuals who live in families with a disposable income equal or lower to a poverty limit conventionally fixed at 60% of average disposable income of the families in the country of residence (ISTAT, 2019).

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savings accumulation in order to face planned and unexpected spending regarding different goods or services that can be durable, educational and so on. They are also associated with productive and financial capital accumulation, for further profits, social status, and power. Common inequalities concern the possibility to access specific environments that involve life, education, care, entertainment, culture, and the ability to make use of natural goods such as water, air, earth, landscape, quality. According to the Inequalities and Diversity Forum (Forum Disuguaglianze e Diversità, 2020) the ways in which inequalities associated with richness act, also in order to create other inequalities, are five: (a) they reduce the possibility to cope with economic unexpected events, with external shocks, that can trap people into forms of indebtedness and make the contractual power less effective when making decisions; (b) they reduce the chances to refuse an undignified job, not in line with individual ambitions and abilities, not protected, underpaid, taking also into consideration humiliating illegal works linked to criminality; (c) they reduce the chances to rationally manage money and protect it, in order to face everyday necessities so that it becomes difficult to plan the future and save in anticipation of subsequent jobs; (d) they make almost impossible to realize business projects and to increase the possibilities of a future income; (e) they raise the risk to live in socio-environmental poverty and to contribute to it, favoring forms of local squalor and segregation, that seems to favor negligence behaviors towards the environment. A second consequence, strictly connected to what above-mentioned, and, therefore, a result of the compresence of inequalities and poverty, concerns health problems, associated with the rise in infant mortality rates, the reduction of life expectancy, and the return of diseases that were considered eradicated (for example tuberculosis). People who have low incomes and that find themselves in poverty conditions are more exposed to risk factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption, junk food diets, and less healthy lifestyles. The physiological conditions associated with these circumstances have recently been

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2 Threats and Challenges of the XXI Century and the Role …

examined: they include chronic inflammations and chromosomes and brain aging. Sapolsky (2019) underlined that daily stress implicates chronic inflammation forms, which in turn facilitate the outbreak of different diseases, from arterial hypertension to Alzheimer, and heart diseases. Summarizing recent studies, Sapolsky (2019) highlights that ongoing negative and stressful conditions are associated with a more rapid shortening of telomeres, that have to keep our chromosomes and the reproduction abilities of our cells stable, causing premature aging forms. Regarding brain functioning, and taking into consideration the latest studies about the hippocampus area, region dedicated to learning and memory, it is clear that there is a relation between prolonged exposure to stress, elevated glucocorticoid levels, and low hippocampus excitability levels, with the retraction of neuronal connections and the inhibition of the birth of new neurons. Farah (2018) observed that children who experience the above-mentioned conditions have a thinner prefrontal cortex, that is less active and less efficient in controlling impulses and in managing executive functions, facilitating choices that are advantageous in the short term, but experiencing difficulties in postponing the reward and in considering long term consequences. These authors underline that this major trend to enjoy immediate pleasures can help to explain why people who are exposed to higher stress levels gain weight, smoke, drink more with respect to those who experience less stressful factors. If on one hand, it is necessary to continue to research and to understand better how inequalities affect health levels, on the other hand, Sapolsky (2019) states that “We know quite a bit, enough to foster moral indignation against this situation. It is shameful that children born in the wrong families are predisposed to have health problems around the period in which they should learn how to read. There should not be the need to measure inflammation or chromosomes length in order to prove how much all of this is wrong, but if it was necessary, I welcome science” (p. 49).

Among the consequences, there are also social ones. From a social point of view, the exposition to discrimination has increased, as much as the perception of suffering this kind of injustice, of being treated in an unfair way. This condition is related to a sense of threat, to the perception of an attack on human dignity, of being treated in an unrespectful way. Stereotypes and prejudices increase too and involve the conditions of being poor, unemployed, precarious, and with low-status jobs. The stereotyped vision of the manual or low-status workers considers these people ignorant, unqualified, troublemakers, focused on doing ‘dirty’ actions. The stereotyped vision of unemployed people sees them as not working hard enough and living at the expense of social assistance (Volpato, 2019). These people are victims of the meritocracy myth and of the myth regarding self-made-men/women and self-entrepreneurs, that we will deepen later, that, as a consequence, maintain the status quo. Other consequences regard the psychological sphere, both in its emotional and cognitive components. As regards the emotional sphere, as we have already mentioned, various conditions can be experienced, such as chronic stress, associated with the worries for daily life, fears and constant worries concerning the survival of the individual and his/her beloved ones, as much as other negative feelings such as being humiliated, discouraged, ignored, excluded for discriminations, not being treated respectfully, and perceiving to be in an inferior position (Chou et al., 2016). The existence of stereotypes is associated with the possibility to experience the so-called ‘stereotype threat’, for example in the presence of a scholastic or professional task, people believe to be inferior, experiencing higher worry levels, giving birth to less adequate performances, and to negative self and external evaluations. There are also cognitive damages, that are due to the scarcity on which all the attention is focused, and makes the cognitive functioning less efficient, to the extent that this condition can also be called ‘a mind tax’. As a matter of fact, cognitive processes are focused on what is

2.4 Inequalities

missing, what the individual immediately needs. This increases cognitive mistakes, makes information processing less efficient, reduces prospective analyses and control, and fosters impulsiveness (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). Furthermore, we must not forget that these situations are associated with a more frequent lack of scholastic commitment and, in many cases school dropouts. Young people coming from families without economic problems spend much time on education, postponing marriage and parenthood. On the other hand, young people coming from lower classes tend to abandon education, to prematurely look for a job and to get precarious ones, to become ‘premature’ parents, creating the so-called deprivation ‘re-cycle’ (Frank, Levine, & Dijk, 2014). The combination of dissatisfaction perceptions, anxiety, lack of confidence, and demotivation can also result in antisocial behaviors. There is an increase in phenomena such as mental disorders, depression, drug use, alcohol intake, and what is worst is that more and more significant groups of people ‘feel inferior’ and are exposed to the judgement of others, and, as a consequence, feel more vulnerable. It seems obvious that the societies that present higher rates of inequality are environments where the most negative conditions can be found, such as more violence, more crimes towards people or their properties, more social distance among different social classes, worse social relationships quality, less trust in others, higher levels of racism, sexism, homophobia, and corruption. These conditions can only lead to a social abyss and to the idea that we do not have a future.

2.5

The Myths of the Current Period: Meritocracy and Selfemployment

Paskov, Gërxhani, and Van de Werfhorst (2013) highlighted that living in countries characterized by high inequality levels seems to be associated with status and success obsessions, to the desire to be the object of admiration, as much as to the anxiety and stress to be socially and materially

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left aside. All of this is fueled by two ways of thinking, that have become a common belief, and that we would like to deepen in this part of the chapter. Meritocracy. Attention has started to be focused on merit around the half of 1800s. We are in England when the public administrators were chosen based on political affiliation. People wanted to remove this ‘political patronage’ criterion. At a later time, this concept has been incorporated by the Labour and Socialist Party, during the ‘Glorious Thirty’, in order to face class privileges and to give everybody the opportunity to improve their position and to aspire to power positions too. Keynes himself supported the necessity to remove privileges regarding class, party, and regarding the way in which ruling classes were selected, based on nepotism and on patronage.11 We owe to Michael Young the start of reflections on the consequences of merit and the coin of the term ‘meritocracy’ (Cassese & Pellew, 1987). In 1958, Young wrote a satiric book called Rise of the Meritocracy that marked the beginning of these reflections. Michael Young brings us in 2033, the year in which Meritocracy is in charge. In this situation, the ruling class governs through social and economic reforms, based on equal opportunities principles and on scientifically measured intelligence. The basic formula is the following: ‘Intelligence quotient + commitment = merit’. We finally find ourselves in the situation in which we can give ‘power to merit’12! According 11

He criticized the fact that school was oriented towards different channels, those that brought to lower jobs and those that brought to the high strata of society. In respect to this criticism, compulsory schooling has been unified (Young himself joined the Labour Party’s manifesto construction, which led this party to victory in 1945). In Italy, pedagogues first, Bottai then, and lastly the centerleft wing in 1962, became the bearers of this idea, which led to the creation of unified middle schools so that everyone could have the same chances. This avoided the existence of a school for high classes and a school for manual workers. 12 The word ends with ‘cracy’, a suffix used in compound words that means “power”. For example, democracy is ‘power to the people’, bureaucracy means “power to the office” (from bureau, ‘office’ in French) and, of course, meritocracy is ‘power to merit’.

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to Young (1958), the fundamental problem, on which he based his satire, is in the situation where the social position of individuals is determined according to intellectual/professional abilities. Without fairness and solidarity, this system can only favor the favorites, those who already have the possibilities to be well instructed, well educated, and so on, to the point that the society is built around a ‘worthy’ restricted caste and a majority of way less deserving individuals, more subtly humiliated, because rich people strongly believe that they deserve their superiority, they think to be self-made, while poor people have to accept an inferiority perceived as ‘natural’ (Appiah, 2010). Everything is supported by the fact that intelligence can be measured, also prematurely. As a consequence, it is possible to detect those who put together ‘intelligence and commitment’ and differentiate those who are deserving and those who are not. It goes without saying that it is also necessary to differentiate interventions, also educational ones: children and adolescents, for example, are sent to different schools, hierarchically organized in the light of individual abilities (Boarelli, 2019). Why is this a dystopia? As it is well known by psychologists, scholars of development, social processes, social matters, and other experts, intelligence, commitment, and investment are the result of received stimuli, of familiar and social living conditions, of the educational opportunities that people have had. The meritocratic ideology is based on the idea that, regardless of all these aspects, everyone is able to climb the social ladder if he/she makes a serious effort and/or if he/she is talented enough, with the consequent idea that what people get is associated to this. The inequalities we mentioned before create markedly different starting conditions, that are often hardly achievable, full of prejudices and stereotypes. To emerge from them, individual commitment alone cannot be enough. It seems undeniable that the idea that there are selfmade men/women who stand out thanks to their talents, abilities, and intelligence is mystifying and it is also a source of higher

inequalities.13 This has to be taken into consideration because the market, as we have seen, is everything but free, where everyone is against everyone and where there is the law of the jungle. It is impossible for us not to mention that today those in charge of big companies belong to élitist groups, who studied in academic contexts that just a few people can afford. The majority of the population is involved in precarious working conditions that hardly give any possibility to develop, to professionally grow and so on. In the light of meritocracy, aspects such as lack of merit, failures, and difficulties are perceived in a negative way, seen as the result of inability, of a lack of commitment, of too few investments. As a consequence, unemployed people are such because they do not make efforts, they do not work hard, they are ‘worthless’ because if they were worthy, they would have a job and be paid. This is how they become ‘undeserving’ and not ‘unlucky’. The connection between demerit and fault is immediate, and if they are guilty this does not determine any action to modify the situation, creating, as a matter of fact, a vicious circle (Bruni, 2018). The next step is the paradox according to which those who suffer these inequalities justify them, supporting the idea that they are less able to do things than other people. In addition, continuing to believe that social mobility is based on merit, makes people believe that the system is fair, hoping that one day it will be possible for everyone, also for those who have low status, to improve their situation, guaranteeing the status quo. As Volpato (2019) reminds us, when the majority of people start to perceive that this is impossible to achieve or reserved to few, it may be possible to witness collective struggle forms (Volpato, 2019). We can mention that, during the ‘70s/‘80s, the idea of self-made man was born in the USA, then spread to England and after in Western countries, also thanks to the ‘climb’ and subsequent Thatcher’s rhetoric. She was a woman and she also belonged to a lower-middle class, but thanks to her effort and value she managed to climb the social ladder and belong to the government élites. This model will be represented also by American President Barack Obama. 13

2.5 The Myths of the Current Period: Meritocracy and Self-employment

Meritocracy covers all of this with sumptuous clothes: no one is excluded a priori, it guarantees success to everybody. Unfortunately, the truth is that there is the tendency to justify new ‘class’ divisions, new social orders based on the infamous talent, that conceals the power of old variables such as census and social class because their explicit role would be disapproved. In the name of meritocracy, at school the emphasis is put on tests, measures, evaluations, selections and dimensions such as attitudes, mathematical and logical skills, and so on. All these abilities have to be measurable or considered such, blatantly, naturalizing inequalities that no longer have social and political components, at the expense of divergent and critical thinking, participation and social issues. In the working environment, measurements concern performances, that became measurable thanks to work decomposition, to productive processes, to the banishing of the social and sensory dimensions, to standard timing assignments and to market effectiveness indexes (Boarelli, 2019). Everything has been spiced up by a language that imposes an economic and financial vocabulary: human capital, human resource, skills, efficacy, competition. The name ‘company’ is given to institutions that deal with the public good, with health, with gas and energy. We also talk about ‘credits’ and ‘debits’ at school and at University, the added value of education. With measurements we have the possibility to create rankings, to make people and institutions compete, to ask to commit in order to ‘deserve’ success, to avoid joining the ‘not worthy’ ones, to learn self-discipline. Educational and professional lives are ‘commodified’ in all their aspects. Performances are goods and the quantification is their ‘price’. Experts of measurement are involved, and it is easy to be addicted to their evaluations, with the passive involvement of people, participation reduction, attention directed towards the standard, towards conformism. The idea of success is strictly connected to the idea of being the first, regardless of everything. The losers are the ones who were not committed, who were not able to seize the occasions that the merit society provides for everybody. Here the so-

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called ‘Equality of opportunities’ comes into play: the idea that every person has the same opportunities of everyone else but needs to grasp them with commitment and to take advantage of them. It seems clear that the manipulation of this idea highlights the awareness about the truth: opportunities are different, especially today. It seems obvious that meritocracy needs to separate people, it needs single individuals that are not able to come together with other people for social purposes. It also needs an idea of progress based on individual variables, of unrestrained attention to competitiveness, in the certainty that there is nothing to be built together. Evaluations, measurements, and rankings have almost become the only ‘approval’ form for some people. These elements are the tools to clear the scene from the ‘less deserving’, who will have to be ashamed for the results they achieved, retreat into themselves and be unable to analyze the contextual causes that determined what happened. These aspects may also make us accept the extreme idea that it is better if the less worthy, among which for sure people with disabilities and with migration stories, are left aside, since they can compromise the deserving people’s progress (Boarelli, 2019; Sausa & Marshall, 2017). This leads us to consider, taking a cue from Agostino’s reflection in his criticism to Saint Pelagius, the nature of gifts and merits. Agostino did not deny the existence of talents and commitment, that generate those actions or ethical states called merits. However, he also supported the idea that merits are not acquired ‘thanks to us’, or at least just a small part of them, a portion that is too little to be the cornerstone of a whole culture and a way of living. If everything that a person has is perceived as deserved, included potential talents, and not as a gift, the consequence is a ‘dramatic shortage of gratitude’. Another consequence is the justification of the elevation of the worthiest to most virtuous that, based on what above mentioned, means to define the richest as the most virtuous, and to justify their choices, actions, conditions and so on. In light of this, Bruni (2018) makes a different examination of the parable of the talents, stating

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that this should be read not as an invitation to multiply talents but as an attempt to denounce an economic-social system aimed at multiplying richness at the expense of poor people and small farmers. He reminds us that at the time of Jesus in a basically static agricultural economics, to double (or multiply by ten, as in Luke’s Gospel) moving wealth was possible just by taking it away from others, with exploitation and with systems of fiscal persecution. We have to be able to recognize reality distortion forms into an individual vision of talents and merits and to act in order to avoid that this mindset is accepted and shared as something legitimate and fixed. Being Self-employed. The above-mentioned phenomena, as we can easily understand, have to affect future planning. Fear, worry, uncertainty, the difficulty to detect goals in this nebulous context, can bind people to the past or to the present, or to a constant swinging between these two parts of life, shortening the temporal perspective, encouraging the attention for the here and now, surviving, chasing little jobs, reducing the impulse to plan, to move towards the future, towards a world full of possibilities (Nota & Soresi, 2018). We cannot omit to consider that the abovementioned factors are associated not only to the presence of more and more precarious and not so dignified working conditions but also to the paradoxical request to become more competitive, more resilient, to be ‘constantly’ ready and good enough to grasp unpredictable opportunities, to become ‘self-employed’, even without actual capital to put into play. Adamson (2017) underlines that in working contexts, it is essential that people have an entrepreneurial attitude, that is to say, the inclination to ‘build future and jobs’, considering as positive elements such as flexibility, short-term contracts, precarious work and so on. Moreover, it is also positive to have the ‘inclination to not rest’, to go beyond limits in order to constantly self-improve and to perform better and better. In this way, people will have more probabilities to be efficient, to be called

again by companies, to have working activities, to carry out the tasks in a better way and so on. This author claims that if people not only have these inclinations but also think that this is precisely what they wish for, the outlined situation is perfect: people can give more, without external pressures. We are describing the ‘ideal worker’ concept that, according to Schouten (2017), is the one that works very hard and who puts work at the first place, without being distracted by personal/familiar problems. By analyzing famous women’s biographies, Adamson (2015) confirms that such a mindset pervaded our society: in this women’s life, a large space has been given to the value of ‘selfmanagement’, to the ability to manage work efficiently also in different places, to balance professional and private lives. Little consideration has been given to the barriers imposed by the context, such as exhausting working hours and shifts, requests that are almost to be considered as exploitation, and the consequent underestimation of those people who are not able to manage their own lives. Family life itself needs to be reconsidered, taking into account this way of being and the awareness that childcare is becoming more and more demanding since schools and Universities require high prerequisites, and parents have to take charge of them, taking into consideration the renouncement of procreation (Schouten, 2017). With the enlargement of ‘immaterial’ forms of work, considerable value has been given to abilities such as establishing relationships, communicating in an efficient way, being able to control emotions, investing in educational paths during life with the self-management of study. However, according to Bialostok and Aronson (2016), in this society, it is not only necessary to have these abilities in order to be more adequate to the labor market, but it is also essential to find a way to deal with failure. They believe that difficulties and failures, in these circumstances, are an everyday occurrence: it is important that people do not believe that if they do not get what

2.5 The Myths of the Current Period: Meritocracy and Self-employment

they care about, this is due to not being intelligent, resilient, able, motivated, self-made, beautiful and so on. It is not the social or working context but people themselves who have to face the consequences and experience a feeling that facilitates this process: shame. Shame, in a different way with respect to the sense of guilt that could bring to a cognitive analysis of the situation, creates an experience that can move from a little embarrassment to a sense of humiliation, associated to the fear of abandonment, rejection, or of other people’s glances. Shame keeps us focused on these intimate and fear aspects and takes us away from the possibility to analyze the situation. Some colleagues claim quite openly that to change the above-mentioned situation ‘social and cultural engineering’ actions are needed: Hartlep and Porfilio (2015), Bessant, Robinson, and Ormerod (2015) examined the role of schools and Universities by analyzing schoolbooks, ministerial documents, websites, and activities. They highlighted the massive importance given to topics such as emotional intelligence, selfregulation, smart skills, employability, creativity, teamwork and so on, in order to strengthen abilities useful to reach success, excellence, without deeply examining the existing relationship between success possibility and contextual conditions. These authors ask themselves how much vocational guidance and career counseling interventions promoted the spread of this way of doing, focusing on ‘self-management’ and ‘selfmaking’ abilities, on the ways to improve flexibility, to accept failure, considered the result of limited abilities, avoiding the analysis of contextual aspects such as barriers, oppressions, discriminations, exploitation and manipulation modalities, and so on. Sugarman (2015), in line with these reflections, adds that ‘sense’ disciplines as career counseling and vocational designing may have encouraged, even unconsciously, people who experience conditions that involve a problem dealing with the meaning to give to life, such as precariousness, exploitation, discriminations, to excessively focus on an ‘inter-individual’ sense, rather than encouraging

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more complex analyses and thought modalities, able to take into considerations also contextual variables.

2.6

Conclusions: What About Career Counseling and Vocational Designing? Could They Be a Tool for a ‘Rainbow New Deal’?

It seems clear that there has been the construction of this mindset, this mind frame, that facilitated the approval, the acceptance of this kind of Weltanschauung and the pursuit of goals in line with everything above mentioned (Adams, Estrada-Villalta, Sullivan, & Markus, 2019). Engineering social actions were performed, also thanks to the social disciplines, schools, Universities, mass media, career counseling (Bessant et al., 2015; Hartlep & Porfilio, 2015). These actions contributed to the creation of individuals who justify the situation, who have in common an individualistic and materialistic view, not so able to perform well thought contextual analyses, who are aimed at a constant improvement towards success, focused on their own wellbeing, happiness, status, or, in case of necessity, on surviving. People who manage to have success, richness, wellbeing, that usually belong to privileged, ruling, high-status classes, tend to believe that what they have is related to talents, personal qualities, hard work, merits, considered as something natural and taken for granted, not as the result of privileges and exploitations. People who do not make it, often the majority of the population, consider themselves as less deserving and have to feel the weight of failure, to be ashamed. They do not understand the mechanisms of privilege, as ignorant people and troublemakers who were not able to work hard, inclined to live at the expenses of social assistance (Volpato, 2019). For the majority of the population, being often in difficult contexts where unemployment, poverty, and insecurity prevail, has to be associated to the inclination to passively accept this condition, to

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think that there is nothing else to do, there is no future, no plans to be made, adapting to ‘dog-eatdog’ mechanics, forgetting the duties of living in a community, caring about themselves, here and now, because this is the only possible reality, tolerating illegality and even being a part of it (Mason, 2019). What can vocational designing do? We cannot think that career counseling and vocational designing has to go on with its activities, respecting markedly individualistic and neoliberal visions, believing that it is still possible to spread the ‘right man at the right place’ motto, to support competition and the promotion of individual talents, which is often observed in our schools, Universities, and job centers. These procedures continue to be focused on the matching and profiling ideas and give life to actions aimed at making ‘self-mademen/women’, people who are responsible, proactive, able to establish networks, of controlling emotions through courses and activities based on smart skills, employability, creativity, and teamworking. Rather than ‘promoting the person’ the said procedures seem to be closer to selection systems of students, candidates, people (Bessant et al., 2015; Hartlep & Porfilio, 2015). Continuing in this way is harmful for people and the mission of career counseling is not achieved: we are not on the people’s side, we are joining the creation of the ‘homo lupus’ instead (Fitoussi, 2019; Bruni & Zamagni, 2015), we give value to the ‘rat race’, at the expenses of the weakest, we make it harder for people, who are blinded by competitiveness, to understand how things are. We do not give ‘power’ to people, we do not train them. We probably are gears in the vulnerability machine. We are not supporting the Earth, our living environment, our surviving possibilities. Going on like this seems to be the result of two conditions, both negative: (a) ignorance and superficiality: lack of study, reflection, deepening, and doing what has always been done without thinking about it; (b) a deliberate choice to create illusions, increasing insecurity, vulnerability, that is always useful in order to trade ‘bread with rights’ as Ainis (2018) has recently said.

Is this really what we would like to study and do? Making people more attractive, more competitive, more likely to be chosen? Making people weak in front of invasion and occupation attempts by forces mostly interested in their performances, in the ‘interests’ coming from the investment of their capital, to the benefits obtainable from the use of their competences? What can career counseling and vocational designing still do in favor of those that, for different reasons, are discouraged, not so competitive and not so supported by their socio-cultural background contexts? Can it be relevant and respectable to tell them that the abilities they have are not enough? Or to communicate, suggest to them that they are ‘suitable’ just for routine jobs and tasks that require low competences that are meant to disappear almost completely in the next decade? Also respecting deontological codes, we, such as every other professional, should take care and highlight areas and factors that we are able to analyze, control, promote, improve. We are convinced that a professional, all things considered, keeps being a person that intentionally deals, using suitable cultural and technical tools, with some specific scopes of action, and is inclined, as far as possible, to improvement, change, to the reduction of the intensity of problems and of the difficulties associated to them. However, if we are not able to increase the number of job opportunities and, most of all, ‘good job opportunities’, if we continue to believe that vocational designing would like to deal with the world of work and professional planning, taking into consideration what is happening to educational and professional environments and what is going to happen in the near future, what could our dignified and relevant scope of action be? What will be the future like, for those young people who are interested in following our professional footsteps or in studying the disciplines we care about? We believe that career counseling and vocational designing need to go out from this deadlock, need to become able to find their original mission and their social value. They need to join

2.6 Conclusions: What About Career Counseling and Vocational Designing?

the promotion of new mindsets, of a new Weltanschauung, belief systems, attitudes, visions, as fundamental steps towards a transformative growth and an actual inclusive, sustainable, and democratic development, in the presence of forces that tend to keep the existing inequalities, with new professional paths (Stiglitz & Greenwald, 2018). Career counseling should carry out a resolved change of pace, we dare to say a ‘destructive innovation’. To avoid ‘sinking any lower’ and to avoid rejecting its own nature, it should request its professionals to make their part, in favor of a fair and sustainable development for everybody, to give voice to values such as justice, equality, solidarity, inclusion, sustainability, grasping the call and invitation that the United Nation sent to governments, institutions, communities and citizens all around the world (Nota & Soresi, 2018; Santilli et al., 2020). It should help to promote cultural processes, movements, trajectories towards what we can call not only ‘Green New Deal’ but also ‘Rainbow New Deal’, that involves the ideas of ecology, green, the necessity to decarbonize, using renewable energies, giving life to clean and safe forms of mobility, green infrastructures with high energetic efficiency and so on (Rifkin, 2019), but also every other color. These colors remind us that we have to create new economic processes, ‘biosphere awareness’, cosmopolitan connections, the extension of rights, to share new different ideas about progress and growth, that take into consideration the circularity, the re-use, the long term, the durability of products, the construction of a system that is not based on hyperconsumption and hyper-production. These colors also remind us that finance needs to take into consideration how money is used, the appreciation of life forms, social justice, the ability to recognize fake news and manipulations, in order to not be trapped into market strategies that ‘paint’ their environments and companies white or green, in order to give positive images of them

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from a social or environmental point of view and to distract attention from the way people are treated or from the damages made by their production processes and so on.

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39 Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Decision making and policy in contexts of poverty. Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, 281–300. Nevrakadis, M., & Giroux, H. A. (2015). Henry Giroux on the rise of neoliberalism. Humanity & Society, 39, 449–455. Nota, L. (2019). La passione per la verità. Come contrastare fake news e manipolazioni e costruire un sapere inclusivo. [Passion for the truth. How to counter fake news and manipulation and build inclusive knowledge]. Roma: FrancoAngeli. Nota, L., & Soresi, S. (2018). Counseling and coaching in times of crisis and transitions: From research to practice. Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Oxfam (2018). La grande disuguaglianza sociale. [The great social inequality]. https://www.oxfamitalia.org/lagrandedisuguaglianza/?gclid=CjwKCAiAyeTxBRBvE iwAuM8dnRIPlP9hBJKFGFSVlow9xGwUJ0uosSM6 D71uRWuqLZNzCiewknKPqRoCWxsQAvD_BwE. Pallante, M. (2018). Sostenibilità, Equità, Solidarietà. Un manifesto politico e culturale. [Sustainability, equity, solidarity. A political and cultural manifesto]. Torino: Lindau. Pope Francis I. (2013). Evangelii gaudium. http://www. vatican.va/content/francesco/it/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_ evangelii-gaudium.html. Paskov, M., Gërxhani, K., & Van de Werfhorst, H. G. (2013). Income inequality and status anxiety. (GINI DP 78). Holland: Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies. Piketty, T. (2013). Capitalism in the XXI century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Rifkin, J. (2019). Un Green New Deal globale. [A global Green New Deal]. Milano: Mondadori. Santilli, S., Di Maggio, I., Ginevra, M. C., Nota, L., & Soresi, S. (2020) Life Design, inclusion and sustainable development: Constructs, dimensions and new instruments to stimulate a quality future design for all. In M. Yuen, W. Beamish, & V. S. Solberg (Eds.), Careers for students with special educational needs– perspectives on development and transitions from the Asia-Pacific Region (pp. 301–312). London: Springer Education & Language. Sapolsky, R. M. (2019). Il divario tra salute e benessere. [The gap between health and well-being]. le Scienze, 44–49. Saraceno, C. (2019). Contrastare le disuguaglianze: condizioni più eque per tutti. [Combating inequalities: Fairer condition for all]. In C. Amadeo et al., (Eds.), Dieci idee per ripensare il capitalismo (pp. 39–56). Milano: Feltrinelli. Sausa, C., & Marshall, D. J. (2017). Political violence and mental health: Effects of neoliberalism and the role of

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Life Designing for an Inclusive, Sustainable and Equitable Future

3.1

Introduction

Based on the observations presented in the previous chapter, it seems clear that in the field of career counseling and vocational designing we can no longer avoid considering that we are living in very different times with respect to the so-called ‘Glorious Thirty’. In that period, there was a general growth and numerous opportunities were offered so that it was possible to rely on a linear vision of reality, that involved an initial training, a short period dedicated to job placement and the following achievement of a stable position, with permanent contracts. We have already affirmed, many times before, that the present and the near future are deeply affected by uncertainty rates, complexities, changes, and by a series of emergencies regarding economic, social and environmental crises, that affect people’s health and wellbeing negatively. With this chapter, after having discussed the contribution of complexity theories dealing with problems regarding choice and professional planning, our goal is to consider some hypotheses proposed by the Life Design International Research Group, in order to provide solutions to the abovementioned problems. We will also analyze some recent suggestions that, also in the field of career counseling sciences, underline the importance of inclusion, of sustainability, of social justice as strategies to guarantee the growth of the community, wellbeing for everyone, and the construction of better futures.

3.2

Complexity in Career Counseling and in Professional Designing

More and more researches and studies underline the complexity and unpredictability of the labor market, of professional actions and individual careers. Traditional career thories, based on Person-Environment fit and psychometric approaches, are no longer able to help people to think about and plan their professional future. The theories regarding career development and career decision-making that were developed during the 20th century (for example Holland, 1997; Super, 1980) were based on an idea of linearity and predictability of professional life and personal characteristics and considered, as a consequence, decision-making and professional development as ‘logic’ and deterministic. Uncertainty was considered a transitional state that could have been removed or minimized thanks to careful and thoughtful planning. Complexity was believed to be something that could have been limited, therefore understood, predicted and controlled by focusing on single components (Bright & Pryor, 2019). Moreover, these approaches interpreted professional life as a planned sequence of stages. Concepts such as career identity, career planning, career development, and career stages, that were used to predict people’s adjustment to different working environments, were based on the idea of stability of both contexts and people’s behaviors.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4_3

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As a matter of fact, it is more and more obvious that socio-economic phenomena are a collection of factors and variables, organized in a complex way (Strunk, 2009), and we can no longer avoid considering the role of complexity in career management, development, and decision-making. Complexity is a key concept of dynamic system theories. This term derives mainly from mathematics and physics and it goes beyond the reductionist vision of traditional science, promoting a holistic perspective in the study of the systems. The analysis of the systems, characterized by non-linear dynamics, allows the detection of emerging phenomena, that is to say, phenomena that cannot be identified considering the single components of the system but the global interaction among them (Catone, 2012). A complex system is determined by the interactions among its components, such as a pile of bricks that are not in a balanced situation: their movements, determined by the respective characteristics and positions, modify in an unpredictable way the initial structure of the pile until they find a stable and balanced position. In the field of social sciences and career guidance, complexity theory underlines how the functioning of a human body, balanced or unsettled, is not only due to private and individual projects, but also to relationships and interconnections among the parts and components of that system and to impressive amounts of other, active, dynamic and ‘external’ systems. This theory underlines the importance that has to be given to the environment and the need to deepen the study of the effects on living systems and of adjustment processes used to survive and develop (Mitchell, Levin, & Krumboltz, 1999; Pryor & Bright, 2011). It is also important to consider that: (a) living systems are composed by many components that are susceptible to multiple and different influences; (b) in the world everything is connected to everything else and everything could potentially affect everything else (c) since these systems are complex and connected, they are susceptible to change, to evolve; (d) the possibility to change can derive both from movements that are internal to the system and from the interaction with other systems, causing

adaptive and resilient reactions. The change we are taking into consideration can be linear or circular, determining impacts on the involved systems that can be excessive with respect to the original modification, as well represented by the well-known butterfly effect by Lorenz (Soresi, in press). Based on everything above-mentioned, those who deal with career counseling and vocational designing should keep in mind that (1) career development and the constructs that describe it are complex because they are dynamic and sensitive to the influence of multiple personal, contextual, internal, and external forces (complexity); (2) that the career development of people and groups interact with many different life aspects (health, family, spirituality, values, and so on), that everything is connected and ‘everything can potentially affect everything else’ (connection); (3) that the systems and constructs we are considering are susceptible to change thanks to their complex interconnections (change); (4) that the consequence of complex systems is the incapability of precisely predict and control what happens in the system or in other systems with which the system interacts. In other words, changes are at least for a while unpredictable and open to different possibilities (chance). Lastly, it is preferable to keep in mind that (5) the lack of predictability opens the possibility for individuals to become active participants in the creation of their own future rather than pawns in a rigid deterministic system based on cause and effect (construction) (Pryor & Bright, 2011). Taking these reflections into considerations, we would like to mention the work done by the Life Design International Research Group, that researched innovative modalities to help people to choose and plan their career future. During the first decade of the 21st century, it clearly highlighted that the 20th century key assumptions of career counseling theories and practice had to be redefined in order to fit the necessities of the new millennium (Savickas et al., 2009). The members of the Life Design International Research Group reiterated that the traditional theoretical approaches were insufficient for many different reasons

3.2 Complexity in Career Counseling and in Professional Designing

and, in particular, for their stubborn rooting to the idea that people’s individual characteristics are stable, as much as educational and professional contexts. In addition, these approaches tended to address educational and professional topics in a separate and independent way from other aspects of life. They also were used to consider life and development in a linear way, as a predetermined sequence of stages.

3.3

The Life Design International Research Group

The Life Design International Research Group was born in the period when the world was facing the economic crisis of the Great Recession. The causes of the crisis were no longer clear. This brought to severe consequences, for example, job losses, an increase in unemployment rates, and to a different job organization, with an increase in job insecurity levels (Nota, Soresi, Ferrari, & Ginevra 2014; O’Reilly, Lain, Sheehan, Smale & Stuart, 2011). There was the need to begin to give solutions to problems and discomforts that were becoming more and more consistent, by looking for new ways to deal with a reality that was still not so understandable. This is how the Life Design International Research Group was born, with vocational designing scholars coming from Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the United States The Vrije Universiteit of Brussels supported and hosted this group that regularly gathered from 2006 to 2008. After a series of actions aimed at outlining in a shared way concepts and definitions in the field of career guidance, the members of the Life Design International Research Group decided to write the position paper Life Designing: A Paradigm for Career Construction in the 21st Century (Savickas et al., 2009), that has been the most downloaded article of 2009. The Life Design International Research Group, based on the epistemology of social constructivism (Young & Collin, 2004) and, in line with complexity theories, recognized that professional development is highly

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contextualized and individualized. It highlighted the strong interconnection among the different aspects of life, underlining that, as a consequence, in the field of career counseling and vocational designing it was no longer possible to refer to the concept of ‘career development’ or ‘vocational guidance’: instead, the idea of ‘life trajectories’ had to be taken into consideration, based on which people progressively plan and build their existence, including professional one (Nota & Rossier, 2015). The point of view of the Life Design International Research Group, as described by its founding group in the 2009 article (Savickas et al., 2009) was built on five premises: (1) From Traits and States to Context. The suggestion was to leave objective measurements and regulatory profiles, that turned out to be inadequate to describe people as living beings that interact and adjust to multiple contexts. Professional identities should be considered as variable patterns influenced by stories and not representable by static, conceptual, and simplified profiles, built with scores obtained through tests. (2) From Prescription to Process. The idea was to leave traditional modalities regarding giving directions and advice on a job career to follow, seen as a paradox in a context in which clients constantly change jobs and are expected to perform multiple choices during their professional life. The suggestion was to focus on coping strategies instead, in order to manage and deal with the complexity of the labor market. (3) From Linear Causality to Non-linear Dynamics. People’s professional lives are a complex phenomenon that cannot be dealt with linear prediction modalities. Working activities are evolving, they are more and more articulated and complex and, related to this, there is the need for analyses that highlight dynamism, evolution, and attention to more holistic life projects. (4) From Scientific Facts to Narrative Realities. There was particular attention to the necessity to take into consideration the constant constructions and reconstructions of people’s

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multiple subjective realities. Rather than referring to group rules and conceptual terms, clients should be involved in activities that help them to give meaning to their situation and, as a consequence, to look for new ways to see themselves. (5) From Describing to Modeling. Clients’ professional plans are, by definition, personal, therefore unique. As a consequence, efficient career counseling has to be adjusted to every single case. Every standardized activity reduces its value. Based on these premises, important studies and publications have been realized between 2009 and 2015 (see the Handbook of Life Design, edited by L. Nota and J. Rossier, 2015), and a series of international conferences have been organized also with the collaboration of the Life Design International Research Group, in order to reflect on the changes of the working reality and on the contribution of career counseling and vocational designing (for example, Vocational Designing and Career Counselling: Challenges and New Horizons, University of Padova, 2011; Life Designing and Career Counseling: Building Hope and Resilience, University of Padova, 2013; Career and Life Designing interventions for sustainable development and decent work, University of Wraclow, 2016). There is a stronger and stronger necessity to give value to (a) the context in which the person lives and to the idea that professional development has to be interpreted as a dynamic interaction between the person and the environment and that every role and environment that are important for the person have to be considered in order to build professional stories and life projects; (b) the importance to focus on prevention, promoting the development of a series of individual resources that people should be able to use in order to deal with the period we are living and to build their own professional life; (c) the necessity to take care most of all of people with higher chances to experience difficulties in the labor market, that is to say, people with disabilities, with migration experiences, and young people; (d) the importance to consider new

dimensions for professional construction. We are referring to hope, optimism, resilience, willfulness, action, and abilities regarding making reflections, critical thinking, decision making, feeling responsible, investing in education and most of all abilities regarding career adaptability, that is considered the cornerstone of the Life Design International Research Group (Rossier, Ginevra, Bollmann, & Nota, 2017; Rudolph, Lavigne, & Zacher, 2017; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). Career adaptability is a self-regulatory, transactional, and flexible competency for coping with developmental tasks in order to prepare and join professional life and to adapt to unpredicted requests due to the changes in the labor market and working conditions (Savickas, 2013). A meta-analysis by Rudolph et al. (2017), using 90 studies from different countries, underlined that this construct is related to a wide range of positive career outcomes, such as decisionmaking, job search, career satisfaction, and so on, confirming its importance in order to deal with the multiple transitions that individuals face through their professional lives.

3.4

Towards Life Design Processes in Order to Build Inclusive and Sustainable Futures

Nowadays, career counselors have to take into consideration phenomena such as complexity, unpredictability, and uncertainty regarding the future. They have also to consider the idea that dealing with the future means also reflecting on how to face some alarming global threats, such as increasing inequalities, wealth and job polarization, increasing peoples’ movements, with raising migration rates, natural resources’ depletion, the impact of technology on the labor market and on living quality, more and more precarious working conditions, less and less dignified jobs, the paradoxical request addressed to people to become more competitive, more resilient, to be ‘constantly’ ready and good enough to deal with unpredictable opportunities, to become ‘selfemployed’, despite the absence of real capital to put into play. We can no longer hide the fact

3.4 Towards Life Design Processes in Order to Build Inclusive …

that all the above-mentioned situations come from short-sighted and selfish choices that ‘exploit resources’, from policies mostly interested in managing the present and keeping consensus, reinforcing, as a matter of fact, the inclination to impoverish natural resources, to an unbridled consumerism, to the extent that all of this is jeopardizing future life on our own planet (Nota & Soresi, 2018). When thinking and planning counseling actions, on the basis of everything above mentioned, some recent reflections in the field of economics and in the field of career counseling and vocational designing can be useful. As concerns economic reflections, we would like to mention the work by Raworth (2017). Her famous Doughnut Economics aims at suggesting developing solutions that do not further harm the Earth, respecting the so-called internal borders, focused on social aspects and on the possibility to guarantee basic resources for everyone (food, water, healthcare, energy) to respect human rights, and the external borders, or environmental ones, concerning the use of natural resources without further harming the environment. Between these two borders, one external regarding the environment, and one internal regarding the social aspects, there is an area shaped as a doughnut (the famous Doughnut Economics) inside of which development could still be possible and sustainable. Based on this, according to us, it is possible to make some reflections concerning career counseling and vocational designing that is aimed at connecting satisfaction probabilities/predictions and personal fulfillment to everyone’s wellbeing. In this way, career counseling can become the tool that encourages to think about the future, suggesting to try to connect economic wellbeing to social and environmental ones, and that refuses to propose visions involving growth and development enslaved to the market, to the infinite competition, to the law of the jungle, interested only in individual short-term profit and not in a long-term development for everyone (LongTerm Economy). Moreover, the priorities set by Raworth, highlight, even in times of crisis we are facing,

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promising developmental and professional fields, as much as scientific, specific and multidisciplinary areas. Universities and education in general will have to take these fields into consideration more and more, in order to create hypotheses, attempts, behaviors, studies, and works that can generate change and improvement. In order to grasp the concreteness of everything above mentioned, we can think about the level of vocational designing, education, and work that can be reached taking into consideration the problems connected to the consumption of freshwater, to the defense of biodiversity, to pollution reduction, but also, analyzing fields that may be closer to the experience of many of our students, to possible educational paths and to jobs that are ‘sensitive’ towards living quality, health, education, dignity, peace, justice, freedom of expression, gender equity, inclusion, use and spread of new technologies, livability of our homes, of our cities and so on. As concerns career counseling and vocational designing, on an international level, there are many different pushes that are leading the scientific community to wonder about the contribution that career counseling can give to inclusion, sustainable development, dignified jobs, social justice, and protection of everyone’s rights. Interesting reflections were born from the discussions with international colleagues, also coming from the Life Design International Research Group, during the International Conference Decent work, Equity, and Inclusion: Passwords for the Present and the Future (University of Padova, 2017), or the International Seminar Life Designing interventions (counseling, guidance, education) for decent work and sustainable development (University of Lausanne, 2020), that allowed to highlight the necessity of new theoretical and methodological approaches, useful to let career counseling have a role in the construction of sustainable, inclusive, and socially just contexts. In this regard, Sultana, Hooley, and Thomsen, with the two volumes they edited “Career Guidance for Social Justice. Contesting Neoliberalism” and “Career Guidance for Emancipation. Reclaiming Justice for the Multitude” and

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the numerous publications of the last few years (for example Hooley & Sultana, 2016; Skovhus & Thomsen, 2017), have brought to our attention the topics of neoliberalism, of the consequences associated to it on a macro, meso, and micro level, of social justice, of social inequalities, and started a debate on the role of career counseling and vocational designing in all of this. Blustein and his colleagues, in the field of Psychology of Working Theory (PWT: Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016), highlighted the urgency to mostly take care of people with the highest vulnerability and marginalization levels, that struggle to get a dignified job. They have highlighted the topic of critical conscience that, being a key element of the PWT, can represent a valuable resource both to improve the psychological resources and management strategies of those who are traditionally marginalized and also to reduce discriminations and prejudices among the dominant members of a group, in order to contrast every form of oppression (Duffy et al., 2018). In addition, since 2018 there has been the work by the international network UniTwin “Life Designing Interventions (Counseling, Guidance, Education) for Decent Work and Sustainable Development”, joined by 16 Universities,1 aimed at fostering international cooperation among Universities concerning career counseling and vocational designing, in order to support dignified jobs and sustainable development. Along with the world of research, some international institutions encourage us to think about new operational paths, according to us, also regarding vocational designing. We are referring to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable 1

University of Wroclaw, Poland; Le Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM), France; l’Université de Bordeaux, France; University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; University of Lausanne, Suisse; Université Catholique de l’Ouest, France; University of Iceland; University of Lisbon, Portugal; University of Padova, Italy; University of São Paulo, Brasil; Université Laval, Canada; University Adam Mickiewicz, Poland; University of Lesley, USA; University of Florence, Italy; University of Pretoria, South Africa; University of Finland, Finland; University of Koudougou, Burkina Faso).

Development, which translated the abovementioned priorities in 17 important goals to pursue with everybody’s commitment. This has been approved in September 2015, by 193 United Nations members. It developed an action plan expanding the intervening contexts, that is to say, all the fields and actions that concern organizations, systems, policies, social practices, that can be modified in order to pursue the goal of building a sustainable world from an environmental, economic, and social point of view (Scuttari & Nota, 2019). Given the nature of this chapter, Sustainable Development Goals 4, 8, and 12 are particularly relevant. Goal 4 emphasizes ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all individuals, especially for women, girls, and marginalized people in vulnerable environments. Goal 8 aims at promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, particularly for young people, and reducing informal employment and the gender pay gap while promoting safe and secure working environments in order to create decent work environments for everybody. Goal 12 aims at ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns, granting, also in the world of work, the sustainable management and the efficient use of natural resources and the reduction of waste production, through prevention, reduction, recycling, and re-use. When asking everyone to do their part in order to build a future of quality, as recently supported by Giovannini (2018) “the crucial question that we have to answer concerns the kind of future that we would like to build in order to counter nowadays and future worries” (p. 97) and, speaking about career counseling and vocational designing, there is the need to encourage the expression of the educational and professional investments that everyone intends to offer in terms of contributions and experiences. In line with all of this, the Larios Laboratory has decided to invest in terms of reflections and research with adults and adolescents (e.g., Santilli et al., 2020). We would like to place the social mission of career counseling in the spotlight, as much as its social and ethic value, and

3.4 Towards Life Design Processes in Order to Build Inclusive …

the attention to vulnerabilities, as it appeared clear during the national conferences that we organized with the Italian Society of Vocational Guidance in the last few years, The Contribution of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing to the 2030 Agenda, University of Roma-Tre, 2018, and Inclusive and Sustainable Vocational Guidance: Researches, Tools, Actions, University of Catania and Kore University, 2019. According to us, career counseling should encourage people to look at the external reality and at what is going to happen in the future, by keeping in mind that all this cannot be interpreted and manipulated depending on one’s own interests, passions, and human capital. We believe that vocational designing should invest in professional designs characterized by inclusion and sustainability and based on social justice, in order to help people to recognize discriminations, inequalities, barriers, exploitations, and to act to fight them, reduce them, create alternatives to the benefit of the overall wellbeing for humanity and for the planet we live in. We have to act so that our life contexts can give us the ability to allow everybody to actively participate and to have satisfying standards of living both on a personal and professional level. In order to better build the reference frame, in the following paragraphs, our attention will be focused on the concepts of inclusion, sustainability, and social justice that, according to us, are fundamental aspects in the fields of career counseling and vocational designing.

3.5

Inclusion and Sustainability to Build the Future

At the root of the neoliberal policies that characterized the last three decades, there are the concepts of competition, individuality, egoism, and little attention has been given to solidarity, collaboration, social responsibility, relationships, and, overall, to sustainability and inclusion (Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen, 2018). The global problems we are experiencing are encouraging us to take into consideration inclusion and sustainability, inside and outside national borders, as

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strategies to improve the economic growth and the development of our societies. In this part of the chapter, we are focusing our attention on the two concepts of inclusion and sustainability, underlining the contribution that career counseling and vocational designing can give in the construction of inclusive and sustainable contexts. Inclusion. When giving a definition of inclusion, it is important to specify that this term differentiates from terms such as assimilation and integration. These words cannot be considered synonyms since they refer to aspects, constructs and even ideologies which are very different and, sometimes, opposite. They represent the expression of historical, social, and cultural changes that were and are in our communities, and the evolution that characterized decades of researches and interventions in social contexts all around the world. The idea of inclusion, that we are about to take into consideration, has clearly been helped by the social and political struggles that took place in Italy and in other countries, from World War II until the end of the ‘70s (Keynes, 2006). In that period, there were the first battles for assimilation of students with disabilities in regular schools, that is to say, for the right to use common areas and services by minority groups (people with disabilities, immigrants, people with mental diseases, and so on), and the right to experience less and less restrictive conditions, in order to reduce the risk of institutionalization and marginalization (Soresi, 2016). During the 2000s, the evolutions of psychopedagogical research and the emergence of the biopsychosocial analysis model and management of health and wellbeing matters, more and more attention has been given to the actions made by people with disabilities and vulnerabilities in different fields of life and to their social participation. The idea of ‘assimilation’, that is to say, being side by side with people with disabilities and vulnerabilities, has to be replaced with the idea of integration, that means to ‘do it together with’, respecting the characteristics of people with vulnerabilities. Integration is not simple assimilation of people in common contexts: it

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involves services and specific professionals (for disability, addictions, mental health, and so on) in order to support the permanence of people with difficulties inside common living contexts (Soresi, 2016). The challenges we are facing in this historical period, the increasing social injustices, the increasing heterogeneities, the increasing difficulties in wider parts of the population: all of these factors lead to the belief that a new change of pace is needed. As a consequence, inclusion becomes a way of thinking about reality that is more and more desirable. Inclusion, in contrast to integration, is not interested in a single individual with vulnerabilities. Its focus is on the context, the ability of our living environments to allow everybody to actively participate and have satisfying standards of living (Soresi, Nota, & Wehmeyer, 2011). Attention is also focused on the contextual characteristics and variables that, in the interaction with every individual’s uniqueness, can determine different levels of social, civil and professional participation (Shogren, Wehmeyer, Schalock, & Thompson, 2016). The concept of inclusion is strictly connected to the one of unicity; Shafik Asant, former leader of the New African, states, “Inclusion is recognizing that we are ‘one’ even though we are not the same” (2002, p. 1). The idea of uniqueness goes beyond the concept of diversity; being and considering oneself unique implies that it is impossible to be included in specific social categories and goes even beyond the idea of the existence of people to include and integrate. The idea of common areas and contexts becomes more relevant and, therefore, also the idea of places that are inclusive from a structural standpoint and also dedicated to the personalization of the way of conceiving every individual. The concept of inclusion is related to the one of dignity. Inclusion involves the recognition of human dignity in all of its expressions as is stated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. The Preamble states that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members

of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” Therefore, human dignity is the founding value of the global order, with the consequence that all of the Member States have the obligation of promoting the satisfaction of every person’s fundamental rights (Griffo & Mascia, 2019). Applying the principles and values of human rights to everyone is an indispensable condition for inclusion, even in those cases in which vulnerability and discrimination represent evident violations, too often tolerated, of said principles. Inclusion implies that every person, with no distinction and valorization of his/her uniqueness, can actually own and exploit all of the rights and fundamental freedoms underlined by the International Rights and the democratic constitutions. There is the involvement of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. From the right to life to equality, to freedom of thought conscience and religion, to work, to health, to education, and so on. Particular attention is given to those rights that are the focus of this chapter: the right to choose an occupation, the right to education, to active participation in social, scholastic and work contexts. These are human fundamental rights, already stated in the 1948 Declaration, considered as the ‘prolific mother’ (Papisca, 2008) of an organic corpus of international legal standards that, in its article 23 states “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment […].” also the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) recognizes that “ Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing training” (article 14) and that “ Everyone has the right to engage in work and to pursue a freely chosen or accepted occupation” (article 15). Lastly, it is important to consider the Carta dei diritti universali del lavoro [Charter of Universal Work Rights] where is clearly stated that “Everyone has the right to a decent and dignified job, with respect to professionalism and equal work conditions” (article 3). The above-mentioned international legal regulations recognize the universality of human

3.5 Inclusion and Sustainability to Build the Future

rights. Therefore, the recognition of ‘additional’ and ‘special’ rights for some categories of people is not necessary but there is the need of a ‘supplement’ of safeguards, positive actions, investments and commitment to advantage everyone. This is what was stated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, elaborated by the United Nations and adopted on December 13, 2006. In this document, there is the application of Human Rights to those people with disabilities. This Convention, having its basis on a disability model focused on the respect of human rights, emphasizes equal opportunities, nondiscrimination, and valorization of people’s uniqueness, valorization of empowerment for those who are disadvantaged or discriminated against. Moreover, it focuses also on the removal of obstacles and discrimination in social, educational and professional environments through the use of appropriate support to people with disabilities and through the implementation of services and benefits that have the goal to include people with disabilities (Griffo & Mascia, 2019). Inclusion and Career Guidance. In the field of career counseling and vocational designing, the topic of inclusion acquires a crucial role because it aims at professional design and at ensuring the right to work, considered as an important opportunity to develop, mature, and create a professional identity, even for those people with vulnerabilities and disabilities. Realizing career counseling activities, to the benefit of people with vulnerabilities, acquires considerable importance from a social point of view since the help provided is inspired by normalization, inclusion, by guaranteeing active participation to educational, social, and professional contexts. It promotes the necessity to focus the attention on respecting rights and human dignity. Therefore, on one hand, it is important for professionals dealing with career counseling, vocational designing, and professional inclusion activities, to be able to operate with single clients, to support them in the construction of a personal and professional identity, avoiding standardized counseling modalities, or the realization of in extremis interventions, performed

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during transitional stages and heavily oriented towards diagnosis, towards the analysis of entry requirements for education and jobs, and towards the formulation of predictions regarding the ability to adjust to educational and professional environments (Soresi, 2016). On the other hand, career practitioners have to act on the life contexts of people, most of all on those with vulnerabilities, in order to identify the organizational and managerial changes needed so that the different educational, social, and professional contexts can allow everyone to get a high-quality professional life (Shogren et al., 2016). Dealing with inclusion means to make an effort in order to guarantee the right of everyone to receive attention, flexibility, and the adaptation they need in order to actively participate in their life contexts. All of this involves the commitment to face socio-cultural prejudices, to break down marginalizing barriers, to promote the ‘natural’ support of colleagues, and to guarantee the active participation and professional success of the individual with disabilities and vulnerabilities (Corbière et al., 2014; Di Maggio, Santilli, Ginevra, Martella, & Nota, 2020). Sustainability. Although in the last 20 years we witnessed to a growing interest over the concept of sustainability and to a significant increase in scientific publications on this topic, sustainability still is an open concept with myriads of interpretations and without a specific and unique operational definition (Purvis, Mao, & Robinson, 2019). This is a topic that has its origins in the past. Authors such as Grober (2012), Caradonna (2014), and Du Pisani (2006) largely contributed to highlight the historical roots of this construct. In this context, we recall forestry experts of the 17th and 18th century such as Evelyn and Carlowitz, who introduced the concept of sustainable response related to the reduction of forest resources across Europe. Of great importance is the opinion of the first political economists such as Smith, Mill, Ricardo, and Maltus that, in the context of the industrial revolution, underlined the need of finding a compromise between economic growth and social justice. The contribution given by natural scientists and ecologists of

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the 19th and 20th centuries has been relevant since they helped to highlight the importance of ensuring the conservation of natural resources for sustainable consumption (Purvis et al., 2019). The modern concept of sustainability was born at the end of the 20th century when in the book The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club di Roma (1972), a group of international politicians, scientists and economists emphasized the fact that growth implies a ‘sustainable … global system’. This was the first time in which the word sustainability was connected to the global context (Grober, 2012). In the same year, the environmental text A Blueprint for Survival, published by the editors of The Ecologist magazine (1972), focused the attention on the urgency and scale of environmental problems, and formulated a series of suggestions for the creation of a ‘sustainable society’. Shortly after, in the same year the World Council of Churches Committee (1974) in their book called The Future of Man and Society emphasized the need for a ‘sustainable society’, and Ecology Party (1975) (today known as British Green Party) adopted the ‘Manifesto for a Sustainable Society’, raising the awareness about the fact that classic development, exclusively connected with economic growth, would soon cause the collapse of natural systems. It is in the ‘80s, however, that the concept of sustainability and, in particular, the idea of sustainable development, is introduced in the international political debate. In 1987 the UN World Commission on Environment and Development [WCDE] published its report Our Common Future (Brundtland’s Report), asking for a “new era of economic growth - growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable” (WCDE, 1987, p. 12). It defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 43). In the years that followed the publication of Brundtland’s Report, ‘sustainable development’ became the main paradigm in the environmental movement, and the literature on the topic grew exponentially.

Following the work of Brundtland Commission in 1987, the publication of the Rio Declaration (United Nations, 1992a, b) with its 27 principle that aim at leading towards a ‘sustainable development’ and Agenda 21 that organizes a plan to implement those principle in a realistic way, the work of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the subsequent global conferences promoted by UN, with particular attention to the one that took place in Johannesburg in 2002, have increased global attention on the topics of sustainability and sustainable development. Among the most recent events concerning the topic of sustainable development, it is impossible not to mention to the Rio + 20 Summit, that took place in Brazil in 2012, where the UN Member States met to determine the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that characterize the guidelines to Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The identification of the goals required more than three years of negotiations (United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network [UNSDSN], 2016), with the participation of the Human Rights Commission, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, organizations created to designate a network of solutions for sustainable development and the implementation of sustainable development goals, as well as consultation with civil society, the academic world, private sector and others (Haslegrave, 2014; UNSDSN, 2016). The Agenda identifies 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an extensive action program for a total of 169 targets. The official launch of the Sustainable Development Goals coincided with the beginning of 2016, with a 15year horizon, since the countries that take part in this project plan to meet them by 2030. Hereafter, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, included the goals 4, 8, and 12, already abovementioned: (1) No Poverty; (2) Zero Hunger; (3) Good Health and Well-being; (4) Quality Education; (5) Gender Equality; (6) Clean Water and Sanitation; (7) Affordable and Clean Energy;

3.5 Inclusion and Sustainability to Build the Future

(8) Decent Work and Economic Growth; (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; (10) Reduced Inequality; (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities; (12) Responsible Consumption and Production; (13) Climate Action; (14) Life Below Water; (15) Life on Land; (16) Peace and Justice Strong Institutions; (17) Partnerships to achieve the Goal. The idea at the basis of the SDGs is to be global, that is to say, to create broader goals than those set by the previous Agenda that are achievable for every country, not only for the developed ones. These goals revolve around the achievement of a prosperous life, safety, sustainable food and water, universal use of clean energy, productive and healthy ecosystems, and global economic governance (Griggs et al., 2013). In Osborn, Cutter, and Ullah’s (2015) opinion “All of the goals and targets contain important messages and challenges for developed and developing countries alike” (p. 2). Nevertheless, countries have the possibility to select specific Goals for the national scenario and determine their priority for each Goal. The goals provided by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development intervene in the macrosystem, that is to say, in political, social, economic, and cultural issues. It also involves the mesosystem in terms of living areas, cities, towns, communities, and organizations. The microsystem, composed by the individual and his/her relationships, that is to say, the person, is at the same time an active and passive subject, both responsible for and beneficiary from the Goals of sustainability. SDGs have been created with the idea of making them integrated and interdependent (Scuttari & Nota, 2019). An example is the fact that the efforts to achieve the Goal of Quality Education (4th Goal) would contribute to the reduction of poverty (1st Goal) and to economic growth (8th Goal) (Nilsson, Griggs, & Visbeck, 2016). At the same time, a Goal achieved in an unsustainable context can stop the process of achieving another one. For this reason, the use of strategies to end poverty that promote an unsustainable production and consumption leads to the consequent unattainability of Goals

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concerning sustainable production and consumption (Stafford-Smith et al., 2016). What clearly emerges from the statements, publications, and the international texts of the last 40 years is that there is a strong connection between the terms sustainability and development, so that in referencing the concept of sustainability we are led to think that it overlaps with the concept of sustainable development (Pallante, 2019). The truth is that these two concepts not always share the same direction. The term ‘development’ implies an improvement, progress, a change toward a situation that is better than the current one, leading to positive transformations for those who are living in said situation. The term ‘sustainability’ refers to the idea of maintaining/conserving over time, existing conditions and abilities to grant support and sustainment without creating degradation. Besides the emphasis concerning sustainable development, in Pallante’s (2019) opinion the words development and sustainability are oxymoronic because of the fact that an economy that sets development as its goal cannot be sustainable and will surely exceed the sustainability threshold. In order for sustainable development to acquire the connotation of sustainability it is important not to limit it to merely satisfy the needs of present generations, but also to selfregulate so that it becomes able to satisfy also the needs of the generations to come. A change in the system of values is also needed. Human beings should leave aside the idea that well-being is given by consumption and ongoing use of resources, and re-discover the spiritual dimension, the importance of meaningful human relationships, solidarity, and creativity. These are concepts that are themselves encapsulated in the root of the word sustainability (Pallante, 2019). The Dimensions of Sustainable Development. As regards the concept of sustainable development, the idea of being an integrative concept is of paramount importance. It involves as its three main dimensions environmental, social, and economic aspects. These three dimensions have been identified as pillars of sustainability, the basis of responsible development that can only require the care of the human, natural and

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economic capital (Hansmann, Mieg, & Frischknecht, 2012). Environmental sustainability primarily takes into account the integrity of the terrestrial ecosystem and the quality of the environment, intended as a good that allows the improvement of the quality of life and, consequently, development. Therefore, environmental quality has to be defended against pollution, waste production, and emissions of harmful gases that are dangerous for the planet. It involves the abilities to maintain the quality and reproducibility of natural resources, such as energies, substances, that are intrinsic environmental and biological forces of our planet and that, when appropriately valued, are able to create wealth and to give an important contribution to the evolution of Earth’s environmental system. The concept of environmental sustainability is the root of the achievement of economic sustainability: the latter cannot be at the cost of the former. Therefore, the acknowledgment of the interdependency between the economy and the environment is fundamental. This is a two-way interaction: the way in which the economy is handled has an impact on the environment and environmental quality has its impact on economic results (Hansmann et al., 2012). Economic sustainability pertains to the ability to create income and work for people’s sustainment with a view of long-term sustainable and intergenerational equality. This is achieved through the rational and efficient use of resources and decreasing the use of non-renewable ones. In a sustainable economy, world heritage represents the main pillar and engine of social development. This heritage is based on every form of diversity present on our planet, ranging from bio to cultural diversity. Sustainable economy aims at modulating financial systems in relation to the regenerative capacity of the ecosystem (Rigamonti, Sterpi, & Grosso, 2016). The achievement of environmental and economic sustainability has to go hand in hand with the social one, and the former cannot be achieved at the expense of the latter (Eizenberg & Jabareen, 2017). Social sustainability aims at an equal social distribution of benefits and costs that come

from a world in which men are able to manage the environment. This should be done on a global scale in order to diversify and integrate both socio-cultural and economic human resources, to give value to heterogeneity and diversity, local identities, and biodiversity. This should be a nonhierarchical system in order to create participative organizational systems, and with the ultimate goal of sustaining equality, democracy, and society’s well-being. Social sustainability is therefore based on the concept of social equity as an ethical principle since it is not possible to talk about development when inequalities in income distribution and in living conditions are present. It aims at ensuring well-being for all citizens, both within individual countries and on a global scale, while also giving attention to future generations. UNESCO’s directions, given in the ‘90s, underline, together with researches made in the field of education, that without adequate education and training it is not possible to reach the desired progress needed in order to create a sustainable future (Baumgartner, 2014; UNESCO, 2012). These directions and researches take into account the need of creating forms of promotion for sustainable development, of the betterment of people’s abilities to act in a sustainable way, of increasing consciousness and the overall ethical vision. Sustainability and Professional Life. There has also been an increasing focus on sustainability in career counseling and vocational designing studies. A first thought concerns the idea of professional life characterized by sustainability, while a second one takes into account the construction of future projects in relation to inclusion and sustainability. As regards sustainable careers, we would like to mention the work of Van der Heijden and De Vos (2015). They state that a sustainable career is “the sequence of an individual’s different career experiences, reflected through a variety of patterns of continuity over time, crossing several social spaces, and characterized by individual agency, herewith providing meaning to the individual” (p 7.). Although all professional careers involve a sequence (or sequences) of

3.5 Inclusion and Sustainability to Build the Future

work experiences over time, not all types of sequences may be equally sustainable, and many factors may affect the sustainability of professional life. In addition, professional careers form a complex mosaic of objective experiences and subjective evaluations, resulting in an enormous number of forms in which professional life can evolve and in a great number of possibilities related to whether or not one individual reaches sustainability (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2015). The idea of professional sustainability puts an additional piece to the puzzle that is the debate on sustainability: in the same way, as environmental sustainability considers health, physical, and psychological well-being (Garavan & McGuire, 2010; Pfeffer, 2010), so professional sustainability can be considered as a peculiar form of sustainability, focused on creating the possibility of having a quality in the work environment (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2015). In the theoretical framework, De Vos, Van der Heijden, and Akkermans (2020) highlight the multiple factors that influence sustainable careers and suggest a dynamic approach in order to better understand the subsequent evolutions. While the individual still represents the core of the process, at the same time it is clear that what happens in professional life is the result of interconnections, influences, contextual variables that are not always easy for the individual to detect and to control. In this way, sustainable careers not only concerns the individual management of what happens at a professional level, but mostly the need to create a strong collaboration among people with different responsibilities, such as family members, colleagues, employers, the educational system, and society as a whole so that the life of the individual can develop the sustainability trait. Underlying all of this, there is the idea that ensuring an individual strong relation between work activities, needs, values, and interests is a complex and dynamic process. This requires the contribution of numerous social actors. Only with a general and contextual desire of making all of this possible, there will be the possibility of ensuring a condition of ‘happiness’ to everyone,

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intended as success and satisfaction at a professional level, ‘health’ intended as psychological well-being, physical well-being and stress management, and ‘productivity’ in terms of work performance, and employability. With regard to the construction of a sustainable career future, there are several contributions that also underline the need to prepare people for personal and professional life forms that could ensure sustainable global development or, as Pouyaud and Guichard (2017) point out, to promote the development of a good life, with and for others, and to promote the sustainability of a true human life on Earth. This implies that the focus of career activities has to be shifted from an analysis of one’s own personal characteristics, interests, attitudes, and competences, as it is still the case of today, to the contribution a person can give in the promotion of an equal and sustainable development, asking to their clients “What priorities would you like to take care of?”, “To the respect of what limits would you like to dedicate your civil commitment and employment?” To help people think about these aspects we created the instrument The Future is around the Corner… What Will it Hold for us? An Instrument on the UN’s Goals for Inclusive and Sustainable Development Nota, Soresi, Ginevra, Santilli, & Di Maggio (2018) see appendix n. 1. It refers to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, giving attention to challenges highlighted by the client and asking them to point out how much each one of them can affect the quality of life of an individual and of those who are close to him/her and affect his/her future education and professional choices (see Appendix 1). The first psychometric analysis highlights that the questionnaire is a psychometrically valid and reliable measure. The construct validity was established through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and the factor structure was found to be invariant across boys and girls. The reliability was found excellent with a Cronbach’s alpha of 91. The instrument can be used with both adolescent and young adults in order to make them think about how threats and challenges that are typical of our time can be relevant for their

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quality of life and on the contribution they can give, even through the use of educational and professional choices, to the construction of a different, inclusive, and sustainable society. Having considered all of this, it stands clear the importance of stimulating choices and professional designs that are less ‘ego-centric’ and more oriented to prefer actions and activities that are good not only for one’s own wellbeing but also to contribute, inspired by less individualistic values, to the realization of life context and conditions that aim at a sustainable development. Particular attention can be given to the activities of career counseling and vocational designing, oriented towards knowledge, abilities, and values that are necessary to live and work in a sustainable way. It is also a matter of integrating in an educational and professional path, the knowledge and skills needed in order to conduct a sustainable professional activity, to recognize other people’s actions and decisions that promote sustainable development, and understand the need for a change towards a sustainable way of working (Baumgartner, 2014).

3.6

Rediscovering Social Justice

Social and cultural phenomena of the present time, as highlighted in the previous chapter, increased inequalities in present social contexts (Milanovic, 2017). There are inequalities between those who have access to education and employment and others that are considered to be ‘competitive’ in global markets for their skilled labor (Arthur, 2014), thus adding new issues to the already existent ones. We are well aware of the injustice suffered by women in the labor market (e.g., Bimrose, 2019; Van Veelen, Derks, & Endedijk, 2019), as well as the ones still exist and that involve people with disabilities (Khayatzadeh-Mahani, Wittevrongel, Nicholas, & Zwicke, 2019), a condition shared with migrants and their situation of underemployment and unemployment (Davey & Jones, 2019). The discrimination people experience in the labor market are connected to their cultural identity, and to variables such as ethnicity, social class,

religion, sexual orientation and their intersections (Chen & Keats, 2016). All of this suggests that we have a problem regarding social justice and that this should be considered essential when taking into consideration career counseling and vocational designing (Arthur, 2014; Hooley et al., 2018). Social justice concerns equal access to resources and human rights and also political fairness in social practices (Toporek, Sapigao, & Rojas-Arauz, 2016). It can be conceptualized both as a goal and as a process: the goal is to create a full and equal involvement of people, belonging to every social group with a society that molds itself in order to satisfy its needs. The process concerns the actions needed in order to build democratic contexts that can make participation easier, at the same time respecting human heterogeneity and group differences, and being inclusive in order to guarantee individual agency and the ability to collaborate with others for the purpose of creating change (Adams & Bell, 2016). Social justice implies a world where the distribution of resources is equal and ecologically sustainable, where every member is physically and psychologically safe, acknowledged and respected (Jackson, Regis, & Bennett, 2019). This vision of social justice was suggested by John Rawls at the end of the 20th century (1999, 2003) in his Theory of Justice. He introduced the concept of justice intended as equity, surpassing the philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism, stating that a just society has to pursue the greatest possible well-being for the greatest amount of people. The concept of Rawlsian justice has its basis in the fact that all major social goods, including citizens’ rights and duties, have to be equally distributed, and an equal distribution can exist only if it mostly benefits people with great disadvantages. Following this concept Young, in his Justice and the Politics of Difference, suggests an idea of social justice that is not exclusively based on “distribution of income, resources or positions” (Young, 1990, p. 20) but also on a “degree to which a society contains and supports […] developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience” (Young, 1979, p. 37). According to Rawls,

3.6 Rediscovering Social Justice

justice is something that should be intended as equal distribution of resources, while Young’s attention is focused on social processes and relations, pushing the concept of justice toward the idea of ‘enabling’. This concerns the measure in which the institutions of our society allow or limit people in the process of learning and using their abilities, in actively participating in social contexts, and in expressing their feelings, experiences, and prospects. When there is the presence of barriers and obstacles that do not allow active participation, the possibilities one has of using and developing his/her skills are highly reduced, raising the possibilities of experimenting situations and conditions of discrimination and oppression. The two theoretical approaches that we have described are strongly connected, declaring that social justice has to consider both resources and the acknowledgment of people. The resources concern an equal distribution of social, political, symbolic, and economic goods. The acknowledgment and the respect for every individual and every group requires full inclusion, participation to decisional processes, the power to model institutions, policies, and processes that affect everyone’s life (Adams & Bell, 2016). Forms of oppression, discrimination or prejudice are a heavy burden strictly connected with the idea of social injustice and that often present themselves as restrictive, pervasive and cumulative phenomena, built by society, hegemonic and normalized, intersectional, lasting over time and constantly changing. In describing these characteristics, the term oppression will be used instead of discrimination or prejudice, in order to underline the pervasive nature of social inequality, which usually creates a network between social institutions and individual conscience (Adams & Bell, 2016). Restriction. Oppression underlines the material and structural constraints that influence and reduce in a significant way people’s life opportunity and their sense of possibility. An example can be found in the national myth of the American dream. It suggests that everyone that works hard enough is able of reaching his/her professional dreams but decades of study show that

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people that live and grow in conditions of poverty have a high chance of remaining poor, regardless of their educational and professional commitment or professional aspirations (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, 2014). Pervasive and Cumulative. Oppression is institutionalized through the use of pervasive practices that enter our lives through rights, economic policies, social costumes, and socialization, which help to rationalize it and maintain the status quo. The more institutionalized these practices become, the more difficult it is to identify their origins and the way they have been built and disseminated. An example can be found in racism and in how it acquires pervasiveness because of the multiple institutions of our society that synergistically strengthen it. Afro-American people highly risk of experiencing forms of oppression or marginalization: prejudices and stereotypes in social contexts, barriers in access to the labor market, difficulties in obtaining a bank loan at the same rates that Caucasian people have, and so on (Adams & Bell, 2016). Construction of Social Categories. Oppression is rationalized by the use of social constructs, that is to say, belief systems, obtained through the use of socialization, concerning attributes and social roles given to people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. Social categories such as ‘females’, ‘people of color’, ‘Romani people’s culture’, and ‘Catholics’, in creating different groups on the basis of social attributes, besides simplifying reality and eliminating individual differences, lead us to rationalize over time different treatment and allocation of different resources, and to believe that there are legitimate reasons for iniquity (Adams & Bell, 2016). Occupational segregation, the term used to describe the unequal gender-based distribution of individuals in different professional environments, is an example of what we mentioned above: socialization during the evolutionary age stimulates boys and girls towards professional roles considered appropriate to their gender, basing these assumptions on the fact that they are biologically males and females (Gysbers, Heppner, & Johnston, 2009). The same unequal

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economic treatment (gender pay gap) is the result of socialization practices linked to educational and professional paths that tend to be associated to men and women and also to the system of regulations and values that lead women, in an almost total exclusive way, to take care of the family and of the house. It is also linked to the spreading of apparently ‘harmless’ customs and policies, such as staff incentive schemes like bonuses and production bonuses that are given to those employees that are mostly available (usually men), excessive prolongation of evening meetings, and the use of forms of psychological mobbing such as jokes, gossip or hostile behavior towards women in leadership roles (Camussi & Annovazzi, 2016). Hegemony and Normalization. Oppression is kept over time through voluntary consent rather than with coercion. This consent comes from both those that are in a disadvantageous situation and from the ones that take advantage from the discrimination of others (Adams & Bell, 2016). Through hegemony, the creation of advantages and disadvantages is perceived as something natural, normal, even by those who do not hold any kind of power. Since the effects of injustice are intertwined with the social context, it becomes difficult to exit from such a system and to understand how it works. The psychological processes involved lead us, over time, to these beliefs whereby those who occupy positions of power, a dominant status, even come to believe the fact that they deserve what they have, that it is something natural and obvious and not the result of privilege and exploitation. In the same way, those who belong to different categories are led to think that they deserve their situation, that there is no way of changing things, and to accept the negative image that is associated with them (Volpato, 2019). The exclusion of people with disabilities from the work possibilities can be used as an example for all of the above mentioned. It is a social process that, from different angles, led us to educational and professional contexts where forms of exclusion can easily be found and where people with disabilities are not only discouraged

but also convinced that they can live with the sole help of subsides (Di Maggio et al., 2020). Intersectionality. Different forms of oppression interact with each other like a network of systems that overlap and strengthen themselves. This happens both on a systemic/institutional and on an individual/interpersonal level. Intersectionality works at the level of identity, as well as the level of institutions and systems as a whole, in a multiplicative and simultaneous way. An example of this can be found in the fact that a homosexual immigrant employee with mediumlow socio-economic status is likely to experience work barriers coming from the intertwining of different factors, each capable of making the access and staying in the world of work more difficult (Adams & Bell, 2016). Durability and Changeability. Oppression is characterized by one last feature, that is to say, durability and the ability to mutate into new forms in order to survive. On one hand, for example, the civil rights movement managed to eliminate racial segregation, on the other racism has evolved creating new forms of discrimination, often on a more implicit level, making them hard to identify. Haney-Lopez (2014) found that the clear calls to racial segregation used by politicians in past times to ‘attract’ the votes of Caucasian voters have now transformed themselves into more veiled and less evident forms, but that still favor situations of discrimination and racism toward non-white people (‘dog-whistle politics’). Examples include the excessive emphasis on criminals and fraudsters of the non-Caucasian social system or recurring talks about the presence of illegal migrants in the social context. These provocations do not directly affect ethnicity, yet they deliver very powerful messages on the threats posed by non-Caucasian people to the well-being of society. Social Justice and Career Guidance. In the field of career guidance, we can surely recall that the attention to social justice was already present in Frank Parson’s work, particularly true for what was done to benefit migrants, youth in general and women, helping them in entering the (at the

3.6 Rediscovering Social Justice

time) thriving Boston’s labor market. During the course of time, different colleagues deepened this topic (Irving & Malik, 2004; Lubin & Winslow, 1990). Lately, the voices of those that ask us to make of said topic our main focus are more and more frequent (e.g., Arthur, 2014; Hooley et al., 2018; Jackson et al., 2019). It is loudly stated that career practitioners need to take greater responsibility for these issues and to bear in mind that social and economic inequalities can have a negative impact on people’s psychosocial and career development. Career counselors are asked to take a stand on social issues and have to work in order to eradicate systems and ideologies that perpetuate discrimination, promote oppression and disrespect for human rights (Lee, 2018). With this in mind, career counseling has to become a social practice even more, a tool that strongly contributes to the construction of inclusive, cohesive, and sustainable contexts. It has to work in order to ensure to all citizens rights to safety and to decent wages, to a highquality education, to equal access to educational and professional systems in order to promote communities welfare in general and people experiencing conditions of great vulnerability (Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen, 2017). As Sultana (2018) and us (e.g., Ginevra, Santilli, Nota, & Soresi, 2018) stated, career practitioners need to have attitudes, knowledge, and skills in order to intervene on different levels, both on a micro level, in order to support clients to recognize and cope with professional problems, and also on a macro level through the use of social advocacy actions in order to favor the transformation of social structures and institutional practices that represent and strengthen social injustice. Specifically, on a micro level, in career counseling activities, career practitioners can give people space, allowing them to talk about the situations of discrimination they have experienced. These stories can be used to allow not only individual analysis of the difficult situation experienced but also the contextual influences that support such forms of discrimination (Santili et al., 2020). Moreover, career counselors can support people in acquiring both skills involving

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social analysis of inequalities and the ability to take individual or collective actions to foster social and political change (Diemer & Blustein, 2006; Watts, Diemer, & Voight, 2011). At a meso level, that is to say, at the level of institutions such as schools, organizations, and workplaces, career practitioners can act to promote the recognition and respect of the individual differences and uniqueness. In school contexts, career practitioners can organize educational activities for teachers so that they become aware of the theme of social justice on an educational and professional level and therefore also able to promote the development of skills and resources useful for professional design and for an inclusion in the labor market of all of their students, with an inclusive perspective. Career practitioners can extend their educational and advocacy work to employers, in order to ensure that they become aware of their duties towards all the employees and to make them seriously consider their responsibilities in granting equal conditions in the work context. In the work environment, professionals could give value to workplaces characterized by a democratic and social ethic, promoting decisions involving participation, giving a voice to all employees, to groups and associations that represent them, promoting, in this way, a ‘collective’ company in which solidarity distinguishes itself as a characterizing element (Croft, 2010). Advocacy work at the organizational level also includes promoting the recruitment and training of people with vulnerabilities and other minority groups, ensuring that work barriers in work contexts do not hinder the full performance of all employees and, at the same time, giving value to the personal differences of all employees (Pless & Maak, 2004; Mor Barak, 2016). Of great importance are the actions of training and advocacy with colleagues, in order not to transform negative attitudes and prejudices in new career barriers for those who risk the most (McManus, Feyes, & Saucier, 2010). In this regard, it is necessary to promote activities and interventions that have the aim of increasing knowledge toward diversity in general, and,

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more specifically, toward workers with vulnerabilities in the company. The aim should be to increase the knowledge of the skills and strategies with which colleagues can promote inclusion in professional activities. Emphasis should be given to those actions that inhibit social categorization, emphasizing heterogeneity, uniqueness and one’s strengths (Deloitte, 2013). To a macro level, career practitioners should be able to influence policies and social culture. Collective commitments in international, national and regional networks become significant, because they can have an impact on the political contexts in which people make decisions that affect the educational and professional life. They should make their voice heard at a ministerial level in order to ensure that school curricula and vocational designing practices are able to support those with the highest vulnerabilities in a school and University context. Professionals can take on the social responsibility of stimulating the community about the impacts of social injustice on people’s personal and working lives, emphasizing the idea that this is not just an individual issue, but a distinctive condition deeply rooted in the global social context. They are therefore called upon to denounce the systems, institutions and cultural norms that promote the oppression and marginalization of certain social groups (Adams & Bell, 2016; Arthur, 2014; Hooley et al., 2018).

3.7

Conclusions

At the end of this chapter, it is clear that career practitioners today find themselves acting in a context that deeply differs from the past, with rates of complexity, uncertainty, and global challenges so big that the discomfort toward one’s own future planning has considerably grown. An always increasing number of people face difficulties, obstacles, and barriers in the pursuit of their personal and professional goals and in the realization of their personal and professional aspirations (Luijkx & Wolbers, 2018).

These are issues that require professionals to acquire new knowledge and highly qualified skills, a scientifically based and up-to-date conceptual background, attitudes and values in line with the preservation of rights of all people in order to make their professional actions more effective. As the Network for Innovation in Career Guidance & Counselling (NICE, 2012) stated, professionals’ education regarding career counseling and vocational designing can only be achieved in a University context, through the attendance of high-quality post-university training courses and, in line with the relevant statements of the UN, it can only focus on the current global challenges of the society and of the labor market. At a national level, also the Italian Society for Career Guidance (SIO) and the Italian University Network for Counseling (Uni.Co) focus their attention on the topic of the training of professionals that deal with career counseling and vocational designing, highlighting once again that the training should be done in Universities and focused on the acquisition of knowledge and skills that allow them to carefully detect threats and challenges of the current context and to identify scientifically sound career counseling procedures and methodologies that can support the construction of a professional future over a lifetime, mostly for those who are experiencing conditions of vulnerability. Therefore, in our opinion, as we are witnessing in the context of the after graduation training project called ‘Career Guidance and Career Counselling for Inclusion, Sustainability, and Social Justice’, it is fundamental for those who deal with guidance to be prepared in carrying out these delicate professional activities in the light of inclusive and sustainable models and social justice, becoming able to create innovation-based projects, social advocacy, activism, and to be the first to use a curious and cosmopolitan approach, in order to become a reference for others and to act with strength. All of this needs to be done in order to create futures of quality for everyone and for the well-being of society in general.

References

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61 Scuttari, A., & Nota, L. (2019). Costruire contesti universitari inclusivi e sostenibili. [Building inclusive and sustainable university environments]. In L. Nota, M. Mascia & T. Pievani (Eds.), Diritti umani e Inclusione (pp. 25–44). Bologna: Il Mulino. Shogren, K. A., Wehmeyer, M. L., Schalock, R. L., & Thompson, J. R. (2016). Reframing educational supports for students with intellectual disability through strengths-based approaches. In M. L. Wehmeyer & K. A. Shogren (Eds.), Handbook of research-based practices for educating students with intellectual disability (pp. 25–38). New York: Routledge. Skovhus, R. B., & Thomsen, R. (2017). Popular problems. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 45(1), 112–131. Soresi, S. (2016). Psicologia delle disabilità e dell’inclusione. [Psychology of disability and inclusion]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Soresi, S., Nota, L., & Wehmeyer, M. L. (2011). Community involvement in promoting inclusion, participation, and self-determination. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15, 15–28. Stafford-Smith, M., Griggs, D., Gaffney, O., Ullah, F., Reyers, B., Kanie, N., et al. (2016). Integration: The key to implementing the sustainable development goals. Sustainabily Science, 12, 911–919. Strunk, G. (2009). Operationalizing career complexity. Management Revue, 20(3), 294–311. Sultana, R. G. (2018). Precarity, austerity and the social contract in a liquid world: career guidance mediating the citizen and the state. In T. Hooley, R. G. Sultana, & R. Thomsen (Eds.), Career guidance for social justice: Contesting neoliberalism (pp. 63–76). New York & London: Routledge. Super, D. E. (1980). A life-span, life-space approach to career development. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16(3), 282–298. Ecologist, The. (1972). A blueprint for survival. Harmondsworth: Penguin. The Ecology Party. (1975). Manifesto for a sustainable society. Leeds: The Ecology Party. Toporek, R. L., Sapigao, W., & Rojas-Arauz, B. (2016). Fostering the development of a social justice perspective and action: Finding a social justice voice. In M. Casas, L. Suzuki, C. Alexander, & M. Jackson (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (4th ed., pp. 17–30). Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage. UN (1987) Report of the world commission on environment and development: Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNESCO (2012). Shaping the education of tomorrow: 2012 Full-length report on the UN decade of education for sustainable development. https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000216472.

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4.1

Introduction

As we have already mentioned before, today we live in a context characterized by uncertainty, complexity, change, globalization, inequality. All these phenomena have a great impact on the wellbeing of people, groups, and communities. An important aspect is, for example, the polarization of wealth and income, whereby within each country a small minority of the population owns an ever-expanding wealth, while a large portion of the remaining population experiences difficulties, struggles to avoid falling in a spiral of poverty, and remains powerless when in front of the reduction of their level of wellbeing. In the World Inequality Report (2018), we can see how inequalities are increasing everywhere, but at different speeds. A comparison over time (1980– 2016) has shown how India, US-Canada, Russia, China, and Europe present more and more inequalities. The top 10% of the population has been gaining profit in all five of the analyzed regions since 1980. In 1980, the top 10% share was between 30–35% of the total national income in Europe, US-Canada, China, India, and only 22% in Russia. The top 10% income shares increased between 1980 and 2016 but at different speeds. In Europe, it increased to 37%, while in US-Canada, China, India, and Russia it increased even more. In China, it reached 41%, in Russia 46%, in US-Canada 48%, and in India it reached almost 60%. There is no available data to analyze regions such as the Middle East, Brazil, and

South Africa but the limited information available suggests that income inequality has remained stable. Moreover, there is a strong apprehension for the African continent, for which this lack of equality is probably related to a strong population growth that, according to the trends, may reach 26% of the global population by 2050. This is the reason why this process is an ‘explosive mix’ able to foster substantial future migratory phenomena. It is important to notice the contrast between the Western/Westernized world, where it is easy to find a concentration of capital, technology, comfort, and everywhere else where misery, discouragement, and desolation are common elements. It is normal to wonder why there are still so few emigrants. Therefore, there is the belief that emigrants will grow exponentially soon. Thus, we can imagine that super-diversity and high heterogeneity rates, with the movements of people, will increasingly characterize our cities and our neighborhoods (Di Cesare, 2017; Vertovec, 2010). The topic of diversity involves other components that are connected to it in a traditional and prototypical sense, such as those regarding impairments, learning difficulties, gender differences, and so on. This creates a situation of ‘movement’, of dynamism, where there is the coexistence of cultures, biographies, repertoires of different abilities, different forms of communications and interaction among individuals that create complex and unpredictable

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4_4

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scenarios that have “authors” and protagonists that are not easy to detect, all of this together with a series of activities, energies, and combinations of original and unimaginable actions (Nota, Ginevra, & Soresi, 2015; Pennycook, 2012). Therefore, we think that guidance professionals, given their role of leaders in career education, research, and innovation in the field of future career design, should help people, especially the younger ones, to develop forms of thinking and abilities that are not only useful to understand and handle the complexity and heterogeneity of their career design, but that also have an important role in advancing sustainable development and in inclusion. Considering all of this, in this chapter, we would like to take into account some constructs, such as cosmopolitanism, curiosity, imagination, courage, and activism, as resources that can encourage reflections for the construction of a sustainable, inclusive, and equal future.

4.2

Cosmopolitanism

Globalization will still affect the life and work of the near future and this will lead to the necessity to understand multiple, interconnected, heterogeneous, and complex systems. We will find ourselves more and more in the situation of having to face local situations caused by global factors, local events that become global. We will have to consider at the same time the culture, needs, and necessities of very different people, both if we are taking into account a situation in which they live in the same space at the same time (for example in a classroom, a company, or a local community), and also if they are in different spaces in which they communicate at different times (for example with clients, colleagues, and students that live in different parts of the world). All of this is the reason why we need cosmopolitanism more and more. Cosmopolitanism has a story that goes back to ancient Greece, almost 2000 years in the past (Inglis & Robertson, 2004, 2005). It comes from two terms, “kósmos” (cosmos, universe, world)

and “polítēs” (citizen, community, politics), that aims at merging two ideas, the one of universality with the one of citizenship and with the concept of being part of the collective. Starting from the pioneering work of Ulf Hannerz (1990, 1996), the term cosmopolitanism has been used to define the inclination to move beyond national borders, to analyze social phenomena involving spaces beyond one’s community, and to develop life projects based on skills, knowledge, and heterogeneous, multicultural and open lifestyles. Hannerz (2004) broadens the definition by stating that cosmopolitanism has two faces: a cultural and a political one. The first has its roots in the knowledge of cultural practices and lifestyles that are different from one’s own and in the possibility and ability to enjoy them to experience a sort of intellectual and cognitive contentment. The second has its roots in issues connected to global inequalities, to the noncompliance with rights, to the democratic deficit and the relapse that all of this has on people’s lives. Taking into consideration the latter meaning, the cosmopolitan is the one who crosses physically and/or cognitively the boundaries of his/her territory and tries to create bonds, new relationships, and also to give life to forms of contexts transformation while respecting the culture of the original population. These peculiarities, as we shall notice, are also at the foundations of contemporary activism. It is the case of environmentalists, that suggest projects that have the aim of facing the environmental challenges on a global scale rather than addressing them only on a national level or involving single countries in the process. This has to be done because the whole planet is experiencing the threat of a major ecological crisis (Holton, 2009). The cultural and political components, besides sharing a clear openness to the world, tend to be independent from each other. There are cases in which both can coexist at the same time, and other scenarios in which only one of these components is present, differently characterizing the concept of ‘being a cosmopolitan’ (Holton, 2009; Roudometof, 2018). To have a better understanding of the whole process, we can use an example made by (Holton, 2009): the case of

4.2 Cosmopolitanism

fair-traded coffee. Most coffee drinkers are not interested in the origin of the product or in how it is processed. On the contrary, cosmopolitan coffee drinkers are interested in those aspects, but in two different ways. In the first, more cultural aspect, the cosmopolitan coffee drinker is not only interested in the different kinds of coffee and in their production modalities, but also in different tastes and different historical traditions that belong to the various areas where the product comes from. In the second, more political and economic aspect, the individual pays attention to inequalities, those being the ways in which workers are treated, to the possible forms in which they are exploited by multinationals, to the relapse that all the above-mentioned aspects have for local populations and their wellbeing, to the evolution of forms of fair-trading. The most advanced forms show the copresence of both these aspects. Considering the role globalization has in creating the contexts in which we live, Beck (2002, 2006, 2016) states that, because of the globalization process, cosmopolitanism characterizes our existence whether we want it or not, defining said process as cosmopolitanization of reality. If an individual finds him/herself in the situation in which he/she chooses a cosmopolitan lifestyle, he/she will likely find him/herself involved in the process of deepening, studying, and trying to understand the context in which he/she lives, and, if this does not happen, said individual will experience a sort of “involuntary cosmopolitism” or “trivial cosmopolitism”. In the first circumstance, a cosmopolitan approach acquires depth only if he/she gives value to the attention to both the local and the global. As Beck states: “cosmopolitanism without provincialism is empty, provincialism without cosmopolitanism is blind” (Beck, 2006; p. 19). Vertovec and his colleagues (Vertovec, 2009, 2016; Vertovec & Cohen’s; 2002) distinguish five different versions of cosmopolitanism: it can be sociocultural, philosophical, political, a set of attitudes, and a set of abilities. Sociocultural cosmopolitanism takes into consideration social and cultural conditions globalization brought along and the ability to look at the world from

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various angles, with both specific local focuses and global ones that pay attention to the unfolding of life on our planet in general. Philosophical cosmopolitanism emphasizes the idea that human beings are citizens of the world and that, in line with what Beck (2006) claims, manage to bring together diverse identity aspects, which merge together. These aspects focus on human rights, respect, tolerance, and global responsibility. Political cosmopolitanism is based on solidarity and on the goals that aim at the collective wellbeing that have to go beyond the national borders, thanks to the establishment and work of both Governmental and nongovernmental institutions, able to bring together people from different national realities. Cosmopolitanism as a set of attitudes involves aspects such as openness to the world, enhancement of heterogeneity, positive attention towards different cultures, bonds with people that have a different cultural and social background, inclination to consider different levels of socioeconomic problems, going beyond the borders of one’s own territory, and the ability to imagine forms of citizenship from a global and inclusive perspective. Lastly, the idea of cosmopolitanism as a set of abilities concerns those knowledge and skills that promote exchanges and complex relationships that pay attention to the heterogeneity, uniqueness, and to peaceful, creative and supportive coexistences. The few studies carried out today seem to highlight that an inclination to assume a cosmopolitan attitude positively connects with a greater openness to diversity and innovations, with a higher tendency to accept the risks connected with activities of ‘exploration’, with the ‘discovery’ of new paths and with an early acceptance of innovation concerning different aspects of existence (Roudometof, 2005). As far as future designing is concerned, it appears clear that new generations need more and more the possibility of cultivating their own cosmopolitan vision of reality. Building one’s future today means to look forward to what will happen with an open mind and to appreciate the differences of the world rather than its uniformity. It means to be curious towards cultures and

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people that are different from ours (Vertovec, 2016). In the awareness that nowadays every place in the world is characterized by the copresence of different people with different cultures, religions, origins, interests, and so on, the inclination to analyze reality from different points of view and on different levels gains more importance. In this way, if on one hand career design that does not consider the global factor is likely to be “empty”, risking of not giving its contribution to the challenges connected to the creation of sustainable and inclusive contexts, on the other hand, a career design that does not take into account the “local” is likely to be “blind” because of the consequences and repercussions that national and international policies can bring in people’s lives. Lastly, looking forward to the future requires careful attention to universal rights, common goods, solidarity, and the ability to understand that everyone’s contribution is more and more important for these precious components of our life to become something vital that advantages a quality future for whole societies. In this context, cosmopolitanism implies the act of taking responsibility for a ‘space’ that is common to everyone and that goes beyond the concept of geographical place; the acknowledgement of all the individuals and their existence, and the requirements for their freedom and wellbeing; “living together with”, going beyond national borders and ethnical ones (Held, 2003). As Saeed (2019) suggests, all of this can represent an important contribution to the sustainable development of the community. Based on the above-mentioned considerations and on Riefler and Diamantopoulos’ suggestions (2009) we developed the instrument: “How Cosmopolitan Do I Think I Am?” (see appendix n. 2) that has the task of analyzing cosmopolitanism in adolescents within career guidance and career design contexts (Di Maggio, Santilli, & Nota, 2018). The analyses, carried out on a group of more than 320 adolescents, composed of 150 males and 170 females, with an average age around 17.22 years, show good psychometric conditions of validity and reliability. More

specifically, exploratory and confirmative factor analyses [v2(88) = 206.841; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.919; RMSEA = 0.065; SRMR = 0.049] show how the 16 items that are part of the instrument create the structure for three subtests: (a) the inclination to give value to different cultures and establish contacts with people coming from different countries, that is to say, to appreciate traditions, customs, principles of people that come from different parts of the world, and also to appreciate religious beliefs and points of view that are different from the ones we have; (b) the inclination to give value to biodiversity and to emphasize developmental sustainability, to protect every environment and biological and social 326 heterogeneity; (c) the inclination to consider both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, this means being able to give credit to ideas, issues, needs of the local communities, while also keeping in mind those of bigger contexts that go beyond the national borders, creating a consideration of the self that is in line with the concept of world citizen. Validation studies have shown that adolescents with higher levels of cosmopolitanism are also more assertive and rely more on collaboration, on critical thinking and argumentative skills; they are also those who decide to invest their future in a university education. In addition to this, cosmopolitanism seems to correlate in a positive and meaningful way with career adaptability, with the inclination to positively worry about the future, to experience a sense of control about the event, to explore and to be curious about the self and the surrounding environment, to rely on one’s own problem-solving skills. In the end, using the instrument The Future is around the Corner… What Will it Hold for us? An Instrument on the UN’s Goals for Inclusive and Sustainable Development, already introduced in the previous chapter of this volume, we have been able to observe how adolescents with higher levels of cosmopolitanism have the inclination to consider systemic challenges to attain sustainable development in their own future educational and career designing.

4.2 Cosmopolitanism

This instrument is useful in career counseling and vocational designing paths to launch actions focused on the above-mentioned topics and aspects and to understand how much those activities were able to foster the promotion of a cosmopolitan vision. As also suggested by the project “Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant” that will be deepened in the following chapter, it is possible to create workshops, in school contexts, while maintaining an educational perspective. These workshops allow us to: • Examine definitions and models focused on cosmopolitanism, discuss and exemplify them, consider their value to improve the contexts in which we live; • Take into consideration the existence of different lifestyles and cultures in the work environment, how workers can evolve once they have become more cosmopolitan; • Consider the relevance and contribution that people with different backgrounds can give when solving work problems (improving a product, a service, etc.), with also the purpose of achieving the sustainable development goals, and reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of multifaceted career identities in the world of work; • Examine the importance of multidisciplinary skills in dealing with complex social problems and the needs that different skilled careers from different disciplines and sectors have; • Analyzing at different levels, local and global, cultural and commercial exchanges, productive activities and so on, with the related supply chains, to fully understand the mechanisms that guarantee wellbeing in some contexts and forms of discomfort in others. This is done to reflect on career designs that aim at changing a status quo that is currently damaging the majority of the population; • Take into consideration possible ways that help to make career actions more cosmopolitan.

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4.3

Curiosity and Imagination

Together with cosmopolitan attitudes and lifestyles, it can be vital, in our opinion, to regain the inclination to curiosity to foster forms of awareness and critical reflections on the times we are living, to avoid the inclination to passively accept news and information, to not rely on prejudices and stereotypes when facing decisions regarding the future (Riva, 2018; Santilli, Ginevra, & Di Maggio, 2020). Moreover, curiosity is at the heart of global citizenship. It stimulates students to ‘discover’ the world, its values, and identities. It also encourages students to identify strategies and modalities in which everyone can make the difference when constructing a sustainable and inclusive future (Hindin, 2019). Curiosity for what happens to us, for the phenomena we are experiencing, for the relationships that characterize them, can be a useful and beneficial instrument for a quality career designing. The importance of curiosity and explorative behaviors associated with it are certainly not new in the field of career counseling and vocational guidance and more generally within the human sciences that study and deal with the development of the individual from different angles. There are different definitions of curiosity. Some consider it to be a sort of need connected to the concept of nourishment, something similar to hunger, that needs to be satisfied to ensure wellbeing and survival (satiation) (Schmitt & Lahroodi, 2008); others define curiosity as a spontaneous learning mechanism based on the necessity that people have to focus their attention towards lesser-known aspects of life to facilitate processes of selfgratification. At the base of all this, there is the need for knowledge that pushes the individual to perform exploratory behaviors useful to fill an information gap, often resulting in pleasing and satisfying sensations (Iran-Nejad, 1990; IranNejad & Chissom, 1992; Pekrun, 2019).

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This shows the value that the research for information has, as Loewenstein’s work shows (1994), in the field of the theoretic model called the knowledge-gap model. Here the desire for information remains a salient element, but the author’s opinion is that this need is capable of activating the individual only when people experience moderate information gap. More specifically, in Loewenstein’s opinion, curiosity increases as the person realizes that there is a gap between the level of knowledge possessed by an individual and the level of knowledge that he/she desires to achieve, but up to a certain extent. If the gap is too small or too substantial the individual will not experience curiosity. Only a moderate gap, perceived as something fillable, tends to enable the person and creates a pleasing process through which the individual looks for new information. Peterson and Cohen (2019) completing Loewenstein’s work (1994), state that, in presence of an information gap, the individual, to be curious, must feel the opportunity to gather information while feeling in control of the above-mentioned process. Curiosity is a construct that is still being debated: some consider it as a variable trait, that is to say, as the result of the individual’s intrinsic characteristics (e.g. Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004; Litmanand & Silvia, 2006), and others consider it as a state variable, that is to say, the result of environmental variables (e.g. Hidi & Renninger; 2006; Loewenstein, 1994). Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that the presence of the following elements seem to characterize it: desire, intended as the need for information that pushes people to act and look for new information; the perception of having a moderate gap between one’s knowledge and the ones he/she wishes to own; lastly, the perception of a sense of control on the process aimed at closing the above-mentioned knowledge gap. This desire of wanting to know more can be related to different subjects: facts, events, disciplinary contents, but also people, relationships, and interactions (Grossnickle, 2016; Pekrun, 2019; Kashdan et al., 2009). It is fair to assume that there is a distinction between cognitive curiosity and social curiosity.

Cognitive curiosity is the desire of acquiring, through the use of explorative behaviors, information about facts, events, and problems of different nature (Grossnickle, 2016). It is interesting to notice that, when focused on disciplinary contents, this kind of curiosity seems to encourage the learning process (Wavo, 2004) and to strengthen the persistence in the field of study and educational paths in a positive way (Neblett, Philip, Cogburn, & Sellers, 2006; Smalls, White, Chavous, & Sellers, 2007). Career counseling and vocational designing have acknowledged the importance of cognitive curiosity: it concerns the search for information, data, ideas and insights on professions, educational paths, possibilities that exist in the surrounding reality and regarding the self, one’s characteristics, interests, and values. Thanks to curiosity and to its explorative behaviors, young people have a realistic idea of their opportunities, they become ‘less naïve’ and at the same time ‘more experienced’ on how ‘the world works’ (Patton & Porfeli, 2007; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). At the same time, curious people get deeply in touch with their own skills and with what it is important to learn to carry out certain career activities. The lack of curiosity puts a limit to exploration and promotes poor realism and unrealistic career aspirations and expectations for the future (Nota & Rossier, 2015; Patton & Porfeli, 2007; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). We think that cognitive curiosity can be useful in the field of career counseling and vocational designing because it fosters, as already highlighted, a better knowledge of the world of work and an investment in education, reducing the current inclination new generations have to abandon their studies, increasing, as a consequence, their vulnerability (Eurostat, 2019; Guichard, 2018), but also because it increases the knowledge and reflection on the complex social, political, economic, and environmental systems and also on the current global challenges, stimulating decision-making processes based on higher levels of insight. Several authors have recognized the relevance of social curiosity. Social curiosity concerns the desire of acquiring, always through the use of explorative behaviors,

4.3 Curiosity and Imagination

information on people, on what they think and feel, on how they behave, on their desires and interests (Grossnickle, 2016; Hartung & Renner, 2011). Several authors have recognized the relevance of social curiosity; for example, Foster (2004) states how to act in an efficient way in a changing and complex social environment, human beings need information about those around them. Dunbar (2004) states that gathering information on what people know and desire is the basis of satisfactory social exchanges, similarly, Baumeister, Zhang, and Vohs (2004) emphasize the role of informal knowledge on how others behave, think and feel, promoting human relationships. In line with all of this, Renner (2006) highlights that people with substantial levels of social curiosity are less anxious, face social interactions more frequently, have higher interpersonal skills, and can use that information accurately. Even if in career counseling and vocational designing social curiosity has a low relevance, we think that it plays an interesting role. We cannot avoid the fact that nowadays it is more and more important to get to know people that are distant from us in terms of origin, culture, religion, interests and so on, but is also important to deepen the knowledge about lifestyles, career activities, ways to cope with different difficult situations, ways to help people to go beyond the stereotypical view of things, to go beyond one’s self, owner’s needs and interests, to meet the other and outline our belonging to one humanity, to know and enrich thoughts and amplify reflections. All of this can help us to think about an innovative variation of professions, about how to make, identify, and suggest improvements in the working environment while considering at the same time personal needs and uniqueness that other people have. The information gathered while curiously searching situations, facts, events, threats, and people can be available to the imagination (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011). Imagination regards being able to produce mental images on something that still does not exist (Hackmann, Bennet-Levy, Holmes, & Marsigli, 2018),

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allowing the individuals to go beyond, beyond the limits of time, place, and, more generally, of reality, and to represent future scenarios from different perspectives (Hackmann et al., 2018). As regards the counseling activities, imagination can allow boys and girls to travel through time, to enter the future, to curiously search both the possible consequences linked to the realization of a satisfying career goal and to detect possible paths to take to realize the desired career goal of one’s life (Meijers, 2002) and, we would like to add, of other people’s lives. Moreover, according to us, imagination can bring into focus actions, activities, and events, that do not exist yet, but that can help to build an inclusive, sustainable world, based on social justice. The transformative paradigm (Laliberte Rudman, 2014), that implies pushing beyond the present and its limits to imagine “what could happen”, we can embrace the idea that the threats that put a strain on our world become challenges for the transformation of reality, detecting new usable scenarios, “missions possible” that we would like to create for the self, for the community in which we live and for the entire planet Earth, from which we can start to identify, backward, steps and actions to perform to realize them (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011). In the light of these reflections, we created the instrument “Look at yourself and at everything else with interest and curiosity” (see appendix n. 3), in reference to the work by Kashdan et al. (2009), and to their instrument Curiosity and Exploration Inventory, and to Renner (2006) and his Social Curiosity Measure. The analyses carried out on more than 297 Italian adolescents, attending the last years of high school, show how the instrument presents acceptable psychometric conditions of validity and reliability. More specifically, the exploratory and confirmative factor analyses [v2(297) = 325.227; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.944; NNFI = 0.950; RMSEA = 0. 083 (CI90 ¼ 0:0796  0:0983); SRMR = 0.068] present a factor structure of two factors (Nota, Soresi, Ginevra, Santilli, Di Maggio, 2018). The first one is cognitive curiosity and concerns the inclination to consider new or unpredicted actions as positive and useful occasions to search

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to know more curiously. The second factor is social curiosity and regards the inclination to be curious and explore people and their lifestyles. Adolescents characterized by higher levels of curiosity are also those who present a higher inclination to cosmopolitism, to believe that it is necessary to gather information to overcome prejudices, to change idea, and to look for new solutions little by little as the events unfold, to look for new mediation forms between the self and the other. The instrument is used to deepen the relations between cognitive and social curiosity and other important dimensions for quality future designing, but also and most importantly to verify if with our interventions we have been able to promote a greater curiosity. In this respect, taking inspiration by the work done in a series of schools (Soresi, Nota, & Santilli, 2019), there could be the realization of laboratories aimed at: • making people reflect on curiosity, examining definitions, processes, and possible consequences on personal and career life; • creating more space involving curiosity in our life, asking, for example, to describe one or more meaningful episodes in which the person acted in a curious way (for example think about yourself and list the circumstances in which, in the past, you gave space to your curiosity) and the experienced consequences (for example what consequences did you have after performing this curious action?), together with emotions, thoughts, and behaviors connected to them (for example what were you told in that circumstance?; how did you feel?; what did you do to look for the information?); • reflecting on the inclination to block exploratory behaviors based on thoughts such as “Just forget it”, “I don’t care”, “I’m not able to…” and to encourage curiosity with incentive thoughts such as “Why not?”, “Yes, let’s see…”, “I can do it”; • looking beyond, towards possible and futuristic innovations, solutions, strategies, that also have the purpose of pursuing the sustainable development goals, thanks to curious

research of information (“Look for information regarding possible technological innovations, consult different sources, go towards different contents and objects of analysis! After all of this, make some personal reflections… ask yourself: “What did I notice by consulting different sources? Can I know more?”) and imagining different scenarios “Close your eyes and travel to the future… here we are, in 2040, you are outside your house, what do you see? What do people use to move around? Take a deep breath… how is the air you are breathing? Do you need a means of transport to go to work?” and so on; • realizing new experiences and actions “Perform a new action that you have never done before and that you would like to do… you could interview a person that has a job you are curious about, observe a worker that does a job you do not know and that you have never heard about”; • looking around at new global challenges, starting, in line with what suggested by Pluck and Johnson (2011), from the awareness of one’s own information gap, asking “What do you already know about…? What else can be important to know about…? What can you do to know more…?” and so on, also to put these challenges in relation to one’s own future and with the future of other people.

4.4

Courage

To help people to “take the reins” of the design of their future, and to not be overwhelmed by the sense of discomfort and difficulty that these times can cause, we think that it is important to place courage alongside with cosmopolitism and curiosity. The term courage has been used since 400 B.C. by philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, to describe one of the most important human virtues that promote the development of the person (Snyder, Lopez, & Pedrotti, 2011). More recently, Putman (2010) has defined courage as the first human virtue that

4.4 Courage

makes all the other virtues possible. Peterson and Seligman (2004) present it as a force that helps the person to fight against potential internal or external obstacles to reach meaningful objectives. (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Woodard (2004) states that it is possible to talk about courage only if the person sets a noble or good purpose, despite of the fear associated with a perceived menace that goes beyond the available resources. Finally, Rate, Clarke, Lindsay, and Sternberg (2007) after having analyzed 23 different definitions of courage, state that it is the expression of four different elements that are the presence of intentionality, an objective risk for the person involved in the courageous action, a noble purpose, and a personal feeling of fear. In addition to the consideration that the abovementioned elements determine courage, many authors (Putman, 1997, 2004, 2010; Rate, 2010; Rate et al., 2007) suggest that it is possible to differentiate many types of courage. Pury, Britt, Zinzow, and Raymond (2014) believe that there are three kinds of courage: physical, moral, and psychological courage. Physical courage involves dealing with physical risks to protect one’s life or another person’s life. Moral courage regards dealing with social risks, such as to suffer discrimination and exclusion, to defend one’s values and the respect towards the self and the others. Psychological courage concerns dealing with psychological risks, such as discomfort and frustration, to improve and be able to pursue new and positive future objectives. In addition, Greitemeyer, Osswald, Fischer, and Frey (2007) refer to civil courage, that is to say, to be indignant to increase the respect of social and ethical rules, in spite of the possible social and physical costs implied. Woodard and Pury (2007) highlight the importance that courage can have in different life contexts such as the career context, for example, to move to another country to find a job, to defend a colleague who is a victim of discriminations, or the social context, for example ‘to offer one’s life’ to deal with a familiar or national emergency, to take action into a conflict, supporting a relative in a difficult moment. Hannah, Sweeney, and Lester (2007) underline the

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relevance of the context in the analysis of courage. These authors state that a courageous behavior is the result of a process that begins in a specific contextual situation. Moreover, in their model, these authors detect a series of factors that can promote courageous actions such as openmindedness, conscientiousness, hope, resilience, the tendency to use positive qualities referred to oneself, one’s abilities to face difficult situations and to produce meaningful changes. The researches previously carried out highlighted that courageous people are more motivated to pursue their goals, even in the career field, to implement more solutions to achieve them, reducing, in this way, the sense of fear. They have greater confidence in their abilities to manage difficult situations and to achieve what they mostly care about, even in the presence of obstacles and internal/external barriers (Amundson, Borgen, Iaquinta, Butterfield, & Koert, 2010). Moreover, Koerner (2014) specifies that courage is necessary to raise difficult questions relative to labor exploitation, corruption, organizational failure, and also to support the rights of a minority, stand up against a domineering leadership, talk about dignified jobs, equality, safety, and dignity. In line with this, Worline (2010) underlines that courage, in the organizational field, becomes an oppositionalconstructive behavior, to put an end to actions of coercion towards workers. Therefore, it refers to the tendency to act against the pressures of conformism, social control, and submission to authority. As regards the projects for the future, courage can help us to act in the presence of difficult situations and moments of uncertainty, to show perseverance, to create career projects that are against the stereotypes, to not suffer the influence of social pressures, to defend one’s and other people’s rights, to push oneself towards innovative solutions (Ginevra & Capozza, 2015). A certain amount of courage is also important to go toward new directions and embrace new professional modalities that are not only environmentally sustainable, but that also “turn poverty, inequality, and lack of financial access into new market opportunities for smart,

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progressive, profit-oriented companies” (Business and Sustainable Development Commission, 2017, p. 7). Using the Italian version of the instrument Courage Measure—CM by Norton and Weiss (2009) we could observe a tight relation between courage and career adaptability (e.g. Ginevra et al., 2018). Taking into consideration the works that deepen and analyze courage and taking inspiration from the work by Pury, Kowalski, and Spearman (2007), we created this interview with the intent to better understand the experiences that people live throughout their life: “Life is often complicated and difficult. For this reason, it can require patience, perseverance, and courage. In your life, have you ever been courageous? If yes, try to describe a situation in which in your opinion you have been courageous. When describing it, please specify when, where, and with whom it happened, what you did, how you felt, what you obtained with your courageous act and how the other people who were there behaved”. This interview has been used with different groups of people with vulnerabilities, stories of substance abuse (Di Maggio, Santilli & Nota, 2019), unemployment (Santilli, Di Maggio, Ginevra, & Nota, under review), and immigration (Santilli, Di Maggio, Ginevra, Nota, & Soresi, under review). The analyses carried out allowed us to highlight how both contextual barriers (prejudice, discriminations, rights violation) and personal barriers (low efficacy beliefs, low self-esteem, attributive bias) are at the root of actions of psychological, moral, and/or physical courage, to face them and to be able to look for more dignified and satisfying life conditions and to reflect once again on the future, in spite of everything. These instruments can be used to analyze barriers and actions of courage that groups of individuals can perform, but also to promote courage itself inside of specific counseling sessions and/or inside of specific workshops that allow people to: • reflect upon courage examining definitions, components, and the consequences that the implementation of courageous actions can

bring in present and future personal and career life contexts; • analyze the different types of courage (physical, moral, and psychological courage), noble purposes, risks, example of courageous actions in the field of personal and career contexts; • analyze the role that courageous actions had in one’s life, their consequences in the short and long term; • promote the realization of new courageous behaviors, put into practice also with the help of other people at school, at home, in the community, and for the construction of more and more inclusive and sustainable contexts.

4.5

Activism for Our Future

As we have mentioned in the previous paragraphs, nowadays planning a quality future requires cosmopolitan ways of thinking and a curious exploration to better understand and reflect upon the global and local characteristics of our societies and think about what to do. All of this can lead to a feeling of indignation, discomfort for the current state of affairs, incredulity regarding how some conditions have been created, frustration, helplessness, and feeling defeated considering the size of problems. These factors can lead us to immobilism, passivity, to the idea that there is nothing we can do about the situation. However, embracing courage, linking it to social justice, rights, visions and images of inclusive and sustainable societies, we can and we must ‘move’, we can and we must think that we can still do something, that we are called to give our contribution to change things, acting after due consideration together with other people. We need to stimulate activism in youth to become active citizens, to try to give birth to that idea of inclusion and sustainability able to save humanity, to give a quality future to everybody. Youth activism can also cover a key role in order to channel creative ideas, technologies, and interconnectedness so that innovative ideas to achieve

4.5 Activism for Our Future

the sustainable development goals can be brought to the fore (Ntuli, 2019). Activism is generally understood as a collection of activities aimed at producing a social or political change. Dono, Webb, and Richardson (2010) define it as the result of the behaviors aimed at encouraging new social courses, from joining socially engaged groups that support a worthy cause to joining collectively relevant political actions, to organize sensibilization activities on topics that have a social value such as demonstrations, signature-collection, and so on. Curtin and McGarty (2016) highlight its temporal component, stating that to be able to talk about activism the behaviors have to be practiced with perseverance and for a certain amount of time. Other scholars (Lubell, 2002; Fielding, Mcdonald, & Louis, 2008) remind us that these activities must have as their ultimate goal changes on a social, political, and economic level, to the advantage of the community, in the awareness that there will be personal costs (that can be social, economic, and sometimes even career) to handle and accept. Over time, activism has accompanied social development and communities’ transformation, also acquiring revolutionary nuances, or giving birth to actual revolutions, making changes possible to the benefit of the majority of the population in terms of job opportunities, growth opportunities, expectations improvement, and so on. For example, the Boston Tea Party marked the beginning of the revolts by the populations exploited by England on American soil, which led to the independence of the United States of America. The actions that generated the French Revolution gave birth to the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Other revolts include the “suffragette” commitment to get the vote for women, Gandhi’s Salt March, partisan’s fights that freed Italy from NaziFascism, and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These actions have the characteristic to be created within national borders, to solve social, political or economic problems, lived specifically in those places, bringing changes in the political and economic structure (Della Porta & Tarrow,

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2005). Some variables such as age, gender, financial resources, the awareness of the relations among individuals and groups, the ability to perceive that the distribution of power is not balanced and advantages rich people, have played a key role in activating the individuals that took a leadership role. At the root of all this, we can find a different vision of the world, a different way of thinking that is outside the box, priorities such as rights and innovative promotions of human growth and wellbeing (Holahan & Lubell, 2016; Lubell, 2002). Today, this ‘social’ beating heart is still the driving force of activism. However, we have to add to it a substantial evolution: the necessity to acquire more cosmopolitan visions, encouraging ideas and reflections on the threats that we are living that go beyond the local and arrive at the global, that push to overcome individualism and selfishness, to embrace a more collective and careful approach, that takes into consideration other people, beyond any kind of border (Holahan & Lubell, 2016; Lubell, 2002; Lubeck, Metcalf, Beckman, Yung, & Angle, 2019). Today’s activism needs to take into account the global challenges that we have to handle, that go beyond the national borders and the interests of the single communities. Holahan and Lubell (2016) states that the actions of activism aimed at the resolution of global challenges, in contrast to past actions related to the resolution of national problems (“Think and act in locally”), require a global thinking aimed also at local actions (“Think globally. Act locally.”), and the ability to overcome the idea that the individual cannot influence the success of collective actions oriented towards the resolution of overall challenges. In his Collective Interest Models, the author analyzes the variables that can positively influence the way in which individuals perceive their influence on collective results. He claims that the influence is more likely to be effective when people believe that the “object of attention” is important for public wellbeing. People perceive that they are able to give a significant contribution to the collective action itself, they feel that the common benefits are larger than the individual costs linked to the participation.

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Della Porta and colleagues (Della Porta & Diani 2020; Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005) suggest replacing the term activism with the phrase “transnational collective action” or “global justice movements”, to underline the transnational nature that these actions should have to adapt to the challenges linked to the construction of inclusive and sustainable global societies. In light of this, modern activism relies on internationalization and rapid spread processes, with respect to what happened in the past, to have higher relevance and international influence. The internationalization processes concern the research of relations and contacts in different nations to make the actions performed in one country able to transform into actions that underline the global value of the commitment. The spread processes concern the divulgation and the involvement of the largest possible number of people in the fastest way, using technologies and the newest forms of communication, with advantages and disadvantages that have to be faced. Among the advantages, we can find the speed with which it is possible to spread on a national and international level idea, ideals, and information regarding events. Among the disadvantages, we can mention the necessity to own specific abilities, to be able to handle negative reactions and often hate, and to avoid the exclusion of everyone who does not have access to the most recent means of communication (Della Porta & Diani 2020; Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005). Among the actions attributed to activism practices, we would like to mention: to study the phenomenon that we care about, its relevance, its causes, its consequences, to provide suggestions on how to change it; to consider moments of reflection and collective critical analysis, to build ‘coordinating groups’ to define the actions to perform; to create moments of sharing and sensibilization, conventions, flash mobs, protests, demonstrations, songs, plays, to be able to spread the mission, to be noticed, to highlight what we care about; to prepare documents available to the public, as a manifesto, to make the understanding of the topic easier, to increase the involvement, and so on; to encourage the collaboration of single supporters, associations, organizations,

other activist groups on a national and international level, to increase the appeal, to draw attention, to make our voice heard in the decisional headquarters. Taking all of this into consideration, among the many activities of activism, we can mention, only by way of explanation, the movement Fridays for Future, women’s actions with their “violador en tu camino” and the commitment of the ‘sardines’ in Italy and elsewhere. The movement Fridays for Future aims at drawing attention to climate change. It was born in Sweden thanks to Greta Thunberg, a student that, as a protest, every Friday skipped school and sat outside the Swedish parliament. As she told in an interview with the New Yorker (2018) she was nine years old when, for the first time, she heard about global warming and her reaction was of incredulous wonder. She started to make her first researches on global warming, on its causes and consequences, telling herself that she had to act somehow. Her first struggle was fought and won inside domestic walls, convincing her family to change lifestyle as regards transports and food. In the summer of 2018, that was particularly hot, she decided that she needed to do more, with flyers, declarations, use of social media, to draw other people’s attention. Her actions became viral, to the point that she became the representative of the Global Justice Now (global coalition of associations that fight for climatic justice) in the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where Greta gave her first public speech that made her famous on an international level and that allowed her to reach many adolescents’ smartphones that were not interested in these matters before. After, with her “Fridays For Future”, published on her Facebook profile, Greta was able to give birth to an actual student movement aimed at asking the powerful people of the planet (politicians, experts of economics and finance) to safeguard the environment and the future. In the spring of 2019, thanks to all of this, there were students demonstrating in almost every country of the world and in September 2019, in the two most important dates of the Climate Action Week, created by the student

4.5 Activism for Our Future

movement Fridays For Future, almost eight million people all around the world joined the protest. Women’s rights and the seriousness of the violent actions against them have been put under the spotlight in the latest years by all-female activism that found new strength, energy, and international union thanks to the work of the Argentinian movement “Ni una menos” and in its hashtag #NiUnaMenos. This hashtag became the symbol of many feminist collective that are allowing women to denounce more and more frequently topics such as femicide, sexual harassment, the gender gap regarding salaries, sexual objectification, the law about abortion, the rights of female workers and of transgender workers (just to mention some of them) in many different countries. In this atmosphere of international activism, the flash mob “Violador en tu camino” has been launched. The first performance took place in Valparaiso (Chile) and was organized by a local feminist collective called Lastesis, which aimed at gathering many people in front of the Chilean police station on the 18th of November 2019. After this, many different feminist collectives all around Chile decided to collaborate and gave birth to a new collective ‘performance’, a new flash mob, on the 25th of November 2019, during the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, involving 2000 female participants. In this case too, their actions became viral on social networks and shortly after became global, to the extent that different feminist movements all around the world decided to realize that flash mob in their national contexts. For this purpose, many activists translated and published the text of the performance in different languages and realized and published videos for ease of use, and this allowed the reproduction the performance in the squares of more than thirty different countries. To act against actions driven by hate and barriers that block social participation are the goals of the “sardines”. This movement was created thanks to the work made by four young adults coming from Bologna that decided to organize a street demonstration, just as those that used to be organized in the past, to give voice to

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the citizens, physically gathering people, in the belief that the bodies put one close to another cannot be easily manipulated or silenced. The organizers called everyone who had their same vision to join them through a Facebook event called “6000 sardines”. The name “sardines” is a reference to the idiom “packed like sardines”, that is to say, the idea that to be more visible it is important to be numerous, so many that the squares are filled with people “packed like sardines”. There is also the belief that even if little and vulnerable (just as sardines are) the group acquires strength to move towards the same goal. On the 14th of November 2019, thousands of people gathered in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna to give value to real participation. After the event in Bologna, the manifesto of the Sardines was created. It allowed to state goals, values, and intentions, focused on the importance of art, empathy, beauty, non-violence, gratuitousness, creativity, inclusion. All these aspects have the potential to be antidotes for fake news, hate, and populism. People should focus on rationality, critical thinking, and to return to the real world, in contrast to the virtual world of social media and to single-mindedness. Dozens of demonstrations have been organized in Italy and other countries. Global Sardines Day was an event that took place in 25 cities at the same time, among which Rome, Berlin, Paris, London, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Madrid, Helsinki, and Dublin. These actions talk about the future and the necessity to change the present. They start from a vision of what can be meaningful for the self, for others, and for the Earth, and they arrive to consider the changes that have to be put into practice today and the commitment needed to achieve this goal. These actions, according to us, should be carefully taken into consideration also in the field of career counseling, because they hold the seed of an inclusive and sustainable future design. They start from a future that does not exist, that has to be built, based on fundamental values and ideals for the whole of humanity. This is a source of social and cultural growth for everybody. This situation is asking to pass from “I” to “us”, and from “us” to the Earth,

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starting from the threats and challenges we are currently facing, to reflect upon how to deal with them. They require agency, action, and reflection. Inside a project of career development aimed at the construction of sustainable and inclusive future, it is important, from an educational point of view, to promote the involvement of the younger generations in actions of activism with laboratory activities that allow to analyze it, know it, detect its goals and modalities, reflect on the consequences that it can bring for the self and for the society, for its transformation, and for the future labor market, providing also support and help for the activism attempts and projects that can be put into practice.

4.6

Conclusions: Acting and Demonstrating for an Inclusive, Sustainable and Socially Just Future

As we have mentioned many times before in this and other chapters, nowadays inclusion and life on Earth are particularly threatened. There still are barriers, borders, walls, prejudices, stereotypes, social inequalities, and selfishness. In addition, the accessibility to education, work, a quality life, is anything but equally guaranteed for everyone. For this reason, we think that it is important that researchers, scholars, and professionals work together to promote the “right to take care of others” and to perform the duties to demonstrate and act, with a spirit of brotherhood, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, a spirit of acceptance and solidarity for everybody, also to be a positive role model for younger generations. Career counseling, vocational designing, education, economy, the services and jobs focused on people’s wellbeing and future, have to act together with new efforts, new visions, a different awareness, alternative skills to be fostered and mobilized on an international level. According to us, they have to demonstrate for what they believe is important. In Italian, the word used to say “demonstrate” is “manifestare”, thus leading to the the word “manifesto” (manifestus in Latin) comes from the Latin word

manus (hand) and the verb fest that, according to the German philologist Wihelm Paul Corssen (1820–1875) represents the root of fend-fendere that means to see first-hand, the “tangible evidence”, “so clear that you can feel it tangibly”, something “public”. As an adjective, manifesto refers to something that is easy to notice or obvious, that is to say, the contrary of hidden, unclear, latent, … (Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta). Moreover, in the most important dictionaries, the word manifesto appears also as noun and adverb, with very important meanings for the topics of equity and inclusion. As a noun, a manifesto is a piece of paper that can be big or small, generally posted to let people know something (announcements, decrees, political and/or cultural programs). As an adverb, it indicates the modality in which an action is carried out: manifestly, publicly, so that everyone can see it, check it, evaluate it, “criticize” it, ignore it or approve it. The word manifestation is associated to manifestus, that is to say, the public presentation of an opinion shared by a group of people, characterized as to act in defense of… or against something creating, in this way, a protest or solidarity action. In virtue of this, we would like to mention, in these conclusions, two processes that have led us to act in favor of better futures, with the preparation and the spread of the Manifesto for Inclusion and of the Memorandum of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing for a Dignified, Inclusive, and Sustainable Development for Everybody. As regards the Manifesto for Inclusion, an important event has been the international conference Counseling and Support: Decent Work, Equity and Inclusion, Passwords for the Present and the Future, which took place in Padua from the 5th to the 7th of October 2017. As representatives of the University of Padua, we wanted to underline the necessity to combine career efforts and knowledge, to demand and launch a sustainable and inclusive growth, able to focus the attention on the topics of dignity and respect of human rights and to promote the banishment of any kind of discrimination and inequality. In this way, we encouraged more than 600 people, among which

4.6 Conclusions: Acting and Demonstrating …

professors, students, parents, and scholars coming from all around the world, to let us have their opinion regarding the characteristics that an educational, career, social context should have to be considered inclusive, and regarding the efforts that every person can make to reach it, together with a slogan, a logo, or a motto that could represent as well as possible, their own idea of inclusion. The collected opinions are available in the volume “… For a Manifesto in Favor of Inclusion. Concerns, Ideas, Intentions, and Passwords for Inclusion” by Nota and Soresi (2017; https://www.unipd.it/counseling-andsupport2017/manifesto). In this way, it has been possible to write the Manifesto for Inclusion, that allows us to underline how contexts can be considered inclusive when they highlight and give importance to the sense of belonging, to participation, to active citizenship, to rights, and to the voice of everyone who lives them, and that actions in favor of inclusion have to be multiple, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary. Moreover, the carried-out analyses allowed us to underline the fact that the efforts and responsibilities of the people interested in inclusion are equally multiple, such as reporting in a manifest way and possibly denounce the presence of physical, ideological, cultural, and administrative barriers that limit the access and the usability of services and contexts or finding allies, careers, agencies, services, groups, and citizens with which constantly act in favor of a more and more spread and quality inclusion. To be able to further share and spread the manifesto, we used the platform change.org, that led almost 2000 people to support it. As regards the Memorandum Carta, more recently, within the LaRIOS Laboratory and the Italian Society of Vocational Guidance, to answer the international call on the role that guidance can play in these hard times, we have encouraged a hundred of scholars, researchers, professionals, and counseling supervisors to express their opinion in relation to these ideas: “Career counseling and vocational designing to be more relevant should…”; “The research concerning career counseling and vocational

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designing should most of all focus on…”; “The training concerning career counseling and vocational designing should most of all focus on…”; “Career counseling and vocational designing can contribute to the realization of a career and dignified inclusion for everybody only if…”. The reflections that we gathered have been analyzed, discussed, and debated during the XVIII National Convention of the Italian Society for Vocational Designing (2019) giving birth to the “Memorandum of Career Counseling and Vocational Designing for a Dignified, Inclusive, and Sustainable Development for Everybody” (Soresi et al., 2019; see appendix n. (4). The Memorandum Carta contains a series of statements that aim at: • encouraging the abandonment of superficial and obsolete visions regarding career counseling and vocational designing that reduce them merely to a matter of people’s adjustment to the requests and expectations of the educational and career world; • promoting the overcome of counseling models and active job searches that are heavily focused on the research of psychometric profiles and skills assessment analyzed almost exclusively in terms of resources and individual capital, forgetting their origins and their markedly environmental and contextual nature; • encouraging to further take care, also with early precautionary interventions, of the removal of barriers and obstacles that block the career fulfillment of a more and more elevated number of people, reducing the possibilities for them to take part to experiences involving illegal, low dignified, unstable, and precarious jobs; • encouraging the choice of markedly interactive and contextual career counseling and vocational designing models, practices, planning, and career inclusion, to be able to highlight not only individual expectations and interests, but also the changes that educational and career contexts should make to become more socially relevant, safe, and inclusive.

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79 Norton, P. J., & Weiss, B. J. (2009). The role of courage on behavioral approach in a fear-eliciting situation: A proof-of-concept pilot study. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 23(2), 212–217. Nota, L., & Rossier, J. (2015). Handbook of life design: From practice to theory and from theory to practice. Göttingen: Hogrefe. Nota, L., & Soresi, S. (2017). For a manifesto in favor of inclusion. Concerns, ideas, intentions, and passwords for inclusion. Firenze: Hogrefe. Nota, L., Ginevra, M. C., & Soresi, S. (2015). Tutti diversamente a scuola. L’inclusione scolastica nel XXI secolo [Everyone at school differently. School inclusion in the 21st century]. Padova: Cleup. Nota, L., Soresi, S., Ginevra, M.C., Santilli, S., & Di Maggio, I., (2018, Giugno). Gli strumenti del progetto ‘Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant’ per un orientamento a vantaggio del perseguimento degli obiettivi dell’Agenda 2030 [The instruments of the project ‘Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant’ for guidance for the promotion of the objectives of Agenda 2030]. Paper presented at the XVIII National Conference of SIO, Roma. Ntuli, M. E. (2019). Student activism and its role in achieving the SDGs. Retrieved from https://www. universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= 20191214112317666. Patton, W., & Porfeli, E. J. (2007). Career exploration during childhood and adolescence. In V. B. Skorikov & W. Patton (Eds.), Career development in childhood and adolescence (pp. 47–70). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Pekrun, R. (2019). The murky distinction between curiosity and interest: State of the art and future prospects. Educational Psychology Review, 31(4), 905–914. Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and mobility: Unexpected places. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press. Peterson, E. G., & Cohen, J. (2019). A case for domainspecific curiosity in mathematics. Educational Psychology Review, 31, 807–832. Pluck, G., & Johnson, H. L.(2011). Stimulating curiosity to enhance learning. GESJ Education Science and Psychology, 2(19), 24–31. Pury, C. L., Britt, T. W., Zinzow, H. M., & Raymond, M. A. (2014). Blended courage: Moral and psychological courage elements in mental health treatment seeking by active duty military personnel. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 30–41. Pury, C. L., Kowalski, R., & Spearman, J. (2007). Distinctions between general and personal courage. Journal of Positive Psychology, 2, 99–114. Putman, D. (1997). Psychological courage. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, 4, 1–11. Putman, D. (2004). Psychological courage. New York: University Press of America.

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant, Etc.” : An Example of Operational Paths and Trajectories

5.1

Introduction

In recent years, we are witnessing a reversal of the foundations of modernity, that saw the future as a symbol of development. Thanks to progress and growth, considered as ‘perpetual’ movements of history, the individual did not need to think about tomorrow, because it came by itself, every day could only be better (Pulcini, 2019). However, nowadays the trust in an unstoppable progress has drastically reduced: we cannot even rely on the certainty that a future will exist. Global challenges, ecological crises, effects on climate change, extreme inequalities: all these factors put us in what has been defined as the Anthropocene age, a historical period in which human actions have the unlimited power to change the natural course of things but also, paradoxically, to jeopardize the survival of the whole living world. The concept of ‘future as a promise’ has been replaced by ‘future as a threat’. As underlined by Pulcini (2019), critical reflections, in this historical period, have been reduced giving space to a hedonistic view of reality and to an intimate closure focused on the self, on the concept that life is now, and, therefore, on individualism, narcissism, indifference, loss of social cohesion. As a consequence, we need to create a new collective project, a new unified approach, to develop a feeling of a public sphere that allows us to find a possible future, to build it for us and for the world we are living in,

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together. We need to shift from the ‘I’ to the ‘us’ and from the ‘us’ to ‘the planet’, as we like to say and as we have underlined many times before. Therefore, it becomes of vital importance to know, understand, and be conscious about everything that is going on today, in order to avoid the opioid condition of ignorance. We need a conceptual mastery that allows us to interpret the global age, taking into consideration the complexity and the interdependence of events, as we have mentioned before, because a local event can have an impact on a global level and vice versa, and also because our lives are strictly intertwined with the lives of people living in other continents, and the fate of humanity is connected to the fate of our planet (Deleuze & Guattari, 2017). In order to do everything above mentioned, it is necessary to train young people to have a holistic, integral, cosmopolitan view, based on being responsible towards the living world, through the commitment to create a new beginning as a premise to try to regenerate the future (Arendt, 2003). Career counseling activities, more specifically, can carry out this task by making young people aware of the fact that they are agents of change, participants with a critical role in conflict prevention, in supporting peace and the development of society, and, in general, in ensuring the pursuit of the 17 sustainable development goals. Young people should receive an education that gives them awareness of their responsibilities, that helps them in being honest with themselves and in ‘showing’, in the context

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4_5

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they live, their aspirations for a better world and a quality and sustainable development for everybody. In this chapter, initially, we will try to define and deepen the concept of ‘aspiration’, as a stimulus to go beyond the present, giving voice to people, in order to reach the idea of career counseling and vocational designing as tools to detect what we have called one’s own ‘mission possible’, the intentions that can guide young people’s future choices and plans. In doing this, we will provide examples of workshop and guidance activities, developed inside the LaRIOS Laboratory of the University of Padua.

5.2

Give a Voice to People and Promote Inclusive and Sustainable ‘Aspirations’ Towards the Future

The word aspiration, from the Latin aspiratioonis, not only recalls the act of ‘drawing air towards the person’ (or a smell, smoke, and so on), and of ‘extracting’ something from an environment, it also refers to a great desire to pursue a noble or legit goal, by single individuals, nations, and social groups. In the psychological literature, aspiration is very similar to the idea of a future goal, and this is the basis of the decision-making process, in particular as regards the professional field, with long term consequences concerning job satisfaction, working performances and psychological wellbeing (Hollmann, Gorges, & Wild, 2016). More specifically, many different studies refer to the Expectancy-Value theory (EVT) in order to understand the development of aspirations and the influence they have on educational and professional choices (for example Durik, Vida, & Eccles, 2006; Eshelman & Rottinghaus, 2015; Lee & Durksen, 2018; Wang, 2012; Watt et al., 2012), based on the premise that people choose to commit to tasks and activities with high individual value.

The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

Some colleagues propose a different idea of aspiration, a desire that goes beyond the individual to take also contextual connotations. Tao, Zhang, Lou, and Lalonde (2018), define aspirations in terms of decisions regarding the professional future, such as the choice of the ideal professional path, to be analyzed inside the cultural context. More specifically, these authors underline how in the cultures that have been traditionally labeled as individualistic, that encourage the expression and realization of the self, aspirations are seen as personal matters. In traditionally collectivist cultures, that underline the subordination of the needs of self-realization to the needs of the group, aspirations are seen as a means to reach a collective goal. Nevertheless, the authors themselves underline that in today’s societies, where young adults are exposed to both individualistic and collectivist cultures due to the above-mentioned phenomena such as globalization and cosmopolitism, the development of aspirations can involve the negotiation of potentially conflictual values and cultural rules. Casas (2018) goes beyond and establishes a connection between aspirations, human rights, and democracy, defining them engines for social participation and the development of a civic sense of responsibility. Appadurai (2017), in his intense and original struggle against poverty, often talks about aspirations as ‘abilities’, as the results of learning processes, created by contextual and relational interactions. In other words, people can learn how to ‘aspire’ and, as it happens to every other kind of human learning, this would not involve loneliness or isolation, but interpersonal relationships and connections with other people. Aspirations, as every kind of learning, need, in order to be developed, ‘aspiring contexts’, sharing, and relationships. All of this requires many social supports and particular interactions that are created when people ‘name together’ the problems that worry them and look for ways to face them by supporting the defense of social justice. Aspirations, by encouraging sharing and

5.2 Give a Voice to People and Promote Inclusive …

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participation, ‘nourish the democracy’, powering the hopes of the citizens and, in particular, people experiencing conditions of marginalization, who can, in this way, feel readier to manifest their needs and the discriminations they suffer through actions of activism. In international literature, the study of aspiration starts therefore to exit the ‘private’ sphere, the mere educational or professional fields, and expands resolutely towards the context, the environment, and the social life. These reflections, according to us, are particularly in line with the idea that career counseling and vocational designing should become more sensitive and careful about what is going on, about what will happen in people’s life contexts, about how and how much their future wellbeing cannot be separated from their social wellbeing and from the sustainability of the development. This perspective allows counseling activities to give voice to aspirations, to shout them to declare indignation about people and events that could reduce their realization. Aspirations suggest to get busy in order to mobilize energies in favor of desirable changes that should, first of all, be perceived as necessary for human dignity and for the safeguard of our contexts (family, friends, educational, professional, and social contexts) keeping a strong inclination towards sustainable development and a future that cares about rights and the fair distribution of resources and opportunities. Therefore, career counseling and vocational designing should be concerned with and decide about ‘taking care’ of aspirations and doing it as soon as possible, in favor of people’s wellbeing. The perception of feeling powerless and unable easily increases discomfort and pain. People who experience these feelings and sensations (the sense of learned helplessness), as Appadurai suggests, can feel to be left without air, breathless, without prospects of improvement. Without all of this, it is obviously impossible to stay open

towards the future or available to be involved in career counseling and vocational designing activities.

5.3

Today’s Adolescents and the Necessity to Encourage Aspirations Towards an Inclusive and Sustainable Future

Taking into consideration the data of recent studies on today’s adolescents, who will have to manage our society over the next years, it appears a picture of uncertainty, barriers, disinvestment in the future and in the school, and lack of knowledge regarding the current reality, that can limit the inclination to aspire. For today’s adolescents, the uncertainty that characterizes the world of work and current times represents a source of discomfort and difficulty that leads many people on one hand to disengage, to avoid building the future, and to move on without aspirations and goals to achieve. On the other hand, it leads other people to set goals to fight for, with all one’s heart and soul, to compete in order to obtain the few possibilities available, in the meritocracy trap, experiencing, because of this, an intense pressure by family and educational contexts (Kenny, Blustein, Liang, Klein, & Etchie, 2019). This pressure tends to delay important life decisions (Chan & Tweedie, 2015; Lewchuk, 2017), it reduces the wellbeing and the investment in education (Ginevra, Annovazzi, Santilli, Di Maggio, & Camussi, 2018; Iovu, Hărăguș, & Roth, 2018). As concerns the barriers, we have to keep in mind that inequalities, precarious employment, and increasing poverty, put wider and wider groups of the young population in negative conditions and degraded situations. Young people have no possibility to see their abilities improved, triggering a vicious cycle, according

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to which poor people, who do not have social resources and advanced professional skills, are involved in situations of unemployment, underemployment, and precarious jobs (ILO, 2017; Santilli, Di Maggio, Marcionetti, & Grossen, 2018). Moreover, all of this intertwines with the massive presence of prejudices and forms of discrimination associated to variables such as gender, stories of migration, religion, disability, socioeconomic status, that involve also children and adolescents and affect a rich and positive development also from a professional point of view (Blustein, Olle, Connors-Kellgren, & Diamonti, 2016; Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016; Watson, Nota, & McMahon, 2015). In addition, the presence of such barriers has higher probabilities to be associated with negative emotions, behavioral problems, such as delinquency, substance use, dangerous sexual activities, school dropout (Milot Travers & Mahalik, 2019; Sipsma, Ickovics, Lin & Kershaw, 2015). Taking into consideration the disinvestment in education, in 2018, an average of 10.6% of young people in the EU were early leavers from education and training, in other words, they had completed at most a lower secondary education and were not going on with further education or training. According to ISTAT data regarding the last two years (2017–2019), early school leaving in Italy increased and involves one in four young people between 15 and 29 years of age. Oxfam Italy, in a report published in 2019 and confirmed by Eurostat data, shows that early school leaving increased, with 14, 5% of adolescents between 15 and 24 years of age that have only a lower secondary education degree. As regards the European University Association (EUA), an organization of European Universities, in the 2017 edition of its Public Funding Observatory shows the data of an investigation on 34 European countries in order to reveal the state of the art of education: Italy, Spain, and Latvia are considered systems “in a worsening phase”, with enrolments that tend to be fewer and fewer. According to Eurostat data, Italy is near the bottom of the EU table for the number of young

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

University graduates: less than one in six people of those in a working-age has a degree in Italy, the second-worst position in Europe after Romania. This is what emerges from Eurostat data (2018) on education levels in 2017, according to which Italy has a negative record for graduates with 13.7% of people between 15 and 64 years of age. We have to keep in mind that young people without a higher education create a very fragile segment of the population, with higher risks to be unemployed, higher difficulties to enter the labor market, and more frequent unwilling professional transitions, temporary jobs with undignified working conditions, low paid jobs, with little possibility to develop their abilities and skills (Wehl, 2019). It is a worrying situation since in the current social contexts education has become essential in order to prepare young people to manage complex and global challenges, to promote the ability to focus on just as much complex, global, new, creative solutions and strategies to help in the pursuit of the goals for sustainable development, to grant for ourselves and for the future generations a society able to provide wellbeing and satisfaction (Guichard, 2018; Peterson & Helms, 2014). Lastly, we would like to focus our attention on another matter that we consider to be significant for the potential future career guidance actions, regarding what adolescents know about what is going on today and what we have analyzed in this volume. Guichard (2016) claimed that it is not an easy task for young generations to reflect on the contextual factors that can affect the design of a dignified future. In this regard, Ginevra, Di Maggio, Santilli, Berti, and Nota (2019), in the context of a study aimed at analyzing the knowledge of a group of adolescents concerning globalization, detected shallow knowledge about this topic. Even if globalization is perceived as an articulated phenomenon, characterized by economic and cultural aspects, almost the entire group of adolescents, in line with a vision supported by the media and schools, tends to have shallow ideas regarding globalization, considering it an advantageous

5.3 Today’s Adolescents and the Necessity to Encourage …

economic resource for all the countries in the world, and an opportunity to make cultural exchanges that allow to create an ideal ‘global village’. In the answers of the adolescents, there is no reflection on the critical effects of this phenomenon, like for example the ones associated to the increase of economic and social inequalities among the countries, the increased political control of Western countries on developing countries, and the growing homogenization and Westernization of cultures. Moreover, Nota, Di Maggio and Santilli (2019), a study that involved about 500 high school students that aimed at discovering how much they know about the 2030 Agenda and about the large-scale social challenges, highlight that very few young people who are about to choose a University path know something about the 17 UN goals. More specifically, only a third of the goals are considered able to significantly affect life quality, and this is specified just by 35% of students. All of this can be considered worrying if, as claimed by Weir (2018), the knowledge and abilities to analyze and recognize future challenges, such as the increasing social division, inequalities, discriminations, encourage reflections on one’s own ability to become an agent of social change. Another reason this can be considered worrying is, as underlined by Di Maggio, Ginevra, Santilli and Nota (2020), if the inclination to consider global challenges is associated, directly and indirectly through the hope to reach personal and common goals, to a more significant investment in higher education. It seems clear that we need to prepare young generations, encouraging their abilities to critically analyze nowadays challenges and the challenges that are going to exist in the future, oppressive social conditions that contribute to educational, economic, and social inequalities, promoting the awareness regarding contextual and structural elements, that can represent barriers for human life and its development, as much as for future design (Diemer, Rapa, Voight, & McWhirter, 2016), giving space and value to a sense of community and solidarity with other people and to the abilities to join forces and work

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together for a better future, involving culture, schools, real and scientifically founded guidance actions, adequate for the times we are living.

5.4

Career Counseling and Vocational Designing Workshops

As above-mentioned, it becomes essential to take into consideration young people and help them to overcome the fog of the present, to look at the future they would like, to aspire in an inclusive and sustainable way, detecting the challenges to face and the abilities to be acquired, also in order to reduce the risk to create a future that strongly depends by the past or by the present and by a series of personal and contextual determinisms that are often inhibitory (Santilli, Di Maggio, Ginevra, Nota, & Soresi, 2020). In accordance with Blustein et al. (2019), we believe that guidance interventions should be realized sooner, with educational purposes, from the kindergarten on, with the aim not so much of making young people think about ‘what to do when you grow up’, but of encouraging awareness, reflectivity, sharing, sense of social responsibility for what is happening, aspirations for a better world, promoting active participation and a process of co-building (Nota & Rossier, 2015) with workshop activities. The ‘laboratory’, according Lindsay’s definition (2016) is an ‘equipped’ space from an educational point of view, in which there are activities focused on a specific cultural object, that actively involves educators and students so that, according to the author, ‘laboratories could be a unifying force for democratic and transformative education’ (p. 2). Workshops represent opportunities to interact with each other and talk about important topics, that are deepened and put at the center of discussions and reflections, thanks to the moderation by operators that usually master the concepts and participative educational procedures, also in cooperation with other experts. The structural core of workshop activities is to promote knowledge and abilities starting from

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conceptual stimuli and activities connected to them, such as practice, experiments, observations, that allow, thanks to specific guidelines, to reflect on what suggested, to conceptually revise what experienced, to reflect on it, and to reach, thanks to the support to creativity and contamination, the formulation of new ideas, goals, objectives (Moon, 2014). A workshop is characterized as something that provides an educational and experiential moment at the same time, aimed at promoting exchanges, interactions, different points of view between participants, educators, experts, in the field of a dedicated physical and temporal space, that welcomes without hurrying the elaboration processes, that offers new stimuli with positivity, that invites participants to share, make new perspectives their own, and to reflect again, in a cyclical way. It is based on the awareness that it is necessary to support recursive, circular, complex ways of thinking and to frequently ask for them and be a model (Deek, Werthner, Paquette, & Culver, 2013; Lindsay, 2016). The realization of these workshops allows guidance interventions to move from the private to the public sphere, from the organization of individual interview sessions to actions rooted in the collectivity and in the group, making them more relevant, creating the opportunity to give life to more complex thoughts, bringing out the value of everybody’s participation in the educational and professional fields and in the construction of futures of quality (Amolins, Ezrailson, Pearce, Elliott, & Vitiello, 2015; Hsu and Wang, 2012; Nota et al., 2019; Thomsen, 2017). These workshop activities, as Guichard (2018) states, should help young people to think about their future, while also taking into considerations the repercussions that one’s active life has on the lives of others, and in particular in the fields of social justice and sustainable development. In order to do this, it is essential to include specific conditions, such as the ones that follow. Include ways to actively involve people. It is necessary that students are adequately introduced and motivated to these kinds of activities, avoiding these actions to be perceived as a usual educational activity that will be subject to

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

evaluation. When introducing guidance workshops, it is appropriate to promote, first of all, a new guidance culture that definitively overcomes the idea that practicing career counseling basically means to research, suggest, advise, to offer ‘the right places to the right people’ or to advertise ‘successful’ competence profiles, budgets, employability rates, exclusive operations regarding ‘narcissism’, believing that the quality of the future can only depend by self-analysis and by personal stories and narrations. These activities are not to be offered to people who do not see their usefulness: the presence of rejections or low motivation to join a guidance laboratory should encourage the research of the causes of everything above mentioned and of the good reasons why some of these people may not perceive advantageous to be helped when reflecting on their own future. At the same time, in order to grant active participation, the number of participants should not surpass 10/15 individuals, most of all when people are encouraged to be operational, to reflect, to exchange and contaminate. Detect the goals to pursue, in terms of knowledge and skills improvement. In order to make of the workshop a precious experience for everybody, it is important to specify the goals that are to be pursued in terms of description of the improvement of the abilities of the people joining the laboratory experience, after the latter has been completed (Nota & Soresi, 2018). A goal should describe the expected result, the anticipation of the expectations that are associated with the actions of operators and professionals. In order for these ‘intentions’ and these expectations to be properly formulated, and also in order to allow collaborations and assessment operations, we suggest adopting an operational language and to specify (Soresi & Nota, 2001): (a) The performance or performances that the participants will have to be able to carry out. The information learned regarding what participants will be able to ‘say and do’ has to be perfectly clear; (b) The conditions, the situations in which it is expected for the above-mentioned performances to be manifested;

5.4 Career Counseling and Vocational Designing Workshops

(c) The mastery criterion, the quality and/or quantity of desired performances believed to be necessary in order to consider the realized intervention effective and, therefore, the goal is considered to be reached. In Table 5.1 There Is an Example of a Goal. Include personalization forms. Personalization concerns the differentiation of requests, stimuli to offer, working material, and so on, prepared in view of the preferences of those that lead the activity and of the participants’ characteristics, such as the presence of a disability and/or insufficient language skills, and so on (Ginevra, Nota, Di Maggio, & Soresi, 2017). The personalization of goals, activities and material, is essential since it allows every participant to take advantage of effective forms of teaching and to actually grow and improve. There can also be a co-presence of operators in the same workshop, so that, for example, an operator can look after a subgroup of people that needs specific personalized supports due to particular difficulties, and another operator can provide information for the other people. Being focused on personalization encourages the host of the workshops to leave aside every program realized through a series of standardized actions, to which ‘subject’ the specificity of the situations and the needs of people, such as when, for example, the same tools (tests, questionnaires, objective tests, skills assessments, and so on) are given to different groups of students. It also happens when a group of different students is asked to join the same

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‘educational paths’, to visit the same ‘markets’, to join the same ‘work placement’ experiences, or to assist to the same offers of ‘meetings’ between supply and demand. Prepare the context, grant accessibility, take time. In order to prepare everything that is necessary for the perfect execution of the activity, the organizers and operators that lead the workshops should take an active role in organizing teaching supports, tables, chairs, and so on, so that everything is ready, functional, and placed according to necessities (for example the circular layout of desks and chairs, the possibility to have different spaces to divide people in subgroups, and so on). At the same time, documents, materials, sites, need to be created, examined, used in view of accessibility in terms of fonts, formats, colors, dimensions, and so on, so that everyone can use them, despite disabilities, learning disorders, and so on (Nota, Ginevra, & Soresi, 2015). When managing a workshop, it is important to carefully take into consideration also the aspect of time, in order to give everyone the time they need to reflect, elaborate, think. For this purpose, it is necessary to work for at least an hour and a half or two hours with a group of 10/15 people. The sentence ‘take time’ must be encouraged, because it is essential to allow reflections and indepth analyses, underlining that career counseling and vocational designing need adequate space and time and that the sooner the workshops are activated the more efficient they will be, also from a precautionary point of view. When

Table 5.1 Example of a goal Goal of the first meeting of the workshop “Challenging the future” The first workshop aims basically at making students reflect on: (1) career counseling and vocational designing, what they are concerned with and why it is important to think about the future; (2) elements and positive and negative aspects that can characterize a good job or a dignified job for the individual, for families, for the society; 3) the rights involved in a good job and the advantages of the rights for the individual, and for the society; more precisely, the pursued objective is the following: • Terms: the request is to describe the importance to design the future, to outline the advantages of a dignified job, and to imagine a future situation involving a good job • Performances and Mastery Criterion: we really care about the fact that the student should be able to point out at least a couple of reasons why it is important to design the future, describe at least two characteristics of a dignified job, making examples also regarding the imagined situation, and presenting at least two advantages for people and for society

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managing workshops, it is also important to encourage reflectivity, awareness, and selfassessment procedures, using qualitative and narrative modalities. There is the need for time and intentional and specific interventions if we really have the intention to modify and increase skills and possibilities, to modify views, to improve the quality of decision-making processes, efficacy beliefs, and the general behavior towards education, work, and future. Effectively manage teaching and learning processes. When planning the workshops, we suggest identifying three different moments that are also dynamically connected and interdependent, then special attention should be focused on the modalities that can help achieve the identified goals. The first stage is probably the most delicate and important one as it should provide better conditions for teaching and learning activities. Special attention should be given to individuation, knowledge needed in order to actively participate in workshop activities. Attention should also be given to the sharing of reasons that determined the decision to participate in a specific workshop. The second stage, stimuli to conduct the labs, requires the participants to plan teaching actions and measures, even when personalized and differentiated, capable of maximizing the learning probability, intended as a series of educational actions (instructions and exemplifications, modeling, role-play, exercises, feedbacks, reinforcements, and so on). Short presentations on the constructs that are subject to attention should be planned. Participants should then discuss said constructs and the relevance they have when designing an inclusive and qualitative future, about the materials to incentivize personal quantitative and qualitative reflections about the construct under consideration. They should also make a personal overview of the contribution that said construct can give when sketching out perspectives and purposes and also define commitments and objectives. Furthermore, there is a possibility for the participants to choose freely in order to favor the beginning of personalized guidance paths for the future.

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The third stage concerns “closure”: this is a delicate phase too, as it is entrusted with the task of conducting operations of assessment and modality to encourage further study and reflection, also through requests for activities to be carried out between one workshop and another, to ensure as well the maintenance and generalization of the learning process. Finally, we would like to point out that, given the purpose of the workshops, there should be the planning of actions aimed at the assessment of the efficacy of what is being achieved through the use of quantitative and qualitative procedures before and after the workshop experience. The evaluation of the activities should become a further learning moment, in which there is the opportunity of assessing what has been done up to that point, analyze the increased strengths, the implemented processes, and what can still be useful in order to reach a goal (Nota, Santilli, & Soresi, 2016).

5.5

The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant”

It seems clear, based on what above mentioned, that it is necessary to act with adolescents to encourage their ability to aspire and build better futures for everyone, in the awareness of the threats and challenges that we have to face. In line with these reflections, we take into consideration the work by Watts et al. (2011), who have realized some workshops for high school students in order to build a sense of collective identity and an inclination to activism of the individual and of the group. The participants to the workshops are encouraged to develop a collective identity through the identification of what they have in common, such as living in the same world, and to underline, at the same time, the uniqueness of their experiences, as regards historical and social facts that characterize their specific belonging environments. During the workshops proposed by Watts et al. (2011), the leader of the group presents a social problem close to the reality of participants (for example

5.5 The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant”

poverty or unemployment), and, through strategies such as Socratic questioning, participants are involved in a collaborative dialogue in order to question their common and stereotypical knowledge regarding social matters. The purpose is to facilitate the distancing from the individualistic conceptions with which phenomena such as poverty and unemployment are interpreted, that can be seen as due to laziness and lack of persistence. Another goal is to recognize what can be considered a structural barrier to the resolution of social problems (for example the lack of workplaces, low salaries, and discriminatory policies). The critical reflection of social problems is encouraged also through instruments such as the analysis of movies, music, and daily life experiences at school and in the participants’ communities. Another example of workshop activity, in line with the purposes that we care about is the MPOWER program, developed by Kenny, Blustein, Liang, Klein, and Etchie (2019). The workshops, that last three hours each and are realized within six weeks of time, have the goal to increase students’ commitment to reflect on their future, on their intrinsic motivation and, lastly, on their investment in university education. The project involves experiential activities, such as individual reflections and group sharing, aimed at helping the students to identify their fundamental values, strengths, and their desired social impact. These activities lead young people during the exploration of what the authors define as the “four Ps”, that is to say: (1) People to support future plans (important adults such as parents, relatives, teachers, and so on); (2) Prosocial benefits (the students are encouraged to detect goals/objectives related to the benefits that they can have also for other people); (3) Propensity (focusing on specific abilities and characteristics that the students perceive as relevant for the chosen purposes/goals/objectives); (4) Passion. Moreover, during the workshops, there are in-depth analyses regarding some elements of the collective identity and critical conscience, taking inspiration from the works by Watts et al. (2011) and some abilities that can help to face future

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jobs, such as being able to ‘work as a team’ and critical thinking. Lastly, we would like to mention workshops and the intervention sessions in board game form, that are based upon the themes of sustainable development and on the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. SDG Watch Europe (2017), for example, implemented workshops with groups of students to introduce them to the 2030 Agenda, involve them in the goals, help them in detecting the targets connected to the goals, and, lastly, ‘inspire’ them regarding their role of agents of changing activities for their communities, identifying real ways to become SDG supporters in their lives. In line with the above-mentioned examples, in the LaRIOS laboratory, we have carried out the project “Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant”, based on the idea that career counseling and vocational designing give the individual orientation and encourages the person to walk toward the future. As a matter of fact, the word used in Italian to express the concept of guidance is “orientamento”. The word gives the idea that guidance, besides defining a precise cardinal point, the oriens, past participle of the verb oriri, and that means to be born or to rise, together with the suffix “mento” suggests a number of activities and results that transform the previous term “orient” in something else. The new meaning stands for a set of processes, initiatives, and actions that encourages people to go toward the sun, the light, the future as we like to put it. In this way, career counseling should and has to refer, on one hand, to cognitive processes that are not involved with operations aimed at understanding the present and, on the other hand, it should foster, at the same time, the contribution to the increase of knowledge and skills necessary to promote a sustainable, inclusive and qualitative future for everyone. From this point of view even the counselors, the professionals of the oriri, should show that they are “visionary”, that they are interested in future scenarios, that they are passionate about what might happen in the future, or, as the French say, to the avenir, courageously expressing their inclination

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towards the future especially in the guidance practices that they put in action. People are to be encouraged to deal with the future and to work in order to avoid the likelihood that personal stories end as it would be easily predictable when considering their background, personal and environmental determiners; at the same time, people are to be encouraged to commit in order for those stories to end in a different, original, unpredictable, surprising way. Individuals are to be helped during workshops in building, or rather to co-building while having an inclusive point of view, improbable developments and conclusions to their stories thanks to visions, contaminations, opportunities, and casual events that are able to start new projects, trajectories, and stories. All of this is about influencing the ability to formulate new aspirations, that involve the self and the others, that allow us to move from the I to us or, even better, to us and to Earth, since we all are the inhabitant of the same planet, agents that pay attention to the protection of the ‘common home’, identifying responsibilities, commitments and one’s own mission possible to be completed also with the support of other people. The project aims at helping people to look out of themselves, to procrastinate gratifications in order to pursue relevant objectives that can be defined as ‘common good’, to the enhancement of active citizenship, to participation, and to the weakening of the strict dependence on the present, of one’s own emotions and sensations, of one’s private life and strongly dependent and restricted contexts in which we usually live. The project invites us to look at the external reality and to what will happen while keeping in mind that all of this cannot and will not be interpreted and manipulated merely by one’s own interests, passions, and human capital. It is considered as incorrect and superficial to ask the old question: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” or to ask toward which profession one thinks will go toward. Rather than encouraging to pick a profession (architect, engineer, agronomist, or computer scientist), people are encouraged to

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

work backward, rather than asking the question “tell me what professional will you be when you grow up, and I will tell you which skills and abilities you need to develop and where”. There is the encouragement to look beyond the present and to move from the future, thinking to the challenges one wishes to face and then move on to the intentions, to what has to be learned and strengthened, to the conditions that need encouragement and research, to the occasions one has to discover with insatiable curiosity, to the goals that have to be tenaciously pursued. These challenges have to encourage people to move toward them already in the present, even if the goals to be identified may still appear uncertain, temporary, unrealistic, fluid, and susceptible to change and contamination. The anticipation of the future can thus reach an important ethical and social depth that will lead to the conjugation of the private and public, of the I and the us, passions and personal capital with prosocial behaviors and common goods. At this point, it will be possible to choose the abilities that one wants to further develop in order to identify and choose professional activities rather than a profession. For all of this to be achieved, there is the need to encourage the switch from the analysis of the self, workplaces, and career, to the challenges and problems that we would like to face and try to resize. Taking the considerations made in this volume as a starting point, the project “Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant” wants to suggest new possible trajectories that inspire the creation of workshops and guidance intervention for new generations, with the invitation to personalize the possibilities to the maximum. This should be done while taking into consideration both preferences and specificities of the managers of the workshops, as well as the desires, needs, expectations of those who are interested in reflection and in future design. This is the reason why there is no such thing as a standard version of this project, those who are interested in it, as an operator and as a student, should first decide how much time and

5.5 The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious, Cosmopolitan, Aspirant”

energy they want to invest in it. The project articulates in a series of possible workshops, basic ones, and in-depth ones. There are five different basic projects. The first has the aim of introducing and starting everything, it involves the presentation of the project, description of conduction modalities, and the conditions needed in order to take part in it. Participants, at the end of it, are invited to sign an agreement that differs depending on the project managers and the adolescents’ personal obligations. This workshop essentially aims at helping the student reflect on the definition of career counseling and professional designing and on the kind of support that a counseling path can provide to people. Another important moment concerns the fostering of thoughts and reflections on emergencies of the near future. Specifically, the five areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet identified by the UN are discussed (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership), so that students become prepared to address the issues that threaten the sustainability in our planet and are then asked to examine them in relation to their hopes and concerns for the future. During the second workshop, students are asked to indicate the importance of taking into consideration trajectories, actions, and projects that should be undertaken in the future, such as those published by the UN 2030 Agenda that aims at facing the challenges and threats already expressed in the first workshop. More specifically, the students are introduced to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN and handed the questionnaire The Future is around the Corner… What Will it Hold for us? An Instrument on the UN’s Goals for Inclusive and Sustainable Development (Nota, Soresi, Ginevra, Santilli, & Di Maggio, 2018; see Appendix A). Consequently, participants are asked to list the goals they think could be more relevant for their future educational and career choices (at least a couple) and to describe the reasons. At this point, and in relation to the complexity of said challenges, the attention of the participants should focus on the theme of the investment on education with grit and courage, describing the

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advantages that said action can provide for the future while relating it to the challenges and to the sustainable development goals one wants to face. In the third workshop, students list and exemplify the striving that can be done in a near future, in relation to the challenges to which they desire to give a resolutive contribution and to the sustainable development goals they intend to pursue or, as we like to put it, their mission possible, while taking into account ideas and incentives made available by researches of current times. All of this is done in order to build new scenarios, to lead to the imagination of still non-existent solutions and conditions that could become a reality thanks to and especially together with other people. Students are supported in listing professional activities that can be useful in the achievement of the above-mentioned striving. In the fourth workshop, students describe indepth one or two actions, identify specific examples of professional activities that could be carried out in order to help their striving. In the fifth and last basic workshop, participants complete the description of what can be useful in order to achieve their striving/mission possible in terms of knowledge needed, of the support that can be given by society, family, friends, emotions, economy, the services provided by schools and universities, such as the skills and knowledge that have to be developed to the benefit of all of this. In this description, participants should also think about the contribution that disciplines and different educational paths can give to the achieving of their striving. The project suggests further future exploration modules. Each one of these is structured in at least three basic workshops and in-depth workshops. The ones concerning future explorations can be found in Table 5.2,1 the in-depth ones in Table 5.3.

1

For further suggestions regarding the contents and activities for some of these modules, refer to what is described in the previous chapters of this volume.

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Table 5.2 Future exploration modules

∙ Working in Favor of Prevention of Social Conflicts ∙ Working in Favor of Social and Professional inclusion Module: “Working in Favor of a Technologic Development for the Benefit of Everyone” ∙ Learning How to Use New Technologies to Favor People ∙ Learning How to Use New Technologies to Favor Inclusion ∙ Learning How to Use Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Biotechnology Module: “Working to Favor the Safeguard of Life on Planet Earth” ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Favor Energy Saving ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Favor Biodiversity ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Favor Ecology and Respect for the Environment Module: “Working in Favor of the Valorization of Cultural Heritage and Cosmopolitan Identities” ∙ Learning How to Promote Culture ∙ Learning How to Promote Social Participation ∙ Learning How to Promote Cosmopolitan Curiosity

Module: “Globalization and Precariousness” ∙ Cultural Globalization ∙ Economic Globalization ∙ Processes of Economic Financialization Module: “Inequalities” ∙ Social Inequalities ∙ Economic Inequalities ∙ Consequences of Inequalities Module: “The Work of the Future” ∙ New Technologies and Jobs ∙ Processes of Precariousness ∙ Dignified Work Module: “A Sustainable Mindset” ∙ Environmental Sustainability ∙ Economic Sustainability ∙ Social Sustainability Module: “An Inclusive Mindset” ∙ Heterogeneity ∙ Personal Uniqueness ∙ Inclusive Contexts Module: “Becoming Promoter of Social Justice” ∙ Social Justice ∙ Discriminations ∙ Rights Module: “Acting and Thinking in a Cosmopolitan Way” ∙ From Local to Global ∙ From Global to Local ∙ Being Global Citizens Module: “Curiosity and Exploration” ∙ Cognitive Curiosity ∙ Social Curiosity Exploration Module: “Resources to Keep Going Forward” ∙ Thinking and Acting Courageously ∙ Investing in Education ∙ Activating Oneself and Activating with Activism Module: “How Not to Be Deceived” ∙ How to Defend Yourself from Hidden Persuaders How to Defend Yourself from the Lures of Markets ∙ How to Defend Yourself from Fake News Module: “Working in Favor of Health and Wellbeing” ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Innovate the Health System ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Promote Healthy Lifestyles ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Develop New Health and Wellbeing Technologies Module: “Working in Favor of an Equal and Sustainable Economic Development” ∙ Learning What is Necessary for an Equal Wealth Distribution ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Promote and Realize Forms of Equal Commerce ∙ Learning What is Necessary to Promote and Realize Social Striving Module: “Working in Favor of Responsible and Inclusive Communities” * ∙ Teaching in an Inclusive Way

5.6

Doing Basic Workshops with High School Students

Since the aim of this project is to favor future design, investment in University education, a greater knowledge about current reality, and to increase the inclination of the younger generation to be aspirant in an inclusive and sustainable way, we created the basic workshops with high school students. This is the result of a collaboration between Laboratorio Larios, University of Padua and the Regional School Office of the Veneto Region. Ninety-two students with and without disabilities and/or specific learning disabilities joined the project. The students were attending their senior year (Mage = 17, 21; SD = 0.62) and were randomly assigned to a control group (43 students) or to an experimental one (49 students). Workshops were carried out once per week, with sessions of two hours each, for five weeks in total. In Table 5.4, it is possible to find the goals the five laboratories planned to achieve. For each workshop, guides and materials have been prepared in order to make the understanding easier and to facilitate participants’ active participation. The following is a learning guide for

5.6 Doing Basic Workshops with High School Students

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Table 5.3 In-depth workshops ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

“Professional Stereotypes and Clichés” “Workers’ Rights” “Children’s Rights” “Students’ Rights” “Entrepreneurial Rights” “Parental Rights” “Teachers’ Rights” “Robotics in Education” “Robotics in Public Health” “Robotics in Hidden Works” “Sociology of Work” “Argumentation” “Philosophy of Work” “Pedagogy of Work” “Negotiation and Compromises”

Table 5.4 Description of the goals of the five basic workshops First Workshop: Guidance and Challenges of the Near Future Terms: the request is to describe what guidance is, to motivate why it is important to care about the challenges of the near future for present and future generations, and to point out the advantages of precociously taking into consideration the challenges for the wellbeing of the individual, of the society, and of the planet Performances and Mastery Criterion: the student answers pointing out that guidance is a process that supports a satisfying career design, describing its purpose, that is thinking about the future today. This means also to detect the challenge that the person would like to help to face and presents at least some of the advantages of precociously taking into consideration the challenges for the wellbeing of the individual, of the society, and of the planet Second Workshop: From Emergencies/Challenges to Sustainable Development Goals Terms: the request is to describe the emergencies and the challenges that young people are facing today, to underline the importance to transform those emergencies in goals for the future, to emphasize the role of the investment in education for future design in relation to future trajectories/objectives Performances and Mastery Criterion: the student describes at least some (two/three) of the threats that scientific research and international institutions such as UN consider to be significant for the near future. The student provides at least a couple of reasons why it can be advantageous to transform the threats in goals for the future of younger generations, giving examples of these transformations, underlining at least two reasons/advantages associated to education and training for future projects based on everything above mentioned, starting a journey backwards, from the emergencies to one’s future project Third Workshop: Creating one’s own Mission Possible related to the Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Terms: the request is to describe the striving/mission possible that can be carried out in the near future, connecting them to the emergencies/challenges that the student would like to improve, and to reflect on one’s own strengths for future design that can be helpful to realize these missions possible Performances and Mastery Criterion: the student describes, taking into consideration the suggestions provided during the workshops, at least three striving/missions possible on which he/she could focus to design his/her future, and states at least some career activities that he/she is interested in, that can be actually realized and toward which he/she has efficacy beliefs Fourth Workshop: Design One’s Own Mission Possible to the Advantage of an Inclusive and Sustainable Future for Everybody Terms: the request is to describe in detail one’s own striving/mission possible and to detect the abilities that the student believes to have and the ones that he/she would like to improve by keep studying, to the advantage of the abilities themselves Performances and Mastery Criterion: the student describes in detail a striving/mission possible that can be carried out in the near future in terms of activity, knowledge, abilities, strengths, and points out at least four/five career abilities that he/she believes to have, and at least four/five abilities that he/she would like to improve, connecting them to the described striving and to a post-degree educational path to choose, describing at least two advantages of it (continued)

94

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

Table 5.4 (continued) Fifth Workshop: Goals, Resolutions, and Steps Toward One’s Own Inclusive Future also Thanks to Education Terms: The request is to reflect on the importance to detect supports and allies to try to complete one’s own striving/mission possible and to describe post-degree educational paths, university ones, useful to pursue one’s own striving/mission possible Performances and Mastery Criterion: the student takes into consideration at least one or two post-degree educational paths and university ones that can help him/her to promote knowledge and abilities to pursue his/her mission possible and detects at least two supports that could be useful to promote his/her future project during the implementation stages

the third workshop and some materials used during the workshop activities such as those that can be found in Table 5.5.

In order to test the effectiveness of the realized path, we have analyzed the presence of significant differences in the experimental group at the

Table 5.5 Third workshop learning guide “creating one’s own mission possible related to the goals of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development” First Stage: Recalling of what has been done and sharing the purpose of the meeting. The Workshop host considers the proposed key concepts and with the objective of underlining the good actions/reflections of the students and examines and discusses the fundamental concepts that have been highlighted in the previous meetings with the students (During today’s meeting I really enjoyed… During today’s meeting I thought about… see Appendix E) Shares the purpose of the meeting: “In this Workshop ‘we will become ‘argonauts’ and we will start thinking about the ‘mission possible’, that is to say, striving, goals that lead you toward the future you would like to live…” Second Stage: Stimuli to the conduct the Workshop The host introduces the idea of Mission Possible and the one of Argonaut and then discusses them with the participants; students are asked to reflect on their idea of mission possible. The host proposes conceptual stimuli, exemplifications, and invites students to discuss Instructions: “The goals of the UN and the 2030 Agenda ask the governors, the managers, and the leaders of public and private organizations, but also the individual citizen to commit, to invest, and to get busy in order to promote sustainable and inclusive development for everybody. The actions to perform in order to achieve a satisfying future are many and can be so complex that require the help and alliance of many “Argonauts” willing to launch interesting ‘striving’, but also difficult to pursue because of obstacles, risks, and threats that are unpredictable. In order to start planning your ‘striving’, to organize your journey, your mission possible, you could start by deciding, as if you were a 2030 argonaut, to what you should commit, on which ship to embark. If an argonaut, in Greek mythology, was a sailor of the ship Argo, that committed to the conquest of the Golden Fleece… how could you call yourself when you decide your performance and the name of your ship? The striving, the ships, and the crew we can think about regarding the future and the 2030 goals are many… in order to help yourself with this choice, you can start by considering the ones that will be presented to you in the near future. Focus on each of them and point out the ones that you find catchier, the ones you would like to ‘embark’ on, commit to, for a performance that you consider to be really important for you” Six fields are presented to the students, in which they can develop their striving (health and wellbeing for everybody, the safeguard of life on planet Earth, enhancement of cultural heritage and of cosmopolitan identities; see Appendix F). Students are invited to detect, among the proposed activities, the ones they consider more important and interesting for their future and to connect them with the most important striving according to them (see Appendix G) and are invited to identify the areas that can help them more than others to deal with one or more of the threats to which they wish to commit for the benefit of a better future for all. For each area, they are invited to identify career activities in which they have an interest and efficacy belief, so that they can begin to focus on actions and steps that can be implemented Third Stage: Summary, Assessment, and Last Steps towards the Conclusion of the Workshop After a summary of what has been done and the reflections that have emerged during the lessons, the host of the workshop asks the students to write what they mostly enjoyed about the workshop and what their thoughts were during the activity (see Appendix E). The meeting closes with comments on the activities, underlining positive aspects of the group and reminding the date of the next meeting. The host hands out and shows the students the activities to do at home in order to promote further consideration and reflection

5.6 Doing Basic Workshops with High School Students

95

Table 5.6 Means and standard deviations of the experimental and control group at pre- and post-test Measure

1. Concern

Experimental group

Control group

Pre

Pre

Post

Total Post

Pre

Post

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

M

SD

M

19.70

4.30

21.33

4.26

20.34

3.59

20.63

3.77

19.99

3.98

21.01

2. Control

22.80

4.13

23.88

3.76

23.63

2.85

22.50

3.99

23.17

3.62

23.26

3. Curiosity

21.00

3.85

22.20

4.16

22.09

2.79

21.03

3.47

21.49

3.44

21.68

4. Confidence

22.15

4.39

23.13

3.49

23.28

3.48

21.75

3.93

22.65

4.03

22.51

5. Investment in the future

8.03

2.77

9.34

2.09

8.18

2.24

8.75

2.56

8.43

2.56

8.69

6. Training Investment

1.23

1.25

1.78

1.23

1.28

1.08

0.97

1.06

1.25

1.17

1.42

7. Wishes about the future

0.25

0.44

0.53

0.85

0.22

0.42

0.28

0.52

0.24

0.43

0.42

post-test, regarding the inclination to detect wishes concerning the future that involved not only personal goals but also the social challenges that we are currently facing, while being careful towards a fair and sustainable development and career adaptability, crucial elements in order to design and manage a professional future (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012), and to invest in the future and in post-graduation education (Nota, Santilli, & Soresi, 2015). Moreover, the social validity of the intervention has been analyzed through markers such as the satisfaction perceived by participants for the intervention, its usefulness in order to design the future, self-reflection, and investment in post-graduation education (Santilli, Nota, & Hartung, 2019). The results underlined that the students who joined the five workshops present, after the activity, higher levels of career adaptability, investment in the future, and in the postgraduation education, with respect to the students that joined a traditional guidance activity (Table 5.6). Furthermore, the students reported more careful wishes concerning future challenges and emergencies (for example: “in the future, I would like to be involved with the emergencies regarding the constant wars among countries, poverty, and inequality”; “in the future, I would like to achieve my goals taking into consideration the contribution I could give with my work to the emergencies”) and the desire to act also in order to pursue the sustainable development goals (for example: “in the future, I would like to

carry out a satisfying professional activity but I also want to help others thanks to my job”; “in the future, I would like to merge my passion for cooking with the wellbeing of the planet, trying to combat food waste and to detect ways to find raw materials avoiding the exploitation of resources”). Moreover, the results regarding social validity suggest that the workshops can be important also to support groups of students in the reflection and design of their future from an inclusive and sustainable point of view. On the whole, students evaluated the workshops as important to reflect on specific dimensions regarding their future, to deal with future transitions, and to develop their educational and professional projects. In particular, 60% of the students showed consistent levels of satisfaction and 35% average levels of satisfaction regarding what they experienced during the workshop.

5.7

Conclusions

Involving people in activities regarding the inclusive and sustainable design of a future of quality means encouraging them to look more and more at the external reality and at what is going to happen, reminding them that all of this cannot be taken into consideration only in terms of personal interests, passions, and capital. The current socio-economic conditions make us believe that the support actions that take into consideration interests, aptitudes, and abilities in order to identify the right job for someone are not

96

much helpful. In order to imagine a fair, sustainable, and inclusive future development for everybody, we can no longer be satisfied with encouraging and verifying the abilities that the homo adaptus needs to have, the one that immediately answers the calls and changes according to the context, neither with the abilities that the homo oeconomicus needs to have because this kind of person is concerned, most of all, about being and looking attractive and competitive in the eyes of the markets and of the world of education and production. We have to focus on a kind of career counseling that offers educational and professional opportunities that are able to mobilize thoughts, feelings, behaviors, aspirations, perspectives, that is to say, in a single expression, the agenticity of people (Soresi & Nota, 2020). As we have experienced with the project “Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant”, it is possible to teach and work backward, starting from the challenges that we want to deal with and then move to purposes, desired and wished perspectives, the elements to be learned and enhanced, the conditions to be encouraged and searched for, the opportunities to be discovered with insatiable curiosity, the goals to be pursued with perseverance, that will have to be relevant and full of meaning for those who intend to pursue them. The project “Stay inclusive, sustainable, curious, cosmopolitan, aspirant” does not expect, obviously, young people to be able to defeat themselves the emergencies that the future presents, since these situations are really complex and need the cooperation of many people, multidisciplinary visions, and the use of very sophisticated and heterogeneous abilities. What is expected is that young people start to look at what above-mentioned, start to imagine the world and the society in a different way, aspiring to it, reflecting on the necessity to start collaborations and asking for the cooperation of abilities and professional specificities, even those that are very different from the ones personally owned, and trying to test how it is possible to create all of this. In order to start planning one’s own

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The Project “Stay Inclusive, Sustainable, Curious …

‘striving’, to organize the journey, the mission possible, the participants to our career counseling workshops are invited to approach their future starting with the decision, as they were 2030 argonauts, regarding what to commit to, on which ship to embark, towards which emergency to direct. Despite the complexity that characterizes the anticipation of the future, if it is expressed also in ecological-behavioral terms, it may have an important ethical and social implication, that will conjugate the private and the public, the ‘I’ and the ‘us’, passions and personal capital, with pro-sociality and common good. This would allow developing the abilities that are necessary for the homo sapiens that we have in mind and that can be defined also as reciprocus, solidalis, and prospectus, because of his/her preference for the future, his/her ‘mania’ of trying to anticipate what will happen and to adjust, in this sense, his/her agenticity.

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Appendix A

The Future is around the Corner… What Will it Hold for us? An Instrument on the UN’s Goals for Inclusive and Sustainable Development Nota, Soresi, Ginevra, Santilli, & Di Maggio (2018) Instructions A possible inspiring and ‘original’ way of thinking about our own future and the choices we will have to make can be to try to forget, at least for a while, ourselves, and look outside, ‘to the others’; we may have to sacrifice something and delay some pleasures, fulfilment and gratification in order to pursue goals that might be more difficult but, at the same time, more meaningful from a social point of view, because they could generate more wealth and a sense of accomplishment. This survey introduces some forthcoming scenarios for which, according to the United Nations (UN), we are responsible, since the quality of life of the next generations will also depend on how we will deal with a wide range of problems and challenges. Those who are going to plan their own future should take all this carefully into consideration while reflecting on what education, what trainings they want to prioritize and what possible job opportunities they want to seek. Here below you will find, one by one, following what UN have suggested in several occasions, the issues that the whole humankind will have to consider in order to create a better world for everybody.

Thinking about your future and what may happen, reflect on each of them and mark: (a) How much each one of these issues could affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you; (b) How much each one of these issues could affect your future educational and careerchoices. 1. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to achieve an equal distribution of wealth. 1:1. Could the reduction of inequality between rich and poor people affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

1:2. How much could the goal of availability of economic resources and their more equal distribution affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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Appendix A

2. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to put an end to all kind of malnutrition in the world. 2:1 Could this affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

2:2 How much could the goal of nourishment and of availability of safe and healthy food affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

3. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to improve people’s physical and psychological state of health, regardless of where they will live, or how much they will earn. 3:1 Could the goal of promoting health affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

3:2 How much could the goal of promoting health affect your future educational and professional choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

4. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to give to everybody high quality education. 4:1 Could the goal of equal distribution of high-quality education affect your future

and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

4:2 How much could the goal of equal distribution of high-quality education affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

5. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to establish an effective gender equality without any form of discrimination and violence. 5:1 Could the goal of establishing an effective gender equality affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

❑

❑

❑

❑

❑

5:2 How much could the goal of establishing an effective gender equality affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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6. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to guarantee the safeguard of water resources and a management that will supply drinkable water to everyone. 6:1 Could the goal of the safeguard of water resources affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you?

Appendix A

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6:2 How much could the goal of the safeguard of water resources affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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A lot

Extremely

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7. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to invest on a widespread use of renewable energy and provide services at affordable prices to everybody. 7:1 Could this the topic of renewable energy affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

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Extremely

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7:2 How much could the topic of renewable energy affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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8. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to allow everybody to have a decent and legal job. 8:1 Could the promotion of decent working conditions for everybody affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you?

8:2 How much could the topic of promotion of decent working conditions affect your future educational and professional choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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9. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to promote, through technological innovations, a sustainable and inclusive economic growth. 9:1 Could the goal of an effective sustainable and inclusive economic growth affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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9:2 How much could the topic of an effective sustainable and inclusive economic growth affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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10. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to reduce inequalities both inside and among countries, to guarantee the same opportunities, rights, mobility, and so on. 10:1 Could the reduction of inequalities among the population, affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you?

Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

Barely at all

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Fairly enough

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Extremely

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Appendix A

10:2 How much could the topic of the reduction of inequalities affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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Extremely

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11. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to transform our cities in places that care about sustainability, inclusion, and participation of all citizens. 11:1 Could the goal of the construction of sustainable, inclusive, and open cities affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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11:2 How much could the goal of the construction of sustainable, inclusive, and open cities affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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12. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to reduce food waste, littering, and unbridled consumption of natural resources. 12:1 Could the goal of reducing waste and using natural resources in a sustainable and appropriate way affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you?

12:2 How much could the goal of reducing waste and using natural resources in a sustainable and appropriate way affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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13. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to adopt appropriate means to fight climate change and to face the consequences of all kinds of pollution. 13:1 Could the topic of climate change and pollution affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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13:2 How much could the topic of climate change and pollution affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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14. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to protect the rivers, the seas, the oceans and any kind of eco-system. 14:1 Could the topic of the protection of water and eco-systems affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you?

Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

Barely at all

Slightly

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Extremely

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Appendix A

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14:2 How much could the topic of the protection of water and eco-systems affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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Extremely

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15. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to protect the forests, to reduce the desertification, and to safeguard our environment. 15:1 Could the topic of a sustainable management of the eco-system affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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15:2 How much could the topic of a sustainable management of the eco-system affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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16. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to reduce exploitation, abuses, corruption, and to build peaceful societies where equality, justice, and commitment are guaranteed. 16:1 Could the goal of reducing injustice and promoting peace affect your future and

influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

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Extremely

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16:2 How much could the topic of reducing injustice and promoting peace affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

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A lot

Extremely

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17. Surely in the future there will still be a lot to do in order to promote new forms of international cooperation and agreement among all the countries that will allow equal exchanges and a global, sustainable development. 17:1 Could the goal of a better international cooperation affect your future and influence the quality of life of the people who will live around you? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

A lot

Extremely

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17:2 How much could the goal of a better international cooperation affect your future educational and career choices? Barely at all

Slightly

Fairly enough

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Extremely

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Appendix B

How Cosmopolitan Do I Think I Am? Di Maggio, Santilli, and Nota (2018) Instructions When we talk about future societies and future working environments, more and more often we hear that they will be multicultural. Every kind of job will definitely be affected by globalization, thus implying the need to fully understand the cultural background of employers, colleagues and ‘costumers’. Each of them may be ethnically different but all of us will have to share timetables, business, relations, and rules. Future workers will have to shift from their limited subculture (the one of their firm, or of their community, for instance) to a global one. To face all this, it will probably be necessary for all of us to adopt a cosmopolitan vision, in other words, to be, feel and behave as citizens of the world,

considering ethnical, cultural, and religious differences as resources for the progress of the world and humanity. In the following survey there are some sentences about cosmopolitanism; please read each one of them and mark how much they correspond to your usual way of thinking and behaving. 1 means “This sentence describes barely at all my thoughts and behavior”; 2 means “This sentence slightly describes my thoughts and behavior”; 3 means “This sentence describes fairly enough my thoughts and behavior”; 4 means “This sentence describes well my thoughts and behavior”; 5 means “This sentence describes perfectly my thoughts and behavior”.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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Appendix B 1 2 3 4 5

1. I like getting in touch with different cultures and traditions 2. I like surrounding myself with people with different interests 3. I like getting familiar with the idea that I could work in Italy, but also in other European countries, or in New York, Beijing, Moscow or Rio de Janeiro 4. I like reading about scenarios, environments and cultures that are very different from the ones I am used to 5. I like interacting with people who remind me how much our planet is diverse 6. I like protecting biodiversity, even if it means having to give up to something 7. I always feel like I am ‘transient’, even where I live, as if my true home was a world without borders 8. I often interact and keep in touch with people coming from different parts of the world 9. I like working with people who, even when they do not share my opinion, ‘root’ also for others 10. I like learning more about different situations and lifestyles 11. I feel pleasure in nurturing my traditions and at the same time I feel attracted by different ones 12. Openly I defend the universal rights, as reported in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his/her own, and to return to his/her country.” 13. I am happy of feeling a citizen of my own town and at the same time ‘of the world’ 14. I pay attention to the differences of people and places in order to give the same rights to everybody 15. I look for and establish relationships with people with different traditions and lifestyles 16. I like learning about objects and materials that characterize the differences of our planet

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Appendix C

Look at Yourself and at Everything Else with Interest and Curiosity Nota, Soresi, Ginevra, Santilli and Di Maggio (2018) The reality in which we live is so complex and diverse that no one can claim to be able, in the course of his/her life, to fully understand and examine it. Despite this, it is appropriate to constantly look around us to ‘treasure’ as much as possible what happens both to us and in general. This is the reason why we have to train to grasp and analyze at least the most relevant information, to understand different points of view and opinions, to ‘look at how things are’ both for us and for the others. All of this can be achieved thanks to an adequately ‘curious’ and explorative behavior. A ‘healthy curiosity’ could also lead us to learn more about the different educational and career offers, to identify new trajectories and opportunities, to discover ‘details’ that could lead us toward the creation of new ideas, hypotheses, and even very original possibilities.

Instructions. With this survey we invite you to reflect upon the opportunity to look at yourself and at what surrounds you with respect, attention, and curiosity. The following sentences have been expressed by some students that, just like you, are interested in designing their future. Read them one at a time and indicate how much they currently correspond to your usual way of thinking and behaving. Keep in mind that: 1 means that the sentence describes barely at all your current way of thinking and behaving; 2 means that the sentence slightly describes your current way of thinking and behaving; 3 means that the sentence describes fairly enough your current way of thinking and behaving; 4 means that the sentence describes well your current way of thinking and behaving; 5 means that the sentence describes perfectly your current way of thinking and behaving.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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Appendix C 1 2 3 4 5

1. When I come across new situations I look ‘left and right’ because I do not want to miss anything at all 2 I consider new and unpredicted situations as an opportunity not to be missed to learn more and more from them 3. When I meet a new person, I like to try to get to know him/her thoroughly and learn more about him/her 4. When I am involved in something complex or challenging, that I do not fully know, I try, first of all, to learn more about it 5. I try to understand other people’s feelings and thoughts 6. I generally try to make new things and experiences 7. I am intrigued by people’s way of thinking 8. I see difficult situations as an opportunity to grow and learn, also for the benefit of my future 9. I like to learn more about the reason for which some people behave in a certain way that could seem ‘weird’ at first glance 10. I like, in the limits of the law, to try and do a little bit of everything 11. I tend to listen what other people think about controversial facts and events 12. Challenging experiences for my present and future do not scare me, they excite me 13. I like to get involved in unforeseen or unplanned activities 14. I’m not so interested in the usual companies; I try to meet new people as much as possible

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Appendix D

analyzed almost exclusively in terms of resources and individual capital, forgetting their origins and their markedly environmental and contextual nature; (c) encouraging to further take care, also with Preamble early precautionary interventions, of the This Memorandum speaks to those who want to removal of barriers and obstacles that block support the scientific dignity and the social relthe career fulfillment of a more and more evance of research, of services and professionals elevated number of people, reducing the involved in guidance, in career design, and in possibilities for them to take part to expericareer inclusion. ences involving illegal, low dignified, This Memorandum, in particular, speaks to unstable, and precarious jobs; those who are responsible for the organization and management of guidance services and sup- (d) encouraging the choice of markedly interactive and contextual career counselling and port to active job research services, to public vocational designing models, practices, planadministrators and to labor organizations so that ning, and career inclusion, to be able to they can reflect about the interventions that could highlight not only individual expectations and and should be done. interests, but also the changes that educational This Memorandum, in accepting the recomand career contexts should make to become mendations of many scholars, professionals, more socially relevant, safe, and inclusive. agencies, and national and international organi(e) encouraging and stimulating those who have zations, proposes what follows: the responsibility of starting educational and career policies to take more care of those (a) encouraging the abandonment of superficial people who, because of their conditions and obsolete visions regarding career coun(impairments and disabilities, financial selling and vocational designing that reduce straits, belonging to minority groups, and so them merely to a matter of people’s adjuston) have a narrow range of opportunities and ment to the requests and expectations of the decisional options. These people tend to educational and career world; picture study, work, success, participation, (b) promoting the overcome of counselling social competition, and quality of life in a models and active job searches that are less satisfying way than those who belong to heavily focused on the research of psychomajority and dominant groups. metric profiles and skills assessment Memorandum in Support of Guidance and Career Counselling Soresi, Nota, and Santilli (2019)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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The drafters of this Memorandum invite scholars, professionals, and those who are interested in the topics of education and career to consider themselves as ‘agents of change’ that are not satisfied with the creation of psycho-aptitude profiles, abilities assessments, and people’s employability projections, and to feel deontologically involved in identifying also the causes and contextual responsibilities of the difficulties that many people experience when complaining about poorly dignified educational and career conditions.

Appendix D

1:6.

1:7.

1:8.

1:9.

First Section: Scientific and Social Relevance of Guidance, Career Counselling, and Support for Career Inclusion Services

1:10.

1:11. The drafters of this Memorandum invite scholars and professionals of guidance and career counselling to: 1:1. Enshrine their reflections and promote with their interventions those theoretical models and those practices that connect scientific rigor to a sustainable, fair, and inclusive vision of the future and of development; 1:2. Put at the center of their theoretical models analyses and practices that use people’s wellbeing and quality in their life contexts; 1:3. Suggest interpreting necessities, expectations, and individual aspirations while also considering contextual determiners and social impacts; 1:4. Use complex and multidisciplinary interpretative models when detecting educational, career, and inclusion problems, avoiding economic-financial, psychological, and social detections and interpretation that are simplistic and reductive; 1:5. Use profiles, classifications, evaluations, and probability indices that correspond to people’s expectations and desires in contexts, only after receiving an explicit

1:12.

consent and only when it is done for their wellbeing; Try to influence local, regional or State policies in the field of career design and choice; Maximize the early and preventive actions to mostly favor those community members that have more vulnerabilities; Operate for the identification and elimination of all the barriers that could reduce the participation of all people to educational, career, and social life; Favor, when concerning the analysis of skills development, educational and preventive actions, and to reduce the merely diagnostic and assessment ones; Act in favor of the social reputation of guidance, career counselling services, and support for career inclusion; Work together with other agencies, services, and professionals interested in sustainable development and in other people’s wellbeing, even with forms of social activism; Play an advocacy role in school-to-work transition services, of inclusion support, and career requalification;

Second Section: Training, Abilities, and Quality of Guidance, Career Counselling, and Support for Career Inclusion Services The drafters of this Memorandum believe that the problems associated to career choice, design, and inclusion concern particularly complex phenomena, that require knowledge and abilities coming from different fields and disciplines to effectively involve and mobilize people, contexts, institutions, and circumstances. Because of everything above mentioned, the drafters of this Memorandum believe that career counselling and career inclusion operators have to be able to perform career abilities necessary to:

Appendix D

1:1. Pursue, with their interventions, goals related to the increase of wellbeing and satisfaction for people and contexts; 1:2. Realize work sessions regarding career counselling, career education, career intervention, that involve also the use of qualitative and quantitative assessment procedures and tools, and advanced interview methods; 1:3. Provide psychosocial and psycho-pedagogic aid and support also in favor of people and groups with disadvantages and at risk of discrimination and marginalization; 1:4. Plan and implement meaningful and collaborative relations with institutions, agencies, services, companies, and so on, and lead in-depth discussion groups, focus groups, advocacy groups, and so on; 1:5. Mobilize complex processes, such as interpersonal, cultural, social, environmental economic and political-institutional ones, and the needed agenticity to propose, encourage, mobilize, and produce changing dynamics; 1:6. Realize also remote interventions, technologically supported, to meet the guidance and career inclusion needs of those people who, for many different reasons (distance, disability, marginalization, and so on) do not have the possibility or do not want to access the services in person. Moreover, the drafters of this Memorandum, believe that career counselling, guidance, and career inclusion operators have to: 1:7 Have a university education and a further multidisciplinary specialization that enables them to do activities regarding information and data gathering, processing, and use about educational and socio-economic realities and their evolution and changing trends;

111

1:8 Make use of an education that regards the models and techniques of guidance and career counseling that can be used throughout the life of people in individual counselling, or small/big group counselling. Their education will also have to involve the analysis of barriers, stereotypes, and discriminations existing in educational, career, and social contexts, and the use of information and communication technology (ICT) functional for the increase of the efficacy of the methods and techniques of information and data transmission, reception, and processing; 1:9 Act, so that guidance and career counselling services use systematic monitoring of the quality of the performed interventions, and provide abilities assessments activities, training, and constant updates for operators; 1:10 Operate, so that, to be relevant from a social point of view, the guidance and career counseling services are also able to realize early and preventive educational programs with the institutions and the agencies interested in education and career.

Third Section: Efficacy Assessment of Programs and Interventions Regarding Guidance, Career Counselling, and Support for Career Designing and Inclusion The drafters of this Memorandum believe that the programs and services of guidance, career counselling, and support for career designing and inclusion, to be high-quality and keep satisfying efficacy levels, have to systematically perform operations of monitoring, evaluation, and assessment.

112

To this purpose, the Memorandum recommend:

Appendix D

drafters

of this

1:1 The use of qualitative and quantitative procedures able to underline the effects of guidance on choice and career designing processes regarding people and groups (ability to explore and know educational and career contexts, ability to face and solve difficult situations, ability to pursue goals and aspirations regarding an equitable, inclusive, and sustainable development, and so on); 1:2 The increase of self-determination of people and groups and the increase of their wish to actively join their community life; 1:3 The visibility and accessibility to guidance, career counseling, and support for career designing and inclusion services; 1:4 The promotion of equal opportunities in educational and career contexts and the reduction of any discrimination form involving low dignified jobs, underemployment, and precariousness; 1:5 The ability to connect institutions, while also playing a social role that influences administrations and politics. The evaluation and assessment operations of the programs and services of guidance, career counseling, and support for career designing and inclusion should also regard:

1:6 The efficacy of advocacy actions to the advantage, most of all, of the people with the highest vulnerabilities, for the elimination of every form of marginalization, discrimination, and injustice; 1:7 The efficacy of remote interventions, adequately supported from a technological point of view, to meet guidance and career inclusion needs also for those people that for many different reasons (distance, disability, marginalization, and so on) do not have the possibility or do not want to access the services in person; 1:8 The ability to use tools and programs with an effective ecological validity able to suggest also how to motivate those that show demotivation, how to increase self-efficacy and empowerment, how to facilitate the pursue of one’s aspiration in the field of the personal and career development processes of citizens, and how to influence educational and career policies; 1:9 The resizing of the gap that might persist between the world of research and that of application, overcoming contrasts and mutual misunderstandings; 1:10 The respect of a precise code of ethics and the suitability of the used communication, without forms of misleading advertising, for the promotion of aims, programs, and events.

Appendix E

Thoughts on the First Meeting of___________ ____________________ Complete the following sentences What I have enjoyed the most today has been… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… …………………………………………………. ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………….

Today during the meeting, I have thought about… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… …………………………………………………. ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………….

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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Appendix F

Missions Possible… to the Conquest of the Golden Fleece For Which of these Kinds of Striving Would you be Willing to Embark? Here are some kinds of ‘striving’ that you could consider, after having reflected on the

emergencies and UN goals on which you would like to focus: after having thought about each one of them, pick no more than three, even if they are all important and challenging. If you want, you can also underline that you would like to know more about that mission, striving, ‘conquest’…

STRIVING TO PROMOTE… Health and wellbeing for everybody. The area of health and wellbeing is an occupational field that takes into consideration the set of career actions, education, and investments to promote development and healthy lives for the population, characterized by the perception of positive psycho-physical conditions both for individuals and communities, in the awareness that everyone’s quality of life is connected to other people’s. The career actions and the professionals needed are many and different, and have to come into play. Moreover, the challenges that the current times raise to grant better health and wellbeing conditions for the highest number of people possible require more and more cooperation among workers with different career backgrounds ❑ I really would like to embark in this striving ❑ I would like to know more Fair and sustainable economic development. The so-called development and investments area is an occupational field that regards the set of career actions, education, and investments to promote an overall economic and social development for the different communities, even in this case in the awareness that the development of the near future can only be focused on perspectives of sharing, reciprocity, and equity, if we want to avoid social disasters at everyone’s expenses We would like to repeat that the career actions and professionals needed are many and different, and have to come into play ❑ I really would like to embark in this striving ❑ I would like to know more (continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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Appendix F

STRIVING TO PROMOTE…

❑I ❑I

❑I ❑I

❑I ❑I

❑I ❑I

Responsible and inclusive communities. The so-called ‘responsible and inclusive societies’ area is an occupational field that regards the set of career actions, education, and investments aimed at creating human contexts that care about the individuals, their differences, their uniquenesses, for the human promotion, education, protection, focused on the reduction of barriers and the creation of new opportunities and positive conditions, to the benefit of a life of quality for everyone It is clear that also this field requires different career actions and professionals, that own many useful abilities to produce new products, materials, and processes really would like to embark in this striving would like to know more Technological development for everyone’s wellbeing. The so-called technologies and new frontiers area is an occupational field that regards the set of career actions, education, and investments in the context of new technologies that can be used in different fields, to the benefit of people’s quality of life. Also for this field, different career actions and professionals are needed, as much as many useful abilities to produce new products, materials, and processes, but also to grant their ethical and accessible use and their availability really would like to embark in this striving would like to know more Safeguard of the life on the planet Earth. The so-called environment area is an occupational field that regards the set of career actions, education, and investment aimed at protecting out contexts from a progressive destruction, at managing resources in a careful way, that is able to encourage a regeneration of resources, granting, at the same time, wellbeing conditions for the living beings as a whole Also this field requires different career actions and professionals, that own many useful abilities to produce new products, materials, processes, and a quality management really would like to embark in this striving would like to know more Enhancement of cultural heritage and of cosmopolitan identities. The so-called ‘culture and identity between innovation and tradition’ area is an occupational field that regards the set of career actions, education, and investments aimed at creating life contexts that focus on the beauty, the culture as source of progress and wellbeing, the accessibility to it, able to keep together and give value traditions and one’s own roots with other people’s roots, and to encourage people to develop new and richer forms of identity As for other fields, it is fundamental to make many abilities cooperate to create new products, materials, processes, and a quality management really would like to embark in this striving would like to know more

Appendix G

A third summary just for myself What are the kinds of striving that I would like to take into consideration? …………………………… …………………………… …………………………… I think that these kinds of striving are particularly interesting because… …………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… Taking into consideration the first striving, with which Sustainable Development Goals is it associated, according to me? And which career activities can be important in order to be able to realize it? ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ……

Taking into consideration the second striving, with which Sustainable Development Goals is it associated, according to me? And which career activities can be important in order to be able to realize it? ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… …… Taking into consideration the third striving, with which Sustainable Development Goals is it associated, according to me? And which career activities can be important in order to be able to realize it? ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ………………………………………………… ……

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Nota et al., Sustainable Development, Career Counselling and Career Education, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60046-4

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