OVERVIEW. One of the most important challenges facing the career counseling profession is developing effective strategies to counsel racially diverse individuals. Understanding the role of racial factors in career counseling requires an understanding of the impact of race on the development and identification of career concerns (Leong & Hartung, 1997). This chapter invites an understanding of career counseling with a focus on people of African ancestry. There is scant literature on the career development and career counseling of people of African ancestry including African Americans. This paucity of literature is explained, in part, by the fact that people of African ancestry have unique histories of being excluded from a broad range of human services, including career counseling.

This chapter considers career counseling with people of African ancestry. First, the chapter explores how the African cultural belief of Ubuntu may influence individuals and then considers its possible influence on career counseling. Second, the chapter considers how cultural contexts may impact the career counseling of individuals of African ancestry, specifically African Americans and African immigrants. Finally, social justice and narrative approaches to career counseling are examined as a means to address the needs of people of African ancestry in a range of cultural settings.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of the chapter, the reader should be able to:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the evolving nature of career counseling and of the culture of people of African ancestry.

2. […]

INTRODUCTION

The emerging field of community and ecosystem genetics has so far focused on how the genetic variation in one species can influence the composition of associated communities and ecosystem processes such as decomposition (see definitions in Table 3–1; reviews by Whitham et al. 2003, 2006; Johnson & Stinchcombe 2007; Hughes et al. 2008). A key component of this approach has been an emphasis on understanding how the genetics of foundation plant species influence a much larger community. It is reasoned that because foundation species structure their ecosystems by creating locally stable conditions and provide specific resources for diverse organisms (Dayton 1972; Ellison et al. 2005), the genetics of these species as “community drivers” are most important to understand and most likely to have cascading ecological and evolutionary effects throughout an ecosystem (Whitham et al. 2006). For example, when a foundation species’ genotype influences the relative fitness of other species, it constitutes an indirect genetic interaction (Shuster et al. 2006), and when these interactions change species composition and abundance among individual tree genotypes, they result in individual genotypes having distinct community and ecosystem phenotypes. Thus, in addition to an individual genotype having the “traditional” phenotype that population geneticists typically consider as the expression of a trait at the individual and population level, community geneticists must also consider higher-level phenotypes at the community and ecosystem level. The predictability of phenotypes at levels higher than the population can be quantified as community heritability (i.e., the tendency for related individuals to support similar communities of organisms and ecosystem processes; Whitham et al. 2003, 2006; Shuster et al. 2006).

The main purpose of this chapter is to develop and test a theory that predicts the voting of individual Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members who dissent, on the side of either tightness or ease, from the Committee's regular monetary policy directives. It is initially assumed that such a directive reflects the monetary policy desired by a majority of the Committee and that the Committee controls monetary policy. It is further assumed that the central government, specifically the administration, has a strong influence on monetary policy (Havrilesky 1987, 1988) through ongoing communication with the Committee (or its chair) and through FOMC appointments (Havrilesky and Gildea 1989).

The theory predicts individual dissenting votes as a function of the difference between each of the dissenter's “characteristics” and the mean value for that characteristic for all FOMC members. Each characteristic is a measure of the member's “career proximity” to the central government. The desired monetary stabilization policy of the central government is assumed to have a time-consistent inflationary bias. Presidential appointments of 7 of the 12 members of the FOMC are assumed to reflect several objectives. These objectives include attaining politically optimal stabilization policy, paying political debts, building antiinflationary credibility, and satisfying the representational demands of constituents (Woolley 1984; Havrilesky and Gildea 1989). Because of these multiple objectives, the FOMC as a whole will have a lesser inflationary bias than will the central government. Therefore, members whose career-proximity characteristics are closer to the central government than are the FOMC means for those characteristics will tend to dissent on the side of ease.