David V. Tiedeman: engineer of career construction.(In memoriam)

When individuals of deep scholarship and intellectual daring lunge ahead of the learned community whom they are addressing, they may not receive the honor that they deserve. Instead, they may blend undistinguished into the scholarly landscape and somehow become taken for granted. Something like this has happened to the scholarly contributions of David Valentine Tiedeman (1919-2004). Being the first psychologist to systematically apply constructivist epistemology to the comprehension of careers, Tiedeman broke with intellectual traditions to lead the counseling profession in a new direction. As he cleared a path into the future, he identified what was to be avoided and articulated what was to be done. When others lagged behind, he moved forward by himself. Tiedeman's path has now moved through the progression identified by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Such has been the course followed by the seminal contributions of Professor Tiedeman, the prime engineer of career construction theory.

In this article, I outline three of Tiedeman's most profound truths: career emerges from self-organization, purposeful action bridges discontinuity, and decisions evolve through differentiation and integration. Before doing so, I describe the prehistory of Tiedeman's (1964) constructivist model of careers, namely, his contributions to the normal science of vocational psychology as represented by the individual differences tradition of personality types (Holland, 1959) and the developmental tradition of vocational tasks (Super, 1957). Kuhn (2000) described normal science as the routine work of individuals conducting programmatic research within an established model. This methodical work slowly elaborates the theoretical model by making incremental additions. The work does not challenge the underlying assumptions of the model, as Tiedeman would eventually do, but I am getting ahead of the story of his beginning as a positivist and becoming a constructivist.

Beginning as a Positivist

Before initiating a paradigm shift in vocational psychology, Tiedeman earned a BA in psychology at Union College (1941). While there, he studied with Ernest M. Ligon, leader of the Character Research Project and author of an innovative student workbook titled A Purpose for Your Life (Ligon, 1972). Ligon (1956) taught Tiedeman that "science is seeing something in the future, not proving something to be true" (p. 38). Following the completion of his studies at Union College, Tiedeman moved to the University of Rochester from which in 1943 he earned an MA in psychology. Being interested both in engineering and in psychology, Tiedeman believed that he could balance these two interests by studying statistics. So he then moved to Harvard University from which in 1948 he earned an EdM and in 1949 an EdD, both in educational measurement. His dissertation, sponsored by the prominent statistician Phillip Justin Rulon, was titled "A Classification of Elementary College American History, Mathematics, and Physics Courses by an Analysis of the Prerequisite Knowledge Necessary" (Tiedeman, 1949). Rulon, who had served as the statistical consultant for the Harvard Vocational Study (1935-1938), encouraged Tiedeman to collaborate with him in applying statistics to problems of vocational guidance.

Immediately upon earning his doctorate in 1949, Tiedeman became an instructor at Harvard and, just 10 years later, the University promoted him to the rank of professor. From 1952 to 1971, Tiedeman directed the Harvard Studies in Career Development. From 1963 to 1967, Tiedeman codirected with Ann Roe the Harvard Center for Research in Careers. Early in Tiedeman's program of research, he applied multivariate statistics to problems such as personnel classification. As part of this research, he codeveloped the statistic for discriminant function along with his mentor Rulon and his graduate student Maurice M. Tatsuoka (Tatsuoka & Tiedeman, 1954; Tiedeman, 1951; Tiedeman, Rulon, & Bryan, 1951). Tatsuoka went on to a career as a noted expert on multivariate statistics (Linn, 1996). Discriminant function analysis is used to determine which variables discriminate between two or more naturally occurring groups. Thus, Tiedeman (1956) found it fruitful to apply this analytic technique to discriminate among occupational groups.

In 1952, while continuing to make important contributions to vocational psychology based on multivariate statistics, Tiedeman began asking himself a question: "So what?" Suppose group membership could be predicted, so what? How could this information be used legitimately anyway? In the Harvard Educational Review of 1952, Tiedeman reviewed what would become a classic book by Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951). In reviewing Occupational Choice: An Approach to a General Theory (Ginzberg et al., 1951), Tiedeman (1952) asserted that Ginzberg et al. misunderstood statistics. Tiedeman (1952) explained that statistics provide a useful, logical framework for understanding the validity of many concepts. However, "we shall never see a statistic that will explain how a particular individual decides upon an occupation or enables one to understand what work really means to the individual" (Tiedeman, 1952, p. 189). Tiedeman's dissatisfaction with the methods of positivist psychology impelled his quest for a new paradigm. He wanted a psychology that did more than offer only a sum of miscellaneous facts. He wanted to investigate how the facts of lived experience organize themselves into a whole that gives new meaning to a life in progress.

A decade later, Tiedeman recalled that crossroads in his own career by reflecting on the following statement by Newell and Simon (1961):