Podcast: David Blustein on Working in America

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and today we’re talking with Dr. David Bluestine, a professor of counseling psychology at Boston College. His 2006 book, The Psychology of Working, made Dr. Bluestine a leader in the emerging field

of vocational psychology. His new book, The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty, discusses the eroding work experience in America and how to prepare young people to thrive in a complex world. Dr. Bluestine is joined by Ed Hidalgo from the Cajon Valley Union School District, a leading example of early immersive career education.

Tom spoke with them right before a keynote session at Learn Launch in Boston, which was sponsored by ASA, a nonprofit that helps students know themselves, know their options, and make informed decisions to achieve their education and career goals. This is the first of a two-part series on starting career education early. Let’s listen in.

Dr. David Bluestine, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. It’s great to be here. I’m in your home city of Boston.

We’re at the Learn Launch conference. Our friends from ASA brought us together for an opening session today. We are joined by Ed Hidalgo from the Cajon Valley School District. Thank you, Tom. Glad to be here.

It’s great to be with both of you, and I’m looking forward to our keynote session together. David, I’d like to dive into your background first. Why psychology at Stony Brook? Interesting question. My journey into psychology at Stony Brook had a circuitous route.

I didn’t start out with an interest in psychology. I like a lot of people started in pre-med and had the experience that many people have, which it wasn’t a great fit for me in a lot of different contexts. Was it organic chemistry, maybe? It was the day in organic chemistry, first day there.

I didn’t do well in my first year, and at that day, I went to a phone booth called my mom, collect calls in those days, and I said that I was going to drop this. This wasn’t for me. Then she said, how could you do this? You’re so smart.

You’re the one in our family who was destined to do these kinds of things. I said, I just feel like I can’t do this. This is not for me. Then she said, well, because you are so smart, I trust your judgment. You do what you think is best.

That was an amazing moment for me. That’s great. Transforming the moment. That’s really great advice. Psychology, history, social sciences, humanities, and that’s where my heart is.

That’s where my talents are. Psychology at Storing Brook was a very good major. Not exactly the kind of psychology that I love. It was a bit behaviorist in that era, but I learned a lot, and it really got me the skills and the confidence to move forward.

At Queens, you did a master’s in counseling. What had spurred the interest in counseling? I had an interest in moving into a field where I could work with people. To be honest, once I was at Storing Brook, I knew I wanted to be a professor. Actually, I thought of history, sociology.

At that period, there were not a lot of faculty jobs. That was the sense that we got. I thought, well, I also like psychology. In psychology, I could also work as a therapist, and there’d be a backup plan. Even then, I was thinking about career development and work.

I was interested in counseling as opposed to clinical psychology. I felt that it had a more holistic, whole-person view of people. I got my master’s at Queens College, which is where I grew up. Then I worked in the field for a few years as a master’s level counselor, the most prominent job being at a community college, which was incredible.

That’s where I found the love of working career, because I worked with people who were being displaced from work, people who were being laid off. It was the first major recession we had, 1980, 81, 10 or 11 percent unemployment. I saw these folks coming in, desperate for lifelong learning. That’s when I realized that that was really my calling, because I come from a working-class

family. My father was a sheet metal mechanic. My mom worked in a department store. I felt like this was the clear narrative path for me, to do something for my community and for all those who were on the margins.

You’ve been a professor of psychology at Boston College now for 21 years. You’ve been nationally recognized for your focus on working and the psychology of work. What drew you to study why people work and how they work? I would say it started at this community college, Rockland Community College, Northwest of New York City.

I was also studying career development in graduate school at that point. I went to Teachers College, Columbia, which was the home of one of the most important theorists in our field, Donald Super. I was there after he retired, but it was in the air to study career development lifelong, looking at different roles in life.

Once I left, and actually my first academic job was at the University at Albany in this part of the SUNY system, I started to do much more research on career development. In my first sabbatical in 1992, I used a sabbatical the way professors are supposed to, and I read outside of my area, and I started to read about labor economics. I started to read about poverty, and I really got enlightened.

I knew about poverty deeply. It was part of the civil rights, Vietnam War, the whole social movements of the late 60s and 70s. I realized that I could do something about it. I started to focus on work in addition to career, that I felt that work was a broader

term, and that I felt, and others in my field also felt that a career focus was a bit elitist, focusing on those with a lot of choice. Did you read Studs Turkle? Yes. Of course.

Was he the first vocational psychologist in a way? In some ways he was. He was the first narrative theorist to give people voice. Studs Turkle’s work was the inspiration for my newest book as well. I think for many of us reading his work was really the first time that we really took

the reflective journey to think hard about why people work and how they choose or find their work. I don’t know. Did you read Studs Turkle? No, I didn’t.

That’s a new name for me, interestingly enough. When did you first run into David’s writings? I think from Dr. Ian Martin, who’s really my mentor at University of San Diego, who really introduced me to Dr. Bluestine’s work, and specifically the psychology of working. That was your book about five years, six years ago?

That one came out in 2006. Okay. It was my first book, a solo-authored book. That book was a provocative book during its time. The focus was to transform the field of career development and transform counseling and also

psychology in terms of how we understand working people’s lives. I hoped it would be transformative. Let me say that. Maybe it’s up to others to make that decision. Some of the core frameworks that we were working on adapting into the classrooms, the psychology

of working wrapped around that in the sense that Gohoun Valley is one of the highest poverty school districts in San Diego County. The psychology of working really helped us understand the importance of decency of work and providing good work for all people and the social impacts of work and just how work can lift people up out of their struggles.

That’s the work that we’re trying to do in Gohoun Valley. Dr. Bluestine’s work really provided a framework for us to understand just how big the impact could be. I want to go in the way back machine maybe 150 years and just think about what’s happened in the nature of work.

What was the industrial revolution and the conception of the modern corporation? Was that the big shift in work and human history where most people had been craftsmen and then most people became employees? Was that a big influx? Huge change in work because work really is part of our evolutionary history.

It’s written about extensively in the Bible, in ancient texts. Big part of who we are. The first age of humanity is called the hunter-gatherer age, which is two occupations. In the industrial revolution, people left the farms, they left their communities, they went into the cities.

During that period, the number of jobs that existed expanded exponentially. That was a game changer completely. During that period is when high schools changed. Work of John Dewey 100 years ago talked about the function of high schools and people began to think about the function of high schools.

In part, high schools needed to serve this new period of human development known as adolescence. Part of the function of adolescence was to give people time to figure out how they were going to fit into this rapidly growing occupational landscape. During that period was when the world of work changed radically. Some ways for the better, some ways not for the better.

Increased alienation. Let’s talk specifically about the last 40 years, the information age. We took the industrial age and then we added computers to it and turbocharged many people. Aspect, how do you think work changed for most people in the last 40 years? I think it’s changed as radically as it did during that industrial era period.

First off, work is completely different than it was. When I wrote my dissertation, I wrote it longhand and at that point I hired somebody to put around a word processor, the beginning of the word processor. Remember, it took up the entire room in this person’s house, the Wang word processor. It’s completely changed.

It could change everything from communication to how we relate to each other, the access to information. And in addition, we see a downside which is the loss of a lot of jobs, particularly at the less skilled levels. And I think sometimes people don’t think this is a concern because the unemployment rate is low,

but it’s a major concern because what we are seeing is incredible wage compression. And the wage compression is leading to so many problems that we’re seeing around us, political theater, social relations. The fabric of our lives has changed radically. Well, not only wage compression, but wage inequity.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s been going on, but it seems to be accelerating. I guess I think we’re a couple years into a new age that we haven’t named yet, but one where machine learning is having a profound effect. It’s machine learning plus Internet of Things, right?

But it does feel like it’s accelerating some of these influences. It feels like it’s accelerating this shift away from long-term employment towards more freelancing, more what we call precarious work. Free agents.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? How do we think about it? I think it’s not a good thing. In fact, I’ve just done some research on the relationship between precarious work and various outcomes.

And there’s been extensive research on precarious work, particularly in Europe, particularly coming out of sociology and labor economics. From a psychological perspective in our new research study, we see that precarious work is associated with a lack of well-being, a lack of job satisfaction, a loss of work volition. So while there is some subset of freelance work that seems attractive,

but in the research we’ve done, it seems to work well when people have good financial resources. For the forgotten half, which is going to be the focus of some new work I’m going to do, those who make $15 or less, which is 46% of our population, precarious work has been generally a nightmare. It’s well put.

It strikes me that for the small percentage, it’s a return to craftsmanship. Yes. It’s the profession as craft. You can now live on these new commerce platforms and be quite independent. You can live where you want and work where you want and return to this old view that we had of

the life of the independent craftsman. But as you said, that’s probably a small percentage. That’s a small percentage of the precarious workers. It is a big issue. It’s being discussed a lot in the academic world.

I think it needs to be discussed more in the political discourse in the United States and other countries. It’s the effect of automation on the nature of work. People have been all concerned about massive unemployment, but to look at just unemployment rates as the outcome of automation is a mistake. We have to look at the nature of work, people’s experiences of work.

David, your new book is the importance of work in an age of uncertainty. The subtitle is really interesting. The eroding work experience in America. Why that subtitle? It’s interesting.

Why do you think the nature of work is eroding? It’s interesting. I didn’t come up with a subtitle till I was basic, almost done with the book. That became the main theme of the research that I reported in there and of the work I did on it. The six-year project of working on that book.

One of the big takeaways in that book, which is framed around qualitative interviews of 58 Americans across the country, one of the main takeaways is that people experience an erosion within the workforce, the precarity of work, lack of stability, a lack of protection for workers, in some ways associated with the loss of union support. The other aspect of it was that people experienced an internal sense of erosion.

So there was an experience of the erosion within the workforce that was mirrored within people’s internal psychological experiences. And I felt like that was a major takeaway. And it was something that hasn’t been discussed in the popular press about work, and also in the field that I’m in, which is vocational and counseling psychology.

People haven’t really talked as much about the sense of erosion. The kind of denigration of our experience of work. Is it realistic for us to think in this new age that most people could be engaged in work that they care about, where they have a sense of purpose, where they feel like they could contribute? That’s a great question.

Throughout history, the idea of having a meaningful purposeful work life has been available to a minority of people. I write about this in my work and I call it career choice privilege. Career choice privilege is not available to all. However, I think one positive outcome of automation is it could reduce our reliance upon

tedious work and improve the quality of work. It will require serious systemic changes and a much more thoughtful and approach to managing the labor market. But I do believe that people can, even if they do not find the work intrinsically interesting, they could find it meaningful in a sense of how it contributes to the broader social good

and how it contributes to their family’s welfare. In my book, I talk about my parents. Father was a sheet metal mechanic. My mother was a clerk, as I mentioned. And they found that they felt enormous amount of dignity in their work lives.

They didn’t necessarily love what they did, but they felt that they were part of something bigger. And they felt that they were supporting their family and they had this dream of seeing their kids go to college and do well. And they did see that. Hi, I’m Nate MacLennan, co-author of the new book, The Power of Place.

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My most important learning has come from place in the outdoors, jobs, conversations, and explorations, all teaching me skills and knowledge that were just as important as what I learned in school. I see that I can make an impact. I see that I can always learn. And I see that my actions create ripple effects across communities and ecosystems.

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Your book is full of a lot of powerful stories, but it is a rather dark view of what’s happening in the nature of work. I guess I’m struck by the paradox of this new age of how great work is for some people. Just the level of opportunity that people have today is, in some places, enormous. It is, yes.

And for many, it’s really awful and tedious. I guess I feel paradoxical about the new age of work. Is that fair? It is fair. And I think what I often think about is that there are really two Americas at work,

like the Michael Harrington book about the other America from the early 60s. So there are really two Americas at work, and there are kind of two bifurcated experiences of work. Yeah, there are many people in, not just in the US, but around the world, who are experiencing enormous opportunities, a lot more wealth, but the inequality that you mentioned earlier is becoming pervasive.

And that is where the dark view comes from. But I am ultimately hopeful, and I hope that that does come through in the book. Let’s come back to that. I want to dive in quite specifically to how you think, given this complex, changing nature of work, how and when should we introduce young people to the world of work?

Well, this does bring me to Ed Hortockel’s amazing work in Cajon Valley outside of San Diego. I’ve had the amazing experience of visiting the schools in Cajon Valley. And just to provide a brief overview for the listeners, in Cajon Valley, they are providing a career intervention that’s completely embedded into the curriculum from K through 8. And some of my colleagues might look at this with some degree of question and say,

why are we focusing on career so early? I think that’s a much more complicated kind of process. What Ed is doing, and with enormous leadership and creativity and passion, is providing an opportunity for kids to learn about themselves. And learning about themselves via the lens of work is ultimately helping them to establish

their sense of identity. The theorist whose work informs Ed’s work, John Holland, who was an amazing theorist, latter part of the 20th century in vocational psychology, talked about interests being our personality, that it’s really, he felt they were synonymous. So when kids learn about their interests, and Ed will describe this shortly,

and they’re able to understand themselves through these different lenses, these Holland types, they have a much clearer sense of who they are. And so in the program at Cajon Valley, they’re not necessarily telling these kids or suggesting that in fourth grade, you should become a marine scientist. What they’re helping them to think about is this is who you are now, who your work can change,

who your work can evolve. But now you can learn to love who you are. You can learn to really appreciate this and feel good about it. There’s a lot of latent impacts from this project. The most important one, I think, is helping kids feel engaged in school,

having a buy-in to the adult world, and experiencing a sense of hope. As well as experiencing the sense of possibility with themselves. So most of the research in career development does support interventions for the early years, but it’s not focused on necessarily telling, helping kids to think about exactly what they’ll do. That’s going to come with time, but helping them to connect to the world of work in a very meaningful,

psychologically deep way. So I appreciate the description of the work in Cajon Valley. I think the difference in what I’ve seen in Cajon Valley is, as you said, that it’s embedded in the curriculum. It’s not the addition of some career education.

It is the curriculum. It’s the way kids explore the world. And you’ve really embedded these beautiful reflections where kids are thinking in each one of the lessons, who am I? And what am I good at?

And what do I enjoy? And can I see myself in these job clusters? Right? Yeah. It’s really all the credit and thanks goes to the teachers, the educators that are in the classroom

who have accepted this work, who have opened their hearts and opened their minds to learn the language. Vocational psychology gives us this beautiful lexicon of language around career development. It seems that everyone wants to talk about college and career readiness, but they don’t really have the language of career, of vocational psychology. We understand ed psych, behavioral psych, developmental psych, but we don’t understand

vocational psychology. And that’s what we’ve brought into the classroom, this language, and as teachers, as the adults they are on their career journey across their own lifespan, they’re learning about their strengths, their interests, and their values. And that’s how we start this process.

When work is so dynamic, I mean, critics might argue that starting at age eight might be too early if they’re not going to be seriously employed for 10 or 15 years. How would you respond to that? Well, what Ed has done in such a very thoughtful and creative way is he’s used personality types. These, John Holland developed six personality types based on a distillation of interest

inventories. 50, 60, 70 years ago, he and his colleagues did factor analyses, and these were the six clusters that organized people’s interests and their personalities. So I really see the world of work as helping people to understand their personality type and then seeing how their personality type can relate to the world of work. And then through these lessons about the world of work, they’re also delivering

very important content about science, about math, about social studies, English, literary arts. So the focus on the world of work is a vehicle to deliver pedagogy. How sticky are these personality types? Do you see those as fixed or they… I think at the early ages, they are much more malleable. By the time we get to late adolescence adulthood, they tend to be a bit more fixed.

However, this is important. In Holland’s type, we are not considered to be one personality type. We’re a configuration of three of them usually, three, maybe even four. So I’m a configuration of three personality types that are very closely aligned. They’re very similar and over the course of my life, they’ve switched in order. So yeah, I think it’s malleable in the sense of the ones that are close together

in your personality can shift. For either of you, is there any danger in typecasting kids early? Do they sort of get into and feel trapped by… I’m not at all. In fact, I was in a classroom two days ago and I have this recorded on video and I think there was a young girl in probably fourth grade

and she goes, I think today, I’m social and enterprising, but we have a long life to live and that could change over time. It’s not fixed. And so the students almost naturally are understanding that their theme codes aren’t fixed and that they can change over time. But the beauty in the framework is it provides children this lens to understand each other.

So even as they’re creating teams and say it’s social, this is a social enterprising, predominant team, well, we need someone with conventional and investigative come over. So, oh, Lisa, will you come over and bring your conventional into this group? We need some more organization in our project. Students are naturally making these decisions on their own.

So is this compatible with growth mindset that your capabilities as a human can grow with effort? Totally compatible? I would say so. I would say so as well that the personality types are not the same thing as giving people information about their achievement. It’s really in the world of values and interests.

I do understand this kind of concern about do these types become a self-fulfilling prophecy and there are some issues that have discussed this with Ed in Holland’s theory of gender-based socialization and race and ethnicity-based socialization that tend to circumscribe the options for people. And our personality types are formed not just by our dispositions but also by our life experiences. So one of the advantages of this is that kids can learn about all six of these

personality types and can explore them. And by having positive experiences, if they say, well, I seem to be high in social and investigative but I really see myself as a business person, as a manager, then the teachers, counselors can work with them on, let’s get you some more activities where you can do those kinds of things. And that’s an important point because in our framework we ensure that students have exposure

to each of the Ryasek theme areas every child, every grade, every year. We’re not testing students in the early grades. They’re self-reporting their interest themes multiple times throughout the year so they’re claiming their themes. We’re not telling them what their themes are, they’re claiming it. And what’s powerful when they can start making connections between the theme codes and what they’re doing in class. So for a child to be able to say that Wilbur’s

enterprising because he negotiated with Templeton in order to save the egg sack, in order to save Charlotte as they’re reading Charlotte’s web, they’re making these meta connections between Ryasek themes, characters in a book, and then you ask students, okay, which of the characters are you most like? Which of the characters represent the types of skills and ways of working that most represent you? Which would you claim? And teachers are doing this naturally throughout

the school year and you see students’ faces light up. Yeah, that sounds like me. That does sound like me. And that leads to I think agency and personal learning. This is about me. All right, more on that in our next episode. David, I want to end with a big question. Yes. And this really gets to your last chapter on helping more people work with dignity and opportunity. It strikes me that we’ve gone through a period of time reinforced by this

information age that really created a focus on individuals and on extraction and consumption. We’ve created schools based on that. And it feels like we’ve taken that to sort of a bizarre extreme. And I think we’re beginning to realize that we can’t all just be in it for ourselves. We can’t just continue to consume at the way we have been. In other words, it feels like we’re at this new age of that is going to require more mutuality. That we’re going to create more wealth

in the next 10 years than we have in the history of the planet with artificial intelligence and exponential technologies. And I guess it strikes me that it’s all going to come down to how we learn to share, how we learn to share the massive wealth that’s going to be created, the extraordinary benefits that are going to be created. It strikes me that that subject is related somehow to your last chapter on how we help people, more people,

live with dignity and opportunity. Yes, actually, that’s a beautifully stated and that is embedded in that last chapter. I do think we’re at a nexus point. And I think it’s a really fundamentally important nexus point. I believe that in order for us to share this wealth, we have to make intentional decisions to be kind and caring and to be generous to others. Ultimately, my book is positive because I think we’re at a point where if we know what’s going on in the world, we can make more

intentional decisions about it. And I come out strongly in favor of doing what we can to share resources as well as share the antecedents of resources, which are really good schools for everyone and all of the other antecedents and aspects of life that are critical for people to thrive. But right now we’re living in what I call the kind of like the height of the neoliberal economic system. And I hope that we’re at a point where we can really critique this, which is,

you know, the kind of worshiping of the deregulatory state. This will require much more systemic planning and much more of an active intervention by government and other leaders. You know, it’s fascinating, David, that we live in a country that has created this unparalleled economic engine, right? And most of the, most of these extraordinary innovations are going to originate in America, the ones that both were for good and for bad.

And the flip side of this is that we may, compared to the rest of the developed world, be unusually poorly positioned to deal with the consequences of these innovations. We may be poorly positioned to learn how to share the wealth and the benefits compared to our friends in Europe and Asia that have more of a collective history. It’s a challenge for America, right? It’s a huge challenge for America. And it gets at the core of who we are as a people,

gets at the core of our identity, touching on the work that Ed Hortogos is doing. It touches on the core of who we are as individuals and as a collective nation. I appreciate how your book makes it quite specific about, it does come down to individual behaviors of being kind and caring and generous, right? It does start with each of us as individuals. Exactly. David Bluestine, thanks for being on the Getting Smart podcast.

It was a pleasure. I enjoyed it very much. A big thanks to Dr. Bluestine for joining us today. We appreciate his thought leadership and vocational psychology and his advocacy for more work that is full of dignity and opportunity. For more on career education, be sure to check out episode 240 with Gene Eddy, CEO of ASA. We’ve got it linked in the show notes and on the blog. Also, stay tuned next week for a deeper conversation with Ed Hortogos on the best career

education system out there. Okay listeners, that’s it for this week’s episode. But before you go, make sure you hit that little subscribe button so you’re sure to get every episode delivered directly to your device every Wednesday morning. And if you love what you heard or have ideas for future episodes, make sure you leave us a rating and a review. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.