ABSTRACT
The section above is an excerpt from the Case of Jessica Chang which is a composite case study that was published in the Career Development Quarterly (Chen and Leong, 1997) 15 years ago. It is a case study to be used in different organizations for cultural diversity management training related to Asian Americans. The case was originally constructed by the first author as a case study for a Real World Ethics course, taught by Professor Caroline Whitbeck at MIT in the spring of 1992. This case has become a permanent part of that course. Chen based the case on incidents he encountered in his personal and professional experiences. Leong was invited to one of the workshops at ATandT/Lucent, where the case was presented. With the permission of Chen, Leong began using the case study in his consulting practice and career counseling courses. It has been used by the authors together and separately in more than 24 workshops, seminars, and courses focusing on issues faced by Asian Americans in the work environment. We have presented the case here as an illustration of the challenges and complexity of providing career counseling and interventions with culturally diverse populations which is the focus of the current chapter. In addition, in reviewing the case study ourselves we could not help but ask the question of what multicultural theories in career research and career counseling have been developed since 1997 to help us reformulate the Case of Jessica Chang. We invite the reader to revisit the excerpt of this case (and the full case study: Chen and Leong, 1997) at the end of reading this chapter to determine what advances in the multicultural perspectives in vocational psychology have been made in the last 15 years that may help us approach the career counseling or coaching of Jessica differently from the authors (Chen and Leong, 1997) and the four career experts who reacted to the case (Cook, 1997; Fouad and Tang, 1997; Shahnasarian, 1997). Finally, we also began with this case to remind ourselves and our readers that the purpose of our chapter is to critically review the literature and existing practices in order to provide more effective career services for our multicultural clients.
