Counseling and Values ■ April 2012 ■ Volume 57 31 © 2012 by the American Counseling Association. All rights reserved. Received 02/04/11 Revised 03/24/11 Accepted 09/01/11 Enhancing Social Justice by Promoting Prosocial Values in Career Development Interventions Bryan J. Dik, Ryan D. Duffy, and Michael F. Steger In career counseling, social justice is typically integrated by helping oppressed groups navigate their way around obstacles of injustice while also working to dislodge the oppressive conditions from society. The authors affirm both of these courses of action while also advocating a third strategy: inviting clients to serve as agents of change by introducing and incorporating prosocial values into career development interventions. This article makes the case that this strategy may enhance client well-being while simultane- ously promoting harmony among organizations and society. Support for this strategy comes from theory, research, and the ethical approaches for working with values in counseling. Keywords: career counseling, vocational psychology, social justice, prosocial values, calling W ork is a core aspect of life for most adults and represents for many their most stinging encounter with social injustice (Blustein, McWhirter, & Perry, 2005). Although vocational psychology arguably originated with efforts to meet the needs of the oppressed (e.g., Blocher, 2000; Savickas & Baker, 2005), the struggles of those facing constrained opportunities have often been overlooked. Recently, the field has more explicitly pushed to address this concern, as evidenced by several prominent articles explor- ing social justice themes within theory, research, practice, and policy (e.g., Blustein, 2008; Fassinger, 2008). Social justice themes in the literature have centered on the role of social, economic, and cultural factors and how these factors exert differing influences on diverse groups, creating obstructions for some groups (e.g., women, racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and persons with disabilities). Two traditions emerged focusing on individual- level and societal-level ways of tackling injustice. The former has included recommendations for how counselors could work with clients to effectively cope with barriers to their career development (Blustein et al., 2005); the latter has advocated a macrolevel perspective targeting public policy as a means through which to stimulate change within broader social systems in structures that perpetuate inequalities (e.g., Blustein, 2006; Fassinger, 2008). We affirm the importance of both of these levels of change for helping individuals experience autonomy, dignity, and justice in the midst of op- pression, while also helping dislodge oppression’s root causes. However, Bryan J. Dik and Michael F. Steger, Department of Psychology, Colorado State University; Ryan D. Duffy, Department of Psychology, University of Florida. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bryan J. Dik, Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, 209 Behavioral Sciences Building, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1876 (e-mail: bryan.dik@colostate.edu).