Contextual Action Theory was developed by Richard Young and Ladislav Valach in the 1990s, and is based on the notion that people’s behaviours can be understood as goal-directed actions. It links action, project and career, each of which represent goal-directed, intentional actions. Action refers to specific goal-directed behaviours that occur in contiguous time. Project consists of groups of actions that have a common goal, and occur intermittently over a mid-length period of time. Finally, career refers to the series of projects that are constructed as having common long-term meaning. In other words, everything individuals do are actions, which accumulate into projects, which accumulate into career.
