Ambition and accounts: a study of working-class women in adult education

The notion of internal and external control is related to a number of important social psychological concepts such as internalization, alienation, powerlessness, and inner and other directedness. (See, for example, Freud 1923, Seeman 1959, Riesman 1954). As originally developed by Rotter (1966), the concept of internal control refers to a person's perception that events are contingent upon his or her behavior or attributes; external control refers to individuals' perceptions that events are not entirely contingent upon their actions but are the result of luck, chance, or fate, are controlled by powerful others, or are unpredictable because of the great complexity of surrounding forces. While conducting an analysis of the motivations of adult women returning to full-time education, I was forced to deal with the competing claims of these two concepts of control. I will, first, describe the nature of my study. Second, in the process of examining my data, I will critically assess the notion of internal and external control in conjunction with related theories concerning vocabularies of motive and casual attributions. Finally, I will discuss briefly the implications of the findings regarding the potential for social change in modern industrial society.