ABSTRACT
In this sense, guidance can be viewed in a policy perspective as a kind of brokerage between individual needs and societal needs. It addresses both individual rights and individual responsibilities within a societal context. It is a means of encouraging individuals to participate in determining their role within, and their contribution to, the society of which they are part. This emphasis on the ‘active individual’ provides a third and more distinctive rationale for policy interest in guidance, which helps to explain why countries with market economies and liberal-democratic regimes have tended to pay more attention to this field than countries with planned economies and totalitarian political systems (see Chapter 20).
