Contemporary career development (CD) involves a wide array of human resource development programs including but by no means limited to selection, placement, orientation, training, transfers, rotation, mentoring, and even organizational exit. Contemporary career development, then, deeply involves both the individuals whose lives are affected by it and the organizations that implement the CD programs for their own organizational maintenance, development, and growth . Because contemporary CD involves so many organizational processes that can affect so many careers, it should come as no surprise that issues of justice in the workplace have begun to emerge with regard to these processes. By its very nature, CD involves basic issues of fairness over the allocation of CD resources, the policies and procedures used to decide who receives them, and the interactions between those who provide and those who not only receive CD rewards but also experience its losses.
Respected CD texts (Brown, Brooks, and Associates, 1990; Greenhaus and Callanan, 1994; Gutteridge, Leibowitz, and Shore, 1993) speak directly to issues of justice in the field. Reviews of justice issues in human resource management (for example, Cropanzano, 1993; Folger and Greenberg, 19851, as well as recent efforts linking justice with organizational development (Cobb, Wooten, and Folger, 19951, suggest fertile ground for more of this work in CD. Even though issues of justice have been addressed in some of the CD literature, no formal integration of justice theory and research has been made in CD as a field. It is our purpose here to begin to do so in a way that will help further work in both the professional and scholarly sides of career development. We begin with a brief overview of the justice literature and then illustrate how justice constructs are related to the practice of career development. Next, we suggest several areas of research that have both theoretical and practical value to career development.