Review of Pannor Silver, Michelle. Retirement and its Discontents: Why We Won’t Stop Working, Even if We Can. New York: Columbia University Press. 2018. (original) (raw)
Related papers
When It’s Time to Retire: Notes From the Afterlife
The Annals of Family Medicine
At the end of the Second World War, the US birth rate peaked at nearly 27 births per 1,000 population-a rate unparalleled in the previous 3 decades, and one that would not be repeated. That Boomer generation is now retiring. How do those of us caught in the wave feel about stepping back? Who will step in to replace us? And how will we replace the loss of purpose and fulfillment that comes from a career in medicine? A lengthening life expectancy has challenged many of us to consider the "second act" to our adult life. This essay describes the emotional turbulence of ending one career and contemplating the next.
Educational Gerontology, 2014
For individuals with strong work identities, the decision to retire can be particularly challenging. For academic physicians, retirement is an important personal decision that also has far-reaching implications for the healthcare system. This is because academic physicians are responsible for producing the research from which key medical decisions are made, for training future healthcare providers, and for providing specialized care for patients. For this study, we conducted focus groups with academic physicians from a large research university in Canada and then performed inductive thematic analyses to examine perceptions and concerns about later life career transitions. This study highlights tensions between professional experiences for the next generation of physicians and individual struggles with personal identity. Findings suggest improvements to institutional programs that support flexible, agentive, and respectful retirement transitions will not only be beneficial but necessary as medical and university systems continue to grapple with issues of balanced recruitment and succession.
Purpose of the Study: Some professions foster expectations that individuals cultivate their work identity above all other aspects of life. This can be problematic when individuals are confronted with the expectation that they will readily terminate this identity in later-career stages as institutions seek to cycle in new generations. This study examines the relationship between work identity and retirement by examining multiple generations of academic physicians. Design and Methods: This study used a multimethod qualitative design that included document analysis, participant observation , focus groups, and in-depth interviews with academic physicians from one of the oldest departments of medicine in North America. Results: This study illustrates how participants were predisposed and then groomed through institutional efforts to embrace a career trajectory that emphasized work above all else and fostered negative sensibilities about retirement. Participants across multiple generations described a lack of work-life balance and a prioritization of their careers above nonwork commitments. Assertions that less experienced physicians were not as dedicated to medicine and implicit assumptions that later-career physicians should retire emerged as key concerns. Implications: Strong work identity and tensions between different generations may confound concerns about retirement in ways that complicate institutional succession planning and that demonstrate how traditional understandings of retirement are out of date. Findings support the need to creatively reconsider the ways we examine relations between work identity, age, and retirement in ways that account for the recent extensions in the working lives of professionals.
"Why Give Up Something That Works So Well?" Retirement Expectations Among Academic Physicians
For individuals with strong work identities, the decision to retire can be particularly challenging. For academic physicians, retirement is an important personal decision that also has far-reaching implications for the healthcare system. This is because academic physicians are responsible for producing the research from which key medical decisions are made, for training future healthcare providers, and for providing specialized care for patients. For this study, we conducted focus groups with academic physicians from a large research university in Canada and then performed inductive thematic analyses to examine perceptions and concerns about later life career transitions. This study highlights tensions between professional experiences for the next generation of physicians and individual struggles with personal identity. Findings suggest improvements to institutional programs that support flexible, agentive, and respectful retirement transitions will not only be beneficial but necessary as medical and university systems continue to grapple with issues of balanced recruitment and succession.
The unbearable lightness of being retired.
In this qualitative study, I followed an approach to examine perceptions about retirement, using an interview guide informed by the life course perspective, among 26 men and women who had retired from positions as chief executive officers. Three key themes emerged: (1) the importance of productivity and networking as participants rose up the corporate ladder; (2) the sense of having a “best before” date and experiencing societal pressures to retire; and (3) struggles with feeling insignificant in retirement while desiring personal fulfillment through continued engagement in paid work. These findings shed light on the value of using a life course perspective to examine retirement as both a personal experience and as a social phenomenon. Findings also contribute to theoretical understandings of productive aging by illustrating how preconceptions about productivity contrast with ideations of a leisure-filled retirement in ways that can foreshorten the employment contributions of some individuals.
Reinventing retirement: New pathways, new arrangements, new meanings
Human Relations, 2013
Retirement involves a set of institutional arrangements combined with socio-cultural meanings to sustain a distinct retirement phase in life course and career pathways. In this Introduction to the Special Issue: 'Reinventing Retirement: New Pathways, New Arrangements, New Meanings,' we outline the historical development of retirement. We identify the dramatic broad-based changes that recently have shaken this established construct to its core. We describe the main organizational responses to these changes, and how they have been associated with shifting, multiple meanings of retirement. Finally, we present a model that frames two general forms of reinvention of retirement. The first involves continuation of the idea of a distinct and well-defined period of life occurring at the end of a career trajectory, but with changes in the timing, the kinds of post-retirement activities pursued, and meanings associated with this period of life. The second represents a more fundamental reinvention in which the overall concept of
European Management Journal, 2003
This article analyzes a problem that can be described as the retirement syndrome. In exploring the difficulties many leaders face in letting go at the end of a full career, it reviews a number of the barriers to exit: financial, social, and psychological. It looks at the physical and psychological effects of aging, in the context of retirement; examines the experience of nothingness that single-minded careerists often feel after retirement; describes the talion principle, a subliminal fear of reprisals; and discusses the 'edifice complex,' the wish to leave behind a legacy. The article concludes with suggestions as to how individuals and organizations can develop more effective and humane disengagement strategies.
Retirement: It's Not About the Finances!
Journal of the American College of Radiology, 2009
Retirement. The word has traditionally represented a milestone for working individuals: after a lengthy phase of labor, one was rewarded with a new segment of life free from the responsibilities of one's vocation. As society has progressed, however, the concept of retirement has also changed, evolving to encompass much more than freedom from work. The elements of retirement that have been generally considered most important, financial security and leisure, have maintained their significance but are now accompanied by issues that reflect the population of today. Factors such as continued self-fulfillment, a sense of worth, social interactions, and intellectual stimulation have become equally as important. Life expectancies have increased, and the period of retirement has lengthened, presenting many retirees with unexpected challenges. Financial security and leisure have most likely been achieved, but what else is there? What can be found missing from the equation are components that have, for many years, shaped these individuals' existences. For physicians, an absence of the very valuable social, intellectual, and structural constants may be experienced. Lacking a definitive plan to address this possible void can lead one to feelings of insignificance and an uncertainty about what rewards retirement will afford one. Advanced planning can lessen the shock of the transition from the working phase to the retirement phase of one's life. Whether this is accomplished by choosing to continue one's career (albeit on a lesser scale), establishing a strong alternative social system, or developing self-satisfying and meaningful interests, a well thought-out plan can ensure that retirement serves its intended purpose of providing a rewarding chapter in the book of life.