Abstract
Private sector managers’ pathways through late career and retirement are important, but insufficiently studied. Based on a large qualitative study of retiring managers in big Canadian firms, this article explores the relationships between managers’ work during their careers, their retirement transitions and their retirement activities. Three distinctive patterns of managerial work and careers are found: those of expert managers, organization managers and strategic managers. They are strongly related to how managers end their ‘full commitment’ careers and then build retirement lives by combining leisure activities, family commitments, civic involvement and paid work. Variations in retirement pathways are not well predicted by either individualization theory or theories based on generational or class habitus. Managers appear to develop distinctive orientations to acting with agency that arise from the way managerial work is organized; and these frame managers’ retirement pathways. These findings may indicate why individualization does not necessarily lead to life course destandardization.
Keywords
Introduction
Private sector managers’ pathways through late career and into retirement have important implications, but they are currently poorly understood. They matter to employers, to managers’ families, friends and communities and to managers themselves. For employers, the issues range from how to manage disengagement or redundancy, to how to retain access to valuable skills (Dychtwald et al., 2004). For the wider society, they concern impacts on labour and skill shortages as demographic change hits (OECD, 2006), the potential for socially valuable contributions through volunteering or supporting family and friends (Smith and Gay, 2005) or beginning new endeavours in the ‘third age’ (Simpson et al., 2012), as well as the demands of providing support as retirees themselves become dependent on others. Despite these issues, existing research does not answer central questions about the variation in managers’ retirement pathways. Do retiring managers use their relative affluence to follow unpredictable and diverse life pathways? Why do some managers choose retirement activities, whether paid or voluntary, that mirror their career jobs and focus, while others treat retirement as an entirely different phase of life?
Individualization theory leads to strong expectations. It implies that managers’ late career and retirement patterns will be powerfully shaped by trends that reduce the capacity of institutions to prescribe individuals’ pathways and activities, but also force them to bear risks that were once shouldered by employers and the state (Vickerstaff and Cox, 2005). Managers in the private sector have been hugely impacted by organizational restructuring and the reform of work organization (e.g. McCann et al., 2008; Osterman, 1996, 2008; Wajcman and Martin, 2001; Worrall et al., 2000). They have experienced the end of de facto lifetime employment guarantees (Osterman, 1996, 2008; Worrall et al., 2000), concomitant loss of lifetime commitment symbolized by the morphing of psychological contracts from a ‘relational’ to a ‘contractual’ basis (Atkinson, 2002), the breaking down of standard, organizational career paths and corresponding opportunities for ‘boundaryless careers’ (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Individualization theory claims changes like these will influence life course pathways, leading to innovation, unpredictability and proliferation in patterns as individuals attempt to hedge against new risks and find meaning outside ‘standard’ life models (Beck, 2000).
In this article, qualitative data are used to explore these issues by focusing on the retirement pathways – retirement transitions and activities – of a large sample (60) of Canadian baby boomer managers who have transitioned to retirement from large private companies. Analysis focuses on how managers ended their full commitment careers, what combination of activities they engaged in and the extent and kinds of connections these activities showed to their managerial careers. It is found that individualization theory may usefully characterize the institutional environment within which managers have made their careers and retire. However, individualization theory’s assumptions about destandardization of previously standardized life pathways prove largely elusive. The relationships between managers’ careers and their retirement pathways and activities were strongly affected by their orientations to agency, which in turn were grounded in the forms of agency they exercised in performing their jobs and developing their careers.
Background
While there is widespread sociological scepticism about the popular image of retirement as a time of unrivalled freedom, nevertheless many sociologists focus on retiree agency at least as much as structured circumstances to understand how retirement takes place and what retirees do (e.g. Higgs et al., 2003; Jones et al., 2010; Vickerstaff and Cox, 2005). Particularly in studies of middle class retirement, focus on retiree agency overshadows concern with how social structures shape retirement, albeit often within a context of wider restructuring of individuals’ relationships to social institutions and structures (e.g. Jones et al., 2010). Theories of individualization offer an influential framework for analysing retiree agency and hence predicting retirement pathways. Grounded in theories of second or reflexive modernity (or ‘risk society’) (Beck, 2000; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2009; Beck et al., 1994), these accounts are taken to suggest variation and diversity, even unpredictability, in retirement pathways (Higgs et al., 2003; Jones et al., 2010; Vickerstaff and Cox, 2005).
Theories generally describe two facets to individualization. First, under ‘second’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity institutional guarantees of stability and security become tenuous, forcing individuals to shoulder a range of social risks that were previously managed institutionally (Beck, 2000; Beck et al., 1994). For example, in Risk Society, probably the single most influential formulation of the individualization thesis, Ulrich Beck describes how this argument applies to work and careers: a transition is occurring in industrial society from a uniform system of lifelong full-time work organized in a single industrial location […] to a risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized, decentralized underemployment. (1992: 143, emphasis in original)
Many theorists expect that this will lead to a qualitative change in the diversity and malleability of social identities as individuals reflexively reconstruct their lives, through the ‘project of the self’ (Giddens, 1991) or increasingly plural identities both within and across individuals (e.g. Beck, 2000; Elliott and Lemert, 2006). Applied to retirement, these ideas are taken to suggest a weakening of the connection between pre- and post-retirement identities, with an important strand of research focusing on attempting to show that identities shaped through consumption become dominant in retirement (Gilleard and Higgs, 2011). The consequence of these developments is the second facet of individualization – the breakdown of normatively secured ‘standard’ pathways through the life course (e.g. Beck, 1992: 135). When individuals reflexively reconstruct identities in the face of reduced institutional guarantees and new freedom from institutional constraint, they will act out new life course patterns reflecting their individualized identities. In relation to family forms, Beck emphasizes the fundamental character of this change: ‘what is now establishing itself is not only diversity, but something much more than that: the normalization of diversity’ (Beck, 2007: 684). In this article, this second facet of individualization is referred to as ‘lifecourse destandardization’ (Bruckner and Mayer, 2005; Moen et al., 2005), while the term ‘individualization’ is retained for the first facet.
Despite the well developed theoretical intertwining of these two facets of individualization theory, a growing body of research finds quite limited evidence of life course destandardization in areas such as employment and education pathways (Bruckner and Mayer, 2005; Nico, 2014; Widmer and Ritschard, 2009), even though there is widespread evidence of reduced institutional guarantees and risk shifting from institutions to individuals. This paradox of individualization without life course destandardization makes private sector managers’ retirement pathways particularly interesting. Managers’ employment experiences exemplify individualization, with consistent research findings of sharply reduced commitment by firms to managerial employees (Osterman, 1996, 2008; Worrall et al., 2000) and corresponding shifts in managers’ orientations to firms and careers (Wajcman and Martin, 2001). In retirement studies, analysts suggest that there will be growing diversity in routes to retirement, with increasingly ‘blurred’ transitions and a new flowering of retirement activities as people seek to act out their reconstructed self-projects and plural (often consumption-based) identities (e.g. Higgs and Gilleard, 2006). However, no existing research systematically assesses managers’ retirement pathways against these expectations. Is there consistent evidence of the reflexive restructuring of identity assumed by individualization theory and, more fundamentally, are restructured identities a basis for managerial retirees’ exercise of agency? Are there sharp breaks or continuity between managers’ careers and their retirement pathways? Is there evidence of proliferating, unpredictable retirement transitions and ensembles of activities, or do managers follow more standardized, predictable patterns?
Bourdieusian approaches focused on habitus represent a different analytical framework for understanding agency, one that has received renewed focus in some recent studies of retirement. Indeed, two strands of recent scholarship do hint at why individualization may not lead to proliferation of life course pathways in retirement. Both use broadly Bourdieusian frameworks to suggest that habitus developed during individuals’ pre-retirement lives shapes their responses in the relative freedom of retirement. One strand finds that class-based habitus established in earlier life carries across contexts including into retirement (Oliver and O’Reilly, 2010). A second strand suggests that a generational habitus structures life orientations and thus activities in retirement, particularly among financially secure retirees (Gilleard and Higgs, 2011; Jones et al., 2010). Beyond specific class or generational habitus, these approaches prompt the speculation that repeated experience of acting with some autonomy and discretion, shaped by work and careers and relying on resources accumulated during the career, may lead to continuities between pre- and post-retirement life not anticipated by individualization theory.
For both individualization-based and habitus-based perspectives, the connection between pre- and post-retirement lives is central to understanding retirement pathways. Each contains an account of how the scope of and limits to the agency people exercise through retirement processes is linked to the agency they are able to exercise pre-retirement. Individualization theory sees agency – both that forced on individuals by institutional risk shifting and that arising from reflexive identity formation – as the wellspring for life course destandardization and hence for new, perhaps increasingly unpredictable, patterns of retirement. For Bourdieu-influenced perspectives, habitus both enables and channels agency. Linking earlier life experience with retirement pathways, it may resurface in class or generational form when structural constraints are reduced in retirement.
Taking its cue from these perspectives, the analysis for this article began by focusing on the agency managers talked about exercising during their careers. Following Emirbayer and Mische (1998), exploration of the data was sensitive to three aspects of agency – the habitual element through which actors selectively reactivate ‘past patterns of thought and action’ giving action its iterational character; the imaginative element through which actors create new patterns of thought and behaviour giving action its projective character; and the element through which actors ‘make practical and normative judgements among alternative possible trajectories of action’ (1998: 971) giving action its practical-evaluative character. In line with Emirbayer and Mische’s argument, real world agency was taken to involve all three aspects, in varying balances, as individuals engage with social worlds, both reproducing and transforming them. Three patterns of agency in the work and careers of managers were identified in the sample, each with a different aspect being dominant. The analysis indicated that these were connected to the kinds of skills managers said they used in their jobs and the forms of discretion and judgement they were required to exercise. Managers’ retirement pathways were then analysed, both in their own terms and in terms of their relation to the agency managers exercised in their careers. Throughout, analysis was sensitized to evidence of both individualization and life course destandardization and to the role of orientations arising from repeated experience in retirement.
The study
This article uses data collected as part of a larger investigation of retirement pathways among Canadian private sector baby boomer managers. The study used qualitative interviews with managers who worked or had worked in large companies and were in late career or recently retired. The results reported here focus on 60 of the 98 study participants, those who had already retired or left their long-term employer at the time of the interview.
Sample
Purposive sampling was used to ensure diversity in career experience, sector and managerial level and to make women at least 30 per cent of the sample. Participants were recruited through the research team’s personal and professional contacts, advertisements in university alumni magazines and through companies participating in an organization-focused phase of the project. Participants were in prime retirement ages, 50 to 65, to probe their ‘in situ’ thinking and experience around late career and retirement. No more than four participants were from any one firm.
Table 1 shows key characteristics of the sub-sample of 60 managers in this study, 43 per cent of whom were female. Nearly 70 per cent had worked in one of three sectors: financial services (38%), natural resources (19%) and manufacturing (13%). Most (88%) were married or partnered and 60 per cent of those had spouses with full-time careers. The median age at the time of the interview was 58. Although many retirements were ‘blurred’ (Han and Moen, 1999), the conclusions of managers’ ‘full-commitment’ careers were easily identified by the end of their last full-time job with a long-term employer. On this basis, the mean age of retirement was 55. The job level of the informants varied from middle to senior management to senior executive (CEO or reporting to CEO).
Sample characteristics.
Data collection procedures
Four members of the research team were involved in recruiting and interviewing participants across Canada. Interviews were semi-structured and confidential and involved questions about individuals’ careers and lives from the time they completed their education to the present, including a focus on retirement transitions and activities. Participants also filled out a timeline indicating significant career events and turning points. Interviews were conducted face to face (90%) or by phone, lasted between 40 and 120 minutes, were digitally recorded and transcribed and were conducted between November 2008 and April 2010.
Data analysis
For this article, analysis proceeded in two phases. First, interviewees’ careers were analysed with a focus on the forms of career agency they described, both in the actual performance of their work and in moving from one job to another. Second, links between interviewees’ careers and their retirement pathways were investigated and then compared across three different kinds of managerial careers.
Phase I
Managers’ agency in their work experiences and career movement was analysed by focusing on decision making initiative and responsibility on the job as well as their roles and motivations in career changes over time. Comparing and contrasting patterns in the interviews resulted in inductive identification of three main kinds of managerial careers into which interviewees could be categorized.
Phase II
Here, retirement transitions were analysed with a focus on how retirement was ‘orchestrated’ by managers and firms, and on what kinds of activities managers engaged in once their full-commitment careers ended. Common retirement activities among managers were identified and eventually grouped into four categories: work-related, civic, family-oriented and social and leisure. The forms of agency managers used in these activities were evaluated and their connection with the different types of managerial careers was assessed.
Configurations of agency, skills/knowledge and scope of autonomy – three types of managerial career
Managers’ accounts of their work and career moves were examined for episodes in which they appeared to exercise agency (iterative, practical-evaluative or projective) 1 and it was found that two key dimensions underlay their accounts. First, managers described three different kinds of skills and knowledge that were critical to successfully making the decisions and exercising the discretion required by their jobs, and to any control they had of their own career moves. These were: technical knowledge about complex matters intrinsic to the firm’s operations (such as engineering knowledge or knowledge about esoteric aspects of finance); detailed, experience-based knowledge about the particular organization in which the manager worked; and skills and experience in innovating in large organizations. Managers usually described their expertise in terms of one of these sets of skills and knowledge throughout most of their careers. Second, managers’ descriptions of their jobs and work revealed a scope of autonomy that defined the reach and depth of the agency they exercised in their jobs; that is, how much discretion, responsibility and initiative was expected of them and over what range of the firm’s activities, e.g. within a specific department or work unit, or across a larger part of the organization.
Focusing on these features of managers’ work and careers, three distinct types of managerial career were inductively identified – expert managers, organization managers and strategic managers. Table 2 shows the configuration of key skills and knowledge, scope of autonomy and forms of agency in work and career moves characteristic of each type. These types have strong theoretical and empirical resonances with previous research. First, although there was no focus on distinguishing iterative, practical-evaluative and imaginative agency, the forms of agency outlined in Table 2 involve the dominance of one or other of these aspects of agency: practical-evaluative aspects of agency are dominant in the agency of expert managers, iterative aspects in the agency of organization managers and imaginative aspects in the agency of strategic managers. Secondly, the three kinds of managerial work and career correspond to aspects of managerial work emphasized by management scholars and management gurus over recent decades.
Managerial career types: key dimensions and forms of agency.
Expert managers
These managers described their jobs as requiring them to exercise their expert technical knowledge to make managerial decisions. These decisions involved judgements about what actions should be taken in problem situations within their realm of expertise. In some cases, these managers described agency that was clearly iterative: involving the repeated application of learned ‘rules of the game’ much as envisaged by theorists of habitus. However, in the dominant form of agency they described, no standardized rules directed them. Instead they made practical evaluations using their technical expertise in varied situations. These managers described their work in ways that echoed accounts, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, of the coming of knowledge-based organizations. For example, Drucker pictured knowledge-based organizations as being ‘composed largely of specialists who direct and discipline their own performance’ (1988: 45) using their specialist knowledge. Indeed, expert managers in the sample described jobs with a well-defined scope of autonomy; they had significant discretion, but within the scope of their technical skills and knowledge. In their career development, these managers described themselves as exercising agency, first, when they had the opportunity to find new jobs or choose between jobs that required their expertise. Their decisions were based on evaluations of the rewards (monetary and non-monetary) that they could achieve. They also sometimes indicated that they had deliberately chosen jobs to develop or deepen their technical knowledge and experience, either because of the job’s intrinsic interest or because of the added earning power they anticipated.
Organization managers
These managers described their jobs as requiring them to use their knowledge of the routines and resources of the firm that employed them, usually built up over years of experience, to manage its ongoing activities. Their agency was dominated by iterative development of established ways of doing things. While much of this managing involved quite routinized work within a circumscribed domain, it could also require considerable adaptation of existing operations and resources to establish a new operation. Even so, drawing on past patterns of work and past performances was the basis for this work. The career narratives of these managers echoed an important strand of organization studies and managerial career scholarship that emphasizes the continued importance of bureaucracy and bureaucratic careers in contemporary firms (e.g. Styhre, 2007). Consonant with this image, these managers generally pictured their careers as unfolding according to the firm’s design, rather than through their own agency.
Strategic managers
These managers described their work performances as requiring considerable initiative, with wide freedom to innovate, often through wholesale reorganization of some aspect of a firm’s operations. When asked to explain their special skills, these managers often described themselves as having reputations for solving problems. They focused on an ability to innovate, to imagine new ways of organizing or new activities for the firm and then to manage their implementation. Thus, they pictured themselves as being required to focus on the imaginative, projective aspect of agency. Rather than judiciously making practical-evaluative judgements on the basis of specialized knowledge, as expert managers did, they described an ability to see situations with fresh eyes. In general, these managers described a much wider and deeper scope of autonomy in their jobs than those in other groups, as would be expected with their focus on imaginative innovation. This work resonates with a strand of management literature that emphasizes the importance of innovative ‘intrapreneurs’ in contemporary organizations (e.g. Pinchot, 1985), along with more critical assessments of the contemporary valorization of CEOs as ‘corporate saviours’ through their quasi-charismatic innovative abilities (Khurana, 2002). These managers often described their career moves as motivated by seeking challenges they had not faced before. They pictured the opportunities open to them as wide, since it was largely their reputation for being able to solve non-routine problems that led them to new positions.
Thus, managers’ descriptions of their work and careers suggested three quite distinct sets of experiences in exercising agency. In managers’ narratives, all three were closely connected with the requirements of the work they performed and, in this sense, were shaped by the social organization of managerial work. For organization managers, iterative adaptation of established, often habitual, organizational routines dominated; for expert managers, agency arose from practical-evaluative judgements based on specialist knowledge; while for strategic managers, workplace agency revolved around projectively imagining new innovations or solutions to non-routine problems. In the remainder of this article, consideration is given to how these different forms of agency shaped managers’ retirement transitions and activities.
To assess the impact of pre-retirement experiences of work and career-based agency on retirement transitions and activities, the co-authors independently coded interview transcripts and classified cases into a single managerial-type category. Overall agreement in classifying participants was 55 out of 60 and subsequent discussion led to agreement in classifying the remaining five cases. There were no major differences in the distribution of cases into the three types by age or gender. In terms of education, organization managers were unlikely to have Masters’ degrees, compared to strategic and expert managers. As for managerial level, there was a disproportionate representation of managers at the most senior level (executive) in the organization manager and strategic manager categories.
Retirement transitions and activities
Managers’ retirement pathways were found to vary dramatically across the three groups. The broad contours of these variations are described before more detailed consideration of the patterns within each group.
Managers’ transitions to retirement were analysed first to assess the degree to which they were orchestrated more by managers themselves, by their organization, or by a mix of the two. Among organization managers, firms were much more often the instigators of managers’ retirement than in the other groups. Over half of organization managers (12 of 22) had organizationally orchestrated departures, compared to less than a third of expert managers (five of 17) and less than a quarter of strategic managers (four of 21). Strategic managers were most likely to orchestrate their own departures (13 of 21 did so), with expert managers also doing so frequently (nine of 17), while organization managers were rarely able to do this (four of 22). Moreover, as is shown below, managers often used the same forms of agency they had exercised in their careers to orchestrate their retirements.
Managers’ retirement activities were grouped into four main themes: work-related, civic, family-oriented and social and leisure. Table 3 shows the most frequently mentioned themes in each category. Nearly all participants mentioned family-oriented and social and leisure activities. However, there were striking differences between managerial groups on work-related and civic activities. Some 15 of 19 strategic managers were working full- or part-time or had done so for a significant period of time since ‘retirement’, compared with eight of 15 expert managers and six of 18 organization managers. 2 Furthermore, there were four strategic managers who had started their own firms, using career skills and knowledge, compared with only one expert manager and one organization manager.
Retirement activity.
As for civic activity, 14 of 19 strategic managers contributed skills, knowledge and contacts from their careers to boards or advisory committees in a range of community, not-for-profit and public sector organizations. In contrast, only four of 15 expert managers and two of 18 organization managers had such involvement. Organization managers’ involvement in volunteering generally did not use their career skills and knowledge and either continued pre-retirement volunteer activity, or focused on responding to particular needs in the population (e.g. immigrants, seniors with health issues).
Expert managers
When expert managers orchestrated their own retirement transitions, they used both forms of agency evident in their careers: they chose whether to continue supplying their skills and they used their expertise to guide firm operations. For example, a manager who had become expert in some complex technical aspects of a financial services firm’s operations initiated a move to retirement at a conventional career stage (early 60s). Having told the firm he was ready to retire, he was involved in hiring and training his replacement. However, he sought to continue contract work with the firm following his formal retirement, noting that it allowed him to provide advice on the basis of his technical knowledge: I said, ‘You know, I really don’t want to just simply go and sit around. And while … I got a lot of hobbies … I still want the mental challenge and stimulation of knowing that I’m doing work.’
By retiring from his formal career and returning on a contract basis, he orchestrated his own retirement transition. Some expert managers had less control over their career exit, most typically because organizational restructuring made their positions tenuous or redundant. In some cases they were able to negotiate an exit which was at least partly on their terms, while in others they were simply dismissed.
After retirement, most expert managers found ways to continue using the technical expertise that was central to their careers, either through paid work or in volunteer or philanthropic roles where they could ‘give back’. Ten of the 15 reported working part- time or full-time, starting up their own business, or sitting on one or more boards for which they were paid; another two did volunteer consulting in their fields. One expert manager who had plied his two main skills sets – accounting and compensation (HR) – across firms and industries, explained his decision about what to do in retirement this way: ‘I enjoy working … I developed some expertise in what I do …. and there is a demand for compensation consultants.’ An expert manager who had worked in financial marketing and finance roles also emphasized using her unique skills when she joined a group of retirees who do free consulting for non-profit organizations. She decided that it made more sense to use the skills she had that were in demand than to do something completely different. Another expert manager retired at 49 from a successful investment banking career and talked about bringing her skills and knowledge to a different kind of setting – being co-president of the board of a museum. Thus, most expert managers (12 of 15) showed an inclination to continue using their career expertise after retirement. Faced with the openness of retirement, they did what they had done through their careers and sought to use their technical expertise in organizations that needed it, but on their own terms.
Organization managers
Organization managers’ main career agency lay in using their accumulated knowledge of a firm’s operations to manage the areas for which they were given responsibility. The ways firms ran their careers was reflected in how these managers said they had come to retire. They often talked of being taken by surprise with an ‘offer’ of a retirement package that they felt it was difficult or impossible to refuse. An expat operations manager in the insurance industry was asked whether he had a choice in taking early retirement: ‘I didn’t ask what the alternative was … there really wasn’t one … I was completely blindsided.’ However, a few of these managers pictured their retirements as primarily a result of their own decisions (four of 22). They sought to prioritize their private lives when they did not like major changes at work, given that their financial situations allowed them to retire.
Organization managers typically saw retirement as a complete break with their careers, as an opportunity to pursue the personal passions that had been put on hold during their working lives. When asked about their activities since retirement, they tended to talk about ‘freedom’ for travel, leisure and hobbies, or time with family: Both our children and all our grandchildren live within five minutes of where we live … So between babysitting for grandkids … travel a lot … play badminton three times a week, golf, usually go cycling twice a week … [retirement] is the freedom to do whatever you want to do.
For these managers, retirement meant freedom and freedom meant not working. In the words of a general manager who had risen up through the ranks in the same company over more than 30 years: ‘[Retirement] meant that I could hold the joystick myself.’
The form of agency these managers had been required to perform during their careers – using their detailed knowledge of the firm to manage towards achieving goals set by others – was not readily transferable outside the firm, so that it ended when their careers did. Few saw a clear path to transfer their expertise to a new position and employer; and those who tried, generally younger managers, were unsuccessful. None found satisfying work at a similar level of responsibility. Even the two organization managers who were paid for their work on boards sought to keep that commitment to a minimum. One said: So I do work up at the University … on the management advisory council and I’m Chairman of the Board at [name removed] … So you know things that I’m passionate about and I’m interested in. And I have absolutely zero interest to become … one of these professional board members in corporate Canada.
Many organization managers volunteered. Thirteen of 18 were involved in some kind of volunteer activity and a typical milieu for involvement was in seniors’ centres or helping seniors with cancer get to doctors’ appointments or treatment centres. In general, organization managers chose volunteer work that did not draw on their career skills and knowledge. However, two did get involved in occasional guest lecturing or serving on an advisory board at a local business school, though both drew a clear boundary between their career and retirement. Other organization managers undertook volunteer activities that built on hobbies or interests they had been involved in throughout their lives. For example, a former marketing director edited the monthly newsletter in the village where she had lived for over 30 years. An HR Director helped immigrant women with computer literacy at a community agency. A former CEO and his wife had a life-long interest in art, so he became treasurer of an annual community art symposium.
Strategic managers
Strategic managers were the most likely to orchestrate their own retirements. The timing and process of their retirement was usually connected to the rhythms of their work, often involving the kind of initiative their jobs had required of them. They often instigated their retirement when they had reached the end of a major project and had come to see their own future heading in a different direction from that of their firm. For example, a manager in a financial services firm described the point at which she decided to retire: About two and a half years before I retired, the bank started a big transformation project, which I had the fantastic experience of running … So when we thought that this process was essentially completed, I said … ‘You know, this is perfect.’ … And so I retired.
Nevertheless, a few strategic managers had little choice in their retirement, typically being forced or eased out following a major restructure or takeover. However, even here they usually pictured themselves as actively deciding to leave or, at least, to use the opportunity to transition to retirement.
All 19 strategic managers who had been retired more than four months were continuing to draw on their innovation skills and experience, whether in paid work, civic activity, or both. Strategic managers’ post-retirement employment fell into four groups. Two strategic managers actually continued their full-time careers after formally retiring from an organization, though their motivations had shifted. They were aggressively recruited to work for not-for-profit organizations and saw this use of their career experience as ‘giving back’ to the community.
A second group (four) started up their own businesses after retiring, using their prior career skills, knowledge and experience. They were working more or less full-time, but had crafted work arrangements that allowed them a mix of work, family and other activities. Their work ranged from HR consulting to wealth management to event management to funding social enterprises. A former top forestry company manager worked three days a week in a wealth management firm he started and then devoted a fourth day to the start-up of a disability management enterprise. He emphasized welcoming new challenges: I feel like I’ve got too much tread on the tires to undertake a traditional retirement … do I want to ski … golf every day? No … I just wanted to try something a little more entrepreneurial.
The continuity with his approach to work during his career was striking. Of his career, he said: [I]t seemed like whenever I would get to the point where I just didn’t believe I was making a difference … I had a new challenge in front of me … it wasn’t all about getting the promotion. It was about the challenge.
Six strategic managers continued paid work, but in a more part-time or sporadic manner. All had served in quite senior roles before retirement and they were therefore active in a variety of networks within industry and/or community. They were all involved in doing some consulting, which was a direct continuation of the kind of work they had done previously. They also all held paid positions on at least one and often several boards. All were also involved in civic activities, as well as leisure and family pursuits, which they found very satisfying and important.
The remaining six strategic managers had re-directed their capacities and interests to benefit social or philanthropic organizations and were doing work similar to their pre-retirement jobs, with minimal compensation. Their work included undertaking a speaking tour, contributing leadership experience to not-for-profit boards and working directly in fund-raising and leadership training and development for philanthropic organizations. This group was also highly involved in specific mentoring activities and talked about the deep satisfaction they received from these more long-term and on-going relationships.
Conclusion
Taking a lead from recent scholarship on retirement pathways, this article has focused on the agency that managers exercised during their careers, in their transition to retirement and in composing an ensemble of activities in retirement. It has found clear patterns of retirement pathways that differ substantially between managers with different experiences of work and career agency. Moreover, there were strong connections between how managers exercised agency during their careers – the aspects of their work and careers they typically controlled, the skills and knowledge they used in this control and the scope of autonomy their jobs required of them – and the agency they displayed in determining their retirement pathways. Overall, this focus on agency provides powerful insight into managers’ retirement pathways, based largely on their career experience.
Although individualization theory has been influential in recent studies of retirement pathways among relatively prosperous middle class groups such as managers, the research reported here found very little support for this perspective in the form it is commonly used in retirement studies. First, there were few indications that reflexive identity construction (Beck, 2000; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2009; Jones et al., 2010), projects of the self (Giddens, 1991; Jones et al., 2010), second modernity consumption identities (Gilleard and Higgs, 2011) or the like, were important in understanding retirement pathways in the sample. Certainly, for some managers the ability to freely ‘consume’ leisure and travel opportunities was central to their choice of retirement activities. However, these managers had often participated in the activities they chose throughout their careers; retirement simply removed the barrier created by holding demanding jobs. The dominance of leisure and travel in retirees’ lives varied greatly and, ironically for individualization theory, managers for whom this consumption focus was most central were those who had experienced the most traditional careers (organization managers), in which career moves and career risks were still largely managed by firms. These managers treated retirement as a reward for their long commitment, speaking much more of the world individualization theory insists has been left behind than of a new era.
Perspectives on retirement pathways influenced by Bourdieu have often suggested that habitus grounded in macro-level cultural fields, such as class or generational cultures (Gilleard and Higgs, 2011; Jones et al., 2010; Oliver and O’Reilly, 2010) resurfaces when people are confronted with the relative freedom of retirement. Although some retirement choices, like involvement in musical or artistic organizations, appeared to conform to conventional class cultures, the ways managers involved themselves in these activities echoed the forms of agency they had exercised in their managerial work rather than being grounded in class culture. Thus, although there was little evidence of the operation of these class or generational cultures, the broader idea that retirees might be responding to the relative openness of retirement by using repertoires of action from earlier in their lives has strong resonance in the analysis. Managers’ experience of agency during their careers was typically structured by the career opportunities available to them from the knowledge and skills they held and by the discretion, judgement and responsibility required of them in their jobs (the jobs’ scope of autonomy). Analysis of the links between managers’ career experience and their retirement pathways showed that they often used the same approach to the ‘problem situation’ of retirement as they had used in their careers.
Managers appeared to develop distinctive orientations to acting agentically. These orientations arose through the forms of agency they were required to exercise in their managerial work and the forms they used in navigating their careers. Three distinct patterns of managerial work and career were revealed. Managers’ orientations to agency formed around these, with different aspects of agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) being dominant in each case. Thus, for example, expert managers were expected to use their technical expertise as a basis for taking initiatives, but only within the parts of a firm’s operations they managed. Dominated by the practical-evaluative aspect of agency, their orientations were towards using their expertise to solve well-defined technical problems. Strategic managers’ innovation expertise was much wider in scope and their work often required them to imagine possible firm reorganizations and how to achieve them. Dominated by the projective aspect of agency, their orientations were towards open-ended re-imagination of firm operations and activities. Organization managers had limited scope for autonomy and the iterative aspect of agency dominated their experience and orientations. In the relative freedom of retirement, managers drew on the orientations that their work and careers had developed and sustained.
This interpretation may help explain a paradox in individualization research noted at the beginning of this article: evidence for individualization without life course destandardization. While the research reported here found considerable diversity in retirement pathways, thinking of this diversity as representing life course destandardization seemed unconvincing. The rather homogeneous patterning of retirement pathways within each of the three groups of managers is one of the more striking findings of the research. Quite contrary to the image of a flowering of diverse and unpredictable pathways, managers seemed to follow quite well-defined and often predictable patterns. Viewing these as orientations or approaches to acting agentically that arise from career experience suggests that relatively ‘standard’ life course patterns may occur without institutions scripting pathways or assuming the risk for them. Indeed, the careers of expert and strategic managers were often weakly defined by employment institutions, yet their work was organized in highly consistent ways within and across firms. This organization of managerial work appeared to be the bedrock for the development of the orientations that so powerfully influenced their retirement choices.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Editors Prof. Andy Charlwood and Prof. Melanie Simms for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
Funding
This research was supported by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant number 864-2007-0047).