Finding Meaning During the Retirement Process

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses “identity-based retirement,” a psychosocial process of identity transition and search for meaning. We see the career as a series of short learning cycles, mini versions of the lifelong career stage model of Super (1957). Retirement is a recursive process of intentions, actions, and outcomes, through which new behaviors generalize to involvement in new roles, and new subidentities associated with retirement (Hall, 1971, 2002). This process entails communicating internally with the self and externally with significant others. Factors in the individual (self-comparisons and protean career orientation) and relational factors (developmental networks and reference groups) influence the identity and goal-setting process, making the person both the agent and the target of the change process that is retirement. Thus the necessity to be self-anchored during retirement gives people the opportunity to find personal meaning in ways that step outside of their previous working lives.

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