Recasting Careers: Changing Reference Groups, Risks, and Realities.

Abstract

The nature of work, family, and retirement being reconfigured. Most baby boomers today are in the midst of building their occupational at the same they are building their family careers (Aldous, I996). But the ground shifting beneath them as the nature of work, family, careers, and retirement being reconfigured. The status passages accompanying their movement through midlife are being reinvented because the baby boomers are different from any other preceding cohort, but also because the world different. Baby boomers are confronting new-fashioned risks and realities at home and at work and will be creating fresh stereotypes of gender and aging, along with new cognitive maps of the work-family-- community interface, that challenge existing ideas about midlife, older workers, retirees, and volunteer work. The very meanings and metaphors of work, career, and retirement are being recast. The role choices and life paths of the baby boomers now in midlife are embedded in existing social structures and situational imperatives that delimit both opportunities and constraints. The contemporary organization of occupational an example of structural lag; where norms, policies, and practices fail to keep pace with today's demographic realities and possibilities (Riley, Kahn, and Foner, I994). Occupational also illustrate a key challenge of our times-suggesting the need for new institutional that promote the social integration and productivity of baby boomers as they move through late childbearing and child rearing, marriage, divorce, remarriages, midlife, and into old age. CAREERS AS PATTERNED BEHAVIOR I find the concept a useful one, since incorporates a range of ideas from different perspectives, including transitions and trajectories, individuals and organizations, and subjective identities as well as objective paths. It also a useful frame for linking changes in baby boomers' individual lives with large-scale changes in culture and in society. The notion of implies an organizational ladder to be climbed, but also stands for an institutionalized life path and a series of choice processes. As Barley (1989) pointed out, the career concept can be used as a lens for peering at larger social processes known as institutions. Consider, for example, the implicit between employer and employee and between family members regarding division of labor (at home and at work), job security, and job progression. These contracts color individuals' views of their experiences both at home and at work, affecting their habits, choices, preferences, and strategies of action (Bourdieu, I984; Breiger, I995; Swidler, I986). What the baby boomers, and those who follow in their wake, are experiencing the dissolution of these contracts, with no clear-cut alternatives replacing them. This essay will use the notion of as a frame with which to view the remarkable transitions confronting the aging baby boomer cohort and will consider the historical forces shaping occupational careers, the hidden assumptions embedded in the career metaphor, and the value dilemmas affecting the future of work, family, and community. HISTORICAL TRENDS Careers are what Pearlin (I988) describes as durable arrangements that serve to organize experience over time In turn, precisely this organized experience that is the basis for how we see the world around us, how we think about and act toward it A number of social forces are creating a disjuncture between conventional views of career paths and the emerging reality, fostering cognitive dissonance in the organization of experience. Three trends in particular have enormous import for baby boomers and their families, for employers and the economy, and for American society more generally: (I) economic and corporate transformations in the workforce and workplace; (2) the dramatic increases in longevity and health of those in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, along with the remarkable turnaround in retirement timing and work exits and reentries; and (3) the disjunctive shifts in both gender roles and the family. …

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