Career and ageing at work

The chapter examines aging in work organizations and the individual and organizational management of the late career. The first part seeks to show, by citing a series of demographic and macroeconomic data, that these issues are of increasing urgency for the western industrialized societies, and for individuals in the late stages of their careers. The second part of the chapter describes the results of research in the social sciences (work and organizational psychology, management studies, industrial gerontology) on elderly workers and their strategies to handle the final phase of the work career satisfactorily (for the individual and the organization). The third section addresses the problem of the late career from the point of view of the individual psychological experience. It examines studies on how aged workers live through this stage of the life cycle, how they prepare for the transition to retirement, and how this specific phase can be studied in terms of the redefinition of personal identity and restructuring of the life-system. Before these issues are examined, an introduction provides a conceptual frame of reference for the study of careers and marks out the area of analysis.