Exploring the Loss of Status, Power, and Recognition during Retirement: Reflections on a Human Resource Executive's Experience

This thesis explores the experience of retirement from the perspective of a Human Resource executive who retired from a long career in a large organisation. It uses autoethnography as a methodological approach, employing research narratives and reflexive inquiry. These narratives follow and explore the emotions, relationships, and politics that arise in the process of searching to continue to be recognised and valuable in the professional field after retirement. This thesis offers a social perspective on the process of retirement. Many organisations in Israel prepare their employees for retirement through workshops based on models that assume individualistic and linear assumptions, in which the transition to retirement is in predictable stages until the individual reaches a new equilibrium as a result of rational decision making and planning of the individual. The current research argues that these models have limitations when applied in practice. If the outcomes arising from those decisions and plans do not meet expectations, there is a probability that this is perceived as a personal failure and a lack of hope. This thesis, drawing on a more social understanding of the self, argues that understanding retirement as paradoxically an individual experience, and at the same time also a social process, offers a different perspective that can be more helpful for retirees in dealing with the transition to retirement, as well as for HR managers, retirement consultants, and policymakers in the field of employment and welfare. The meaning of the concept of retirement is influenced by the culture and history of the particular society. Thus retirement can be viewed as what Mead (1925, 1934) calls a 'social object': a population-wide tendency to act in similar ways in similar situations that have evolved over time in many interactions which may therefore differ within and between communities. A tendency to act in particular ways in social routines creates habits, which means that the transition to retirement is a change in habits. It takes place in iterated interactions with the community to which one belongs in which the individual change cannot be separated from change in the community they are part of, what is referred to as transformative change (Stacey, 2006). This thesis argues that understanding retirement as a 'social object' opens up more and new possibilities to reflect on what retirement means. This may challenge stereotypical attitudes towards retirees, such as those described in this research.