The Retirement Process: Making the Person and Cultural Meanings Malleable

In research on life-course transitions, the dynamics of reorganizing meanings and lives were examined in interviews with 32 retiring workers in the United States. New retirees engaged in reorganization of self and social identity by work in special projects involving physical labor to demolish and rebuild backyards and household interiors. Findings indicate that the work in these projects conjoins the reshaping of subjective experience and social life. The projects express a behavioral narrative of the transition in that the spatial sequence of activities (moving from households to the community) parallels the temporal order of reorganization (from self to social identity). Individuals invent and recapitulate partially formed symbols (i.e., dirt, birth, and death) and prior life events to develop new self-images and social lives. These metaphors and processes of separation and death foster creativity and reintegration and must be viewed as integral to transition rather than interpreted as phenomena to be avoided as they are in gerontology and medical practice. Transitions need to be understood as situated within individual histories and cultural contexts.