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Recognizing the environmental changes and challenges that have impacted academics over the past 20 years, we develop a model of academic career success from a job demands-resources perspective. We ...

Retirement involves a set of institutional arrangements combined with socio-cultural meanings to sustain a distinct retirement phase in life course and career pathways. In this Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Reinventing Retirement: New Pathways, New Arrangements, New Meanings,’ we outline the historical development of retirement. We identify the dramatic broad-based changes that recently have shaken this established construct to its core. We describe the main organizational responses to these changes, and how they have been associated with shifting, multiple meanings of retirement. Finally, we present a model that frames two general forms of reinvention of retirement. The first involves continuation of the idea of a distinct and well-defined period of life occurring at the end of a career trajectory, but with changes in the timing, the kinds of post-retirement activities pursued, and meanings associated with this period of life. The second represents a more fundamental reinvention in which the overall concept of retirement as a distinct period in an individual’s life is challenged or rejected, whether because it is not appealing or no longer realistic. We provide examples of how both types of reinvention may manifest in individuals’ careers and lives, and suggest future research directions that follow from our model.

Theoretical developments in the analysis of organizations have recently turned to an “organizational becoming” perspective, which sees the social world as enacted in the microcontext of communicative interactions among individuals through which meaning is negotiated. According to this view, organizational change is endemic, natural, and ongoing; it occurs in everyday interactions as actors engage in the process of establishing new meanings for organizational activities. We adopt this approach to study how meanings were negotiated by senior and middle managers in a workshop held as part of a culture change program at a telecommunications company. Our study identifies two very different patterns in these negotiations, constituted by the particular communicative practices adopted by participants. We discuss the implications of these patterns for organizational change in relation to generative dialogue and power-resistance relations between senior and middle managers.

This article considers the possibility that ‘high performance work system’ (HPWS) practices generate positive outcomes for employees by meeting their interests (specifically their interest in an orderly and predictable working environment). Utilising survey data on employees working in the Australian aged-care industry, statistical analysis is used to test the mediating effect of order and predictability on associations between HPWS practices and employee experience of work. The results suggest that positive outcomes arise in part because HPWS practices contribute to workplace order and predictability. In explaining this finding, the article highlights the importance of contextual factors, notably industry and employee characteristics, in shaping outcomes. The article concludes that socio-logically oriented analyses which apprehend the importance of employee interests provide a useful supplement to conventional psychologically oriented accounts of HPWS and provide a basis for continued development of labour process theory.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to advance novel ways of thinking about retirement by developing new theoretical perspectives and harnessing methodologies that focus on the multiple meanings of retirement and distinctive behavioural pathways. We welcome conceptual and empirical papers that make clear contributions to this effort. These may include life course approaches, discursive or narrative methods, longitudinal assessments, or cross-cultural or generational perspectives, although they are not limited to these. We also strongly encourage works that are multidisciplinary in nature; for example, works that traverse gerontology and human resource management or demography and organizational behaviour.

We developed and tested a model linking organizational embeddedness with two indicators of career advancement one year later (promotions and career satisfaction), via the mediating role of firm-spe...

Using a mixed-methods design, we developed a model of antecedents and outcomes of professional identification. Based on a sample of 1,807 academics working in the management field from a large prof...