The Retirement process: Making the Person and Cultural Meanings malleable

Abstract

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.

Profound transformations of public and personal identities occur at the onset of retirement life. The results of these changes are well described in the popular and psychological literature. Retirement from work precipitates adjustments to family, friends, and neighbors, as well as to former coworkers. These adjustments coincide with reformulations of one’s self-images and sense of place in the world (Luborsky 1987, 1994c). Researchers studying aging have come to understand such processes as both abrupt alterations to social and personal life and as the continuation of lifelong processes that become more socially and psychologically charged at certain socially marked points in the culturally defined life course. This article is concerned with the early stages of life reorganization upon retirement.

Orientations to the Problem of Life-Course Transitions

My interest in life-course transitions was heightened by Margaret Clark’s (1972) discussion of fundamental value dilemmas posed by conflicting core cultural ideals. She explored the notions of dependence and independence in U.S. society and described multiple dilemmas and ideological conflicts implicit in our culture that shape experience and behavior. Her work argues against studies of later life transitions that view personal distress as rooted largely in intrapsychic rather than social conditions. That perspective is one of the most enduring of her many contributions to social gerontology and to medical anthropology.

It is notable that the social transformations and transitions of individuals and of social groups are generally studied in terms of the final results or specific changes. The economic and social structural processes that push older workers into retirement are not addressed in this article (see Graebner 1978; Guillemard 1983; Luborsky 1985; Quadagno 1982). The bulk of the literature on the retirement of workers presents findings on postretirement health, income, and psychological adjustment (Streib and Schneider 1971). There are, however, few studies of the transition itself (Atchley 1976) and no attention is given to how conditions of changeableness are created. This article examines the constitution of malleableness, defined as the quality of being fluid and able to be reshaped. The focus here is on the ways the self and social life are made malleable and open to remaking a new self-image and social life and the making of concrete contexts within which such changes can be formulated. An important component of the process of changing from work to retirement life involves creating transitional identities and life patterns. These identities and patterns may serve as bridges between different periods in the transition or as the nucleus for replicating a future self and social life.

Challenges to Discovery of Life Reorganization Processes

Midway through a longitudinal study of the retirement transition in the United States, I struggled to encourage informants to reflect philosophically about their sense of a true enduring self and about the changes they felt in the week after they retired. My efforts were largely a failure. Informants preferred talking about mundane household labors, described as “pecial projects,”¹ such as housecleaning or landscaping. These accounts were not the rich and elegant existential reflections I hoped a major transition would call forth. The scope of these projects included wholesale tearing up of the sod, lawns, and flower beds, felling trees and shrubs, grading soil, planting vegetables and fruit trees, and adding new patios. Informants labored alone in the relative seclusion of their backyards without assistance from paid help. Thematic concerns in their discussions of these projects were attention to shaping raw matter, personalized production, generativity, and creativity. The projects were conducted, explicitly, prior to reshaping the social relationships and routines outside the home that mark the completion of the transition into retirement.

These projects tangibly express the anthropological view of culture as the creation and habitation of intentional worlds (D’Andrade 1992; Shweder 1990) and bodies (Murphy 1987), as opposed to culture as received wisdom. Informants were unable or unwilling to provide any detailed verbal explanations, in contrast to the readily visible, elaborate physical activities. They simply stated that it was the “proper order” or the “right” course of things to do when adjusting to a new life, “each thing in its time.” Later stages in the retirement process (e.g., altering household routines, altering family ties, and doing volunteer work) were not interchangeable with other stages, nor could the timing or nature of the special projects be attributed to a collective public ceremony.

Contradictions and Alternative Perspectives

The timing and character of the projects are puzzling and are not explained in the literature on life-course transitions in later life. In the United States, retirement is overtly defined as a time for leisure and freedom from work. Particularly at the start of retirement, the labors seem to directly conflict with the trenchant prescription to relax and be at ease. The retirees’ exclusive focus on the domestic terrain of backyards and household space, but not on front yards and community ties, is also problematic. Several conventional explanations provide inadequate and contradictory answers.

From a life-span perspective, the projects may be old projects long deferred until informants are freed from work life, family, and routine household demands. The projects alternatively may simply fill empty time prior to mobilization of the psychosocial efforts required to adjust to a new situation. Brief periods of voluntary free time being used to gain perspective commonly occur after a major life change or a strenuous endeavor. Alternatives to constant ever-meaningful lives include concepts of experiential flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) as periods of intentional mindlessness and untutored pauses (Read 1986) or breathers (Lazarus 1991) from constant meaning-making and reflection.

Such situational explanations may account for the general occurrence of projects, but they explain neither the particular timing within the retirement transition, nor the substantive focus of these tasks. Further, such explanations do not exclude other kinds of familiar retirement activities (e.g., travel, volunteer work). One would expect to find a variety of activities in all domains of life, especially community contexts, but the new retirees focus only on domestic arenas.

From a developmental viewpoint, the projects might be seen as either a transitory period, or even as evidence of a psychological fixation. That is, the emphasis on labor and production is a holdover of valued behavior patterns from work life. In this view, the projects indicate a failure to let go of the past life stage and adapt to the new one. This view defines retirees’ private projects as somehow pathological. For example, to some degree, even though separated physically and socially from the workplace, informants may find retirement values too hedonistic to reconcile with basic values internalized during socialization. Concern with remaining busy, even in the absence of meaningful social activity is suggested to be a characteristic of U.S. adults (Ekerdt 1986). The kinds of value dilemmas or contradictions that infuse the experience of retiring are illuminated by one new retiree who debates with herself:

You have always been busy, that whole Puritanical background, you have to work all the time. Fight that frame of mind. For 31 years, I took care of the family and other demands. Now is the time in life to do what I want to. It’s a self-centered way to think, but you have to look at it that way.

This informant’s explanation, too, fails to explain the project’s timing in the transition. If the projects are a holdover of earlier patterns, then they should appear later as routines develop, not during the early euphoric phase of freedom from work. Further, a broader range of more compulsive public exertions, not just private ones, would be expected as a means to convey a visible sign to others. That is not the case, however, and in addition to the shortcomings already noted, the preceding explanations cast people as reactive beings, denying them a creative volitional capacity in the continuous construction of culture. People are conceived as oversocialized, rule-bound zombies (Holy and Stuchlik 1981) or, alternatively, as free agents entirely outside of society.

Dirt, Dust, and Backyards: Retirement Projects Embody Rebuilding the Self and Social Life

I argue that the projects are not just an empty period prior to the effort of making an adjustment, nor a simple externalization of social-psychological processes. Study reveals that the projects are integral to the thorough leveling of social and personal landscapes during retirement. Working the earth in the backyard is a transaction that conjoins psychodynamic and sociocultural processes as the retirees realign the landscape of their social identities, statuses, and interaction patterns. The concepts of nonverbal idioms of protest, the late life development stage of generativity, and transitional and potential space inform the interpretation of field data on the special projects.

The entire project serves as a polemic in the intent to contest and create meanings. All informants in this study entered retirement voluntarily, yet they all incurred the stigma associated with the social label of “retiree,” a term that evokes images of aged, feeble, and powerless people discarded by socioeconomic mechanisms (Guillemard 1983). The normative life course entails an institutionalized social deprivation of ascribed competence and prestige. In that view, the projects are acts in the context of perceived social deprivation. People engage in labor and its products to create a realm conducive to redefining themselves by revitalizing core cultural ideals, thereby demonstrating to themselves and others that they are still complete, potent persons (Luborsky 1994b, 1994c). In the wider perspective of collective social movements, rededication to core cultural ideals or their abandonment is a familiar topic in anthropology described in terms of redemptive movements such as the Shoshone Indian Sun Dance ceremonies (Aberle 1966; Jorgenson 1972) in contrast to social transformative movements such as the Ghost Dance or Melanesian Cargo cults. To date, these concepts have not been applied to the study of the life course (Luborsky 1994a) or to individuals going through life-course transitions.

From this perspective, the protracted work of the landscaping projects may be viewed as enacting a single semantic unit, a lexeme or trope, in a metalanguage designed for creating persuasive meanings. The intended audience is both the retiree as self-creator and the wider community of family, friends, neighbors, and others who are influenced by negative stereotypes of the aged and dependent retiree. The cultural grammar of the retirement transition transforms the informant from a working adult to a retiree whereas the informants’ projects are part of an opposing grammar of self-constitution. By tangibly representing intact capabilities, the projects refute the stigma of decrepitude. Clearly, however, they are more than reactive behaviors undertaken to contradict the social categories built into the normative cultural life course.

The process of reshaping a sense of self and identity at retirement involves a revitalization of core cultural values in order to counteract the public stereotype of retirees as dependent and infirm (Luborsky 1987). For example, working with the bare earth is an effective idiom for expressing procreativity, mastery, and autonomy. The backyard landscaping project creatively reshapes both social and real estates. It conjoins the retiree’s intent to redefine cultural and personal meanings and the household structure. The life story narratives of many of these informants were organized by metaphors depicting the informant’s life in terms of phases and cycles in nature and the planets (Luborsky 1987,1993b). Understandings of cultural and personal process are enhanced by knowledge of nonverbal discourse idioms and the metaphors informants use to express them. The projects may serve as rehearsals (MacAloon 1984) for altering cultural meanings. They concretely enact a meaning-centered discourse of physical performance that pervades the life-course transition. The units of the action-meaning discourse are lengthy sets of activities (cf. Gatewood 1985) that generate meanings and engage personal and cultural categories at several levels, including self, body, and environment.

An arena similar to the transitional space and objects described by Grolnik (1987:138) seems to be created by the projects. Inside such an arena, partially developed symbols are played with; they are a bridge between psychological attachments and established orders during development or socialization (after retiring from the adult worker role and prior to becoming retiree in the community). Arguably, the projects also create a potential space (Grolnik 1987; Winnicott 1971), which is defined as an arena where symbols with multiple meanings are developed and used to create new images of self and life. In this case, the potential space of the projects helps informants to make the change from career-related patterns and values to ones for retirement. Individuals draw upon the raw materials of cultural images of both death and birth and from personal lifetimes of experiences and meanings (Luborsky 1985; Luborsky and Rubinstein 1987,1990). The individual’s own definition of a lifestyle and sense of self is important in retirement since it is, partly, an endless transition. Informants expressed concerns about becoming isolated or marginalized in the community. Retirees are socially marginal, defined in the United States as “a category of people awaiting death,” the last life stage (Clark and Anderson 1967). A view of the projects as creating a potential space concurs with Myerhoff’s (1978) argument that positive functioning in later life emerges from incorporating past meanings and attachments, not just replacing them with new ones as posited in some traditional psychological theories of loss and mourning.

A key element of the projects, as explained by the informants, is that they will leave a mark on the earth that will endure after their death. Acting on this motivation is a hallmark of the later life developmental stage of generativity. It was originally defined as the avoidance of stagnation and narcissism and the investment of oneself in establishing and assuring the continuity of generations through one’s children (Erikson et al. 1986). Criticized for limiting the idioms of generative expressions to biological ties (and the biases inherent in excluding the substantial minority of childless adults from normal adult development), researchers later refined the theory to include the investment of substance or energy in other people or collective enterprises (Alexander et al. 1991; Kotre 1984) that leave an enduring record of the individual’s contributions. Emotional attachment to the work site, perceptions of separation, and loss at retirement include issues of generativity and personal production. A recurrent theme among retiring workers was a desire to insure some continuity. This took several forms, including: preserving a system of operations; passing on knowledge; or picking and training a successor. For example, in this study the greatest anxiety and frustration was expressed by the childless informants, regardless of gender, when they were denied such opportunities.

Informants’ interactions with the earth engage intersecting domains of cultural meanings. The three compass points of this familiar landscape are the front door and front yard, the house, and the back door and backyard. The front door and front yard face outward to the world of work, commerce, and public life. There persons are defined in terms of normative social statuses and participate by means of roles in individuated modes of production to serve society’s interests. The backyard is an inward realm of the personal and private, featuring individual production for personal consumption. Retirement from a career job profoundly reverses the central focus of activity and meanings as illustrated above. It inaugurates the social retirement process, which is marked by a period of seclusion within the domestic and household contexts and by a leveling of social estates.

This article addresses the portion of the retirement transition in which retirees engage in physical alterations to their real estate in unison with revamping self-concepts and social estates of relationships. Notably, the projects emphasize sensory intensive and physically arduous actions directed at loosening up and recasting the form of one’s environment, self, and body. In examining the issue of how changeableness is constituted, I ask two questions: how are such projects integral at the onset of self transformations, and why is there similarity in behavior without guiding rituals or secular norms?

Methods and Ethnographic Setting

The materials discussed here are drawn from a longitudinal study of how people go about the business of ending career jobs and moving into retirement. The study was conducted during the early 1980s in a metropolitan region of California using extended case studies. The goal was to describe informants’ personal meanings regarding a shared public experience and to explore differences in resolving cultural value dilemmas and ambiguities. To further that aim, informants were selected to be relatively homogeneous in several respects: all were in good health, lived in the same region, had education or training beyond high school, and were without financial problems. That is, volunteers were excluded if the retirement experience was potentially overshadowed by health or financial problems. The selection of a relatively homogeneous sample also helped to minimize major contrasts in employment histories due to educational and social class differences.

Participants were recruited by word of mouth, flyers, and notices in local papers and employer newsletters. Each informant was interviewed approximately one year prior to retirement, immediately after the final day of work, and one year after retirement. While 44 people volunteered for the first interview, attrition due to death, delayed retirement, and relocation reduced to the number completing the final interview to 32 people. They ranged in age from 57 to 67 years of age at retirement, averaging 63. Two-thirds of the sample were men. Seventy percent retired from the company where they had started their first job, 50 percent had a college degree, and 17 percent had a postgraduate degree (mostly M.A.’s and a few Ph.D.’s). Eighty percent were married, and of those, 28 percent were second marriages. Three-quarters were Protestant, 20 percent were Catholic, and all were non-Hispanic white.

The aim was to describe personal experiences, the cultural and social dimensions that shaped the retirement behavior of a carefully selected set of informants (Luborsky 1994c) rather than to generalize from a population-based random survey (Luborsky and Rubinstein 1994). Informants were selected as part of a homogeneous population so that individual differences in orientations to cultural values and in experience would be highlighted. The view provided is one of how retirees act when free from major health and monetary constraints. This approach to the study of retirement experiences provided a better understanding of what goals people pursue in adjustment. An unintended homogeneity occurred in that the sample was largely Protestant of Western European origin.

Three detailed cases are presented. They were selected to depict the experiences and actions of people entering retirement from a range of differing lifelong and current social situations and living conditions. The three cases illuminate similarities in the nature and course of life reorganizations during this period of the retirement passage. The goal of the study was to describe the nature of personal and cultural definitions of retirement and to explore differences within the pool of volunteers rather than to determine the distribution or prevalence of these in the general population.

Regional factors may condition the comparability of metaphors and activities with which retirees work, although underlying processes are likely to be similar. California offers a benign environment conducive to more year-round outdoor activity than other regions of the United States. Outdoor pursuits are reported to be characteristic of retirement in other climates (Atchley 1976; Shanas 1968). Regarding the prevalence of the projects described here, Gordon et al. (1973) in a cross-sectional study of priorities for leisure among 1,440 people found that home embellishments reach a peak early in maturity and again after retirement.

Information elicited from participants at each of the three interviews included open-ended discussions about the social and personal meaning of work and retirement, plans for retirement life, relationships with family and friends, a life history narrative, and discussions about the challenges of the retirement transition. Information about careers, family, education, income, and other characteristics were elicited. Interviews were recorded in the form of field notes and observations of the home, style of dress, and description of conduct during home visits. Content analysis was conducted to summarize each informant’s reply and to identify topics of concern repeated during the interview. Themes were identified in two ways: informants’ explicit assertions that issues or ideas were important and concerns identified as frequently repeated in the interviews (Luborsky 1993a).

Retirement Transitions and Self-Transformations

In life history narratives and informal discussions, informants voiced strong feelings of a distinctive cohort identity founded on sharing values with others their age who had grown up and entered the job market during the same period. The Great Depression was a salient theme in recounting life and work histories and choices at major turning points. Informants highlighted childhood during the Depression, education and career plans changed by World War II and military service, raising families during the prosperous postwar years, and confronting challenges to their values posed by the “youth movement” of the 1960s in San Francisco when their children were entering their teenage years. Looking to the future, some expressed a sense of disillusionment because the secure retirement life they had been promised and worked for was threatened by the high inflation of the early 1980s and uncertainty about the future solvency of the Social Security system. Retirement was depicted in terms of the succession of generations or as a “changing of the guard.” Conditions in the workplace were described as having changed too. Previously, business relationships had been warmer and family-like; now they were increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic, and retirement beckoned as a welcome escape. These shared circumstances and identities fostered a view of life as having cycles of growth and decline in the economy and their cohort as well as in individual lives.

This article specifically concerns the first weeks after ending a job. The completion of a career entitled participants to leisure without the social stigma of the label “unemployed.” They were equipped with resources, ideally including a pension, social security, and personal assets. The informants explained to me that they now must develop a personalized concept of the social identity of retiree and establish a new way of life before others would define them as full retirees. Growing into the social outline of retiree is accomplished by serially negotiating identities in successive domains (Luborsky 1985); it does not occur in one ceremonial event.

The retirement transition is one of the few social occasions in the United States that is marked by formal public ceremonies and symbols associated with a rite of passage. The concept of a rite of passage is a heuristic that helps to describe features of the social process of retirement; it is not posed as a theoretical framework. Retirement was found to encompass three intertwined phases. In one view, the transition replicates the social separation, liminality, and reintegration of a rite of passage. At each step, the focus proceeds from private and inward looking to more public and outward looking. A brief description of the intertwined public and personal processes is needed to contextualize the following cases illustrations.

The first retirement phase involved termination of the career job. This phase, lasting from one to five years, began with informal private preparations concerning finances and personal sentiments related to how to live after ending work. Participants gathered information from books, retirement seminars, and discussions with friends and family but without announcing their intention to retire. In anticipation, workers may take a special long vacation to “try out” or to “get a feel” for retirement life. Next, the retiring worker makes public his or her intention to retire. This period ends with the official declaration to the employer and the formal retirement ceremonies of leave taking at work. Now the official status as “employee” is terminated, marked by official ceremonies (“exit interview,” “final day,” returning identification badges, documents, and keys) and informal farewells. Recurrent images of separation, death, and rebirth figure prominently in the commercial greeting cards, banners, and small talk among the retiree’s friends and colleagues. The worker reminisces with colleagues and reviews events and eras in the history of their employment. After the retirement party and official termination of employment, they are officially designated with the identity of retired workers.

The second phase was a limbo period of readjustment that lasted about one to two months. Immediately after the final day of employment, informants left the familiar terrain of their homes and daily work routines by taking a trip or secluding themselves with the stated objective to “just laze around, sleep late” and take pleasure in “ignoring daily routines” of eating, exercise, sleep, and visiting. Retirees thus reinforce their separation from the prior routinization of the nine-to-five job schedule. They expressed pleasure in breaking business routines and personal habits and avoiding schedules (including keeping dates for our interviews). They described their moods as “euphoria” or being “on a high,” marking the altered states befitting initiands in passage rituals. In this period, all the informants relaxed by themselves at home, and they carried out the special projects.

Third was the postretirement reorganization process, which lasted approximately one year. Here the informants renegotiate relationships and routines in a sequence moving first from the domestic and conjugal to familial and then to friendship and community domains. The process ends with renewal of neighborhood and community citizen roles. The assumption of an overall retirement “lifestyle” encompassing new routines and relationships, as opposed to celebrating the separation from work life, is socially recognized as a sign of the end of the process. The movement from personal and private to public realms associated with various stages demarcates culturally basic arenas of experience and relationships.

Anatomy of the Special Projects

Dedication to revitalizing core cultural values is a prominent dimension of the special projects. At the onset of retirement life, the informants in this study followed similar patterns by starting with activities directed to domestic arenas. Several cultural values infuse the subjective experience of reorganizing personal and social life and are expressed in reshaping the terrain of their physical real estate. The special home projects ranged from reclaiming neglected gardens to full relandscap-ing projects. Few projects were spur-of-the-moment. Notably, they were carried out alone, without the help of spouse, children, or neighbors. No one hired a contractor. Thus, both the timing and spatial location of the projects emphasized seclusion inside the domestic arena and solitary work.

An example may amplify this perspective. Mrs. Collins, a divorcée for 15 years, retired after 25 years as an executive secretary. She spoke of feeling satisfied with the job she had done and fulfilled by the opportunity to train her successor. She said nonetheless that she “felt out of it now; the Company gets along without me.” After retiring, she stayed home laboring on a “special project, getting the yard into shape.” Alone, she cleared a large, wildly overgrown backyard: “[I] turned into a real farmer; clear trees, fight back all the blackberry bushes and thorns, hack it back.” After clearing out the old growth, she planted seeds “to grow a decent crop of vegetables to eat.” Flowers and ornamental shrubs were added to create an appealing yard. She said, thus, that working the earth, becoming a backyard “farmer,“ provided a personalized sense of pioneer self-sufficiency and autonomy that she then used to build her new life. Her children urged her to get involved in local affairs when she retired instead of staying at home, but she resisted until the landscaping was complete. These arduous projects effected dramatic changes in home environments and the retirees’ sense of self and identity.

Content analysis of retirees’ discussions of these projects was conducted to identify basic dimensions of these undertakings. These dimensions concern personal experiences of rejuvenating a personal link to fundamental cultural ideals and values. Four dimensions were identified: (1) youthfulness and strength—participants expressed feelings that the hard labor inspired them; “still working just like younger men, sometimes better!” or “the freedom reminds me of childhood, but with more responsibility”; (2) rugged pioneering, embodied in discussions in which informants explained feelings of pride at “laboring alone” and struggling to “uproot and replant the yard” or redefine the household; (3) self-sufficiency and productivity–projects were directed to accomplish idealized goals of being “less dependent upon the outside world, being able to sow and reap, grow my own produce to feed my family, be more self-sufficient, even raise some chickens or a goat”; and (4) generativity–informants spoke of the projects as markers of then-existence that will continue past their death or as labor that increases the value of the property that will sustain them and their surviving family after their death.

These dimensions amplify how involvement in the projects allowed the retirees to demonstrate adherence to fundamental social values and their continued capacity to personally reproduce the values even after being retired. Another ideal is reaffirmed as informants describe feeling closer to the idealized pioneer heritage of Western settlers, particularly in comparison with experiences at the end of their careers, when work seemed increasingly routinized and impersonal.

Liminality and Generativity: Three Examples

Using three cases of self-transformation for illustration, I suggest a more robust interpretation. These cases highlight the process of making meanings and life structures malleable and creating raw materials to aid in life reorganization. Observe that while the informants’ experience-world is made fluid, not every aspect is altered. That is, continuity as well as change is important. After a period of playing with new forms, some aspects (e.g., conjugal and household relationships) are recast into their preretirement form. The following three cases illustrate how the raw materials used for accomplishing the retirement transition include not just culturally constructed categories and objects, but also highly personalized visions of multiple alternative selves. Examples of the latter include obsolete social identities, partly reconstituted selves from earlier life, wished-for selves, and liminal or not-yet-formed selves. The recapitulation of earlier personal states while constructing a new life is striking in light of the larger serial pattern of the retirement transition described above.

Case One: Mr. Keith

Mr. Keith, age 66, had worked as a midlevel executive in a large corporation and lived in the suburbs with his wife. After his last day of work and the retirement ceremony, his first concern was to relandscape his yard and to reorganize the household. For several weeks, he labored to domesticate an overgrown, neglected backyard. He felled four mature hardwood trees, uprooted the stumps, and carted away the remains. Next, he tilled and regraded the soil. He devoted himself to these arduous tasks with enthusiasm. He then “planted and nurtured” new plants, shrubs, and grass. In addition, he installed a flagstone patio to use for relaxing and reading. Mr. Keith explained to me that the work was intended to make the backyard more pleasant to use and to increase the value of his home if they it sell in the future.

Our last discussion took place on the new backyard patio shaded by a clump of birch trees. He had completely transformed the dark and neglected, seldom used dark weedy back lot into an appealing terraced garden, bordered by ornamental and vegetable gardens with a sun-dappled patio. He made the backyard productive of food for his household. He also drew pleasure from having increased the financial value of his estate.

For Mr. Keith, this project had a deeper resonance. It embodied a partial return to the pursuits of his youth, which he idealized, a return to nature through working the land, enhancing his sense of efficacy and idealism. He contrasted the experiences sharply with the constraints, tedium, and alienation he had experienced in the business world during the later years of his career. He had graduated from high school during the Depression and found work in the Conservation Corps. On this period he reflected: “I got some experiences, education, and came to maturity there.” Just prior to retiring, he revisited the site of the conservation project. He described his feelings upon seeing the wooded hillsides: “There was the whole acreage of trees we planted, they were mature, ready to harvest. That’s a real solid feeling of seeing something through and making a concrete contribution.”

Thus, his labors in the backyard were infused with a culturally patterned dimension of personal symbolism and generativity. The script of the project recapitulated events from his own individual life history and replicated the basic structure of the social life course, now at the threshold of old age. At another level, his labors to suburbanize (“domesticate”) the wild back lot by tearing down full-grown shrubs, uprooting tree stumps, and planting new seedlings are resonant with the sociocultural processes of breakdown and growth of his social identity in the transformation into retireehood. A salient part of the yard work for him was getting his hands dirty, sweating, and working the earth of his backyard. The backyard also symbolizes for him (and the other informants) the “domestic” backyard of family and household he described as having felt somewhat neglected during his working life.

Transforming his real-estate property reflects the major change of focus in his life. When he was employed, each morning he went out the front door to his place in the cosmopolitan industrial world. In contrast, during retirement his energies refocused toward the domestic realm. Now in the morning, he goes out the rear door into the backyard of the domestic realm where he relaxes with the newspaper and coffee.

The changed focus from front yard to backyard and from work to domestic realms presents a more general retirement dialectic of oppositions between contexts in which the individual is conceived of as old and used up and contexts that have been neglected but remain capable and productive. Informants described the redirection more generally as “catching up” in neglected areas of life. As a consequence of striving to be a good provider, and with childhood memories of the Depression, they concentrated on earning money and advancing their careers while their children were growing up. Male informants, in particular, expressed regret at having not spent more time with their children. This is a second feature of the informants’ new inward focus on the household. Retirement offers an opportunity to catch up in these areas. The next step was attention to the conjugal arena. A fledgling egalitarianism between husband and wife appeared but soon failed. The couple rehearsed a variety of arrangements for sharing the dish washing, bed making, and grocery shopping. Mr. Keith and his wife, however, soon returned to their former arrangement, despite the fact that his wife had not retired from her job.

In summary, his first acts as a retired worker involved reconstruction of the physical environment of his home (spatial order) in concert with the symbolic reordering of his social life with a focus on the household. Mr. Keith’s actions illuminate the nature and consequences of retirement. He reengaged a personal generativity and youthfulness through interaction with the earth expressed in idioms of personal production, independence, and self-sufficiency by, among other things, the production of garden foods for his family and labor to increase the value of his home.

Case Two: Mr. Herbison

Mr. Herbison was a proud father and grandfather, age 68, whose children lived nearby. After retiring from an engineering career, he set out to redesign his household. In our last meeting, he described a moral dilemma: “I felt guilty, the work ethic is such a part of me and I worked hard all my life.” That was juxtaposed with another notion of retirement: “It is something we earned and should enjoy, being free at last.”

One reason voiced by couples for retiring (and widows’ source of deep regret at being single in retirement) was to return to what they termed “spousing.” This term was used to explain their wish to regain greater intimacy and togetherness as a couple, similar to the period when they were first married and freer from obligations to children and kin and from wage-earning duties (see Lowenthal et al. 1975). Mr. Herbison and his wife embarked on a trip to the family cabin for ten days without the children. Only on later trips did they return to inviting the entire family. Again, this reveals the cultural calculus of retirement ideology, which links the postretirement era recursively with early youth. Because playing in the yard (during daytime hours) is a feature of childhood and old age, the physical activities and yard work of the special projects are another link between retirement and youth.

His project was to renovate the back of the house and rear yard. He used a retirement cash gift given by his former colleagues to buy tools, including a power saw and vise. These were “for fixing and making small things,” he said. The purchases reflect the change in scope, duration, and personal role in work. During his career, he was responsible for long-term projects that involved many people functionally integrated as cogs in a team directed by the corporation. After retirement, he pursued small-scale projects in which he carried out all the tasks himself. His tools and project also reflect the shift from participation in the wider world of commerce and industry outside the home to the domestic worlds of suburban backyards.

Mr. Herbison relandscaped the backyard and used his new saw and bench vise to hew planks for a redwood deck to add to the rear of the house. Before beginning construction, he tore down the existing fence enclosing the backyard, excavated post holes, inserted new supports in the ground, and erected fencing in a new pattern allowing for deck supports. Similar to Mr. Keith, he also relandscaped the entire garden. Old growth was torn out, and new flowers and shrubs were planted. Both he and Mr. Keith labored in the backyard to remove old boundaries and to level the grounds, then working with raw wood, dirt, and new plants, built a new vision of their world. These activities are the first harbingers of the home-centered life, more physical activities tied to nature, and less externally routinized life of retirement.

Beginning the second week of his retirement, his wife cajoled him to become a guide at the museum where she volunteered. He demurred and suggested that it was too soon, that there was the deck to build, trips to take, and people to visit before he would be ready for that final stage. The yard work was accompanied by testing new arrangements of doing household chores. He did some of the food shopping. But after he returned with expensive meats and what his wife deemed to be frivolous items, she insisted on going with him or doing it herself.

At the time of our last interview, roughly 12 months after he retired, he suggested, “I’m just settling in now,” and was considering involvements in the community such as being a museum docent. Again, we see the tacit notion of the “proper” order for conducting social reorganizations and the place of the special projects within that scheme.

Case Three: Mrs. Barclay

Mrs. Barclay lived in a second-floor apartment that did not have a yard or garden for projects. Retired from a career as an executive secretary at age 63, she had been widowed for ten years. Several of her children lived in the area.

“The Project with a capital P,” as she named it, was a month-long consummate household cleaning and reorganization. This included stripping the apartment to bare walls, removing and sending out the drapes and carpets for cleaning, sorting clothes and possessions, opening every drawer and closet for cleaning. She washed every window inside and out, vacuumed up dirt and dust from behind furniture and the now bare floors, and polished the furniture. Mrs. Barclay labeled this “a rare and thorough cleaning” in contrast to a “usual” or even “occasional really heavy cleaning.” The work involved handling and taking a mental inventory of virtually her entire estate. This work served as an active remembering (Myerhoff 1984) and life review (Luborsky 1993b) through the idiom of her possessions. These tasks parallel and replicate the processes of stock taking, life review, and resorting her past and future life occasioned by preparing her finances for retirement (e.g., naming beneficiaries, disposition of estate) and herself for retirement life.

Sorting out work attire as part of the special projects exemplifies that process. Formal attire such as suits, ties, and dress blouses and skirts do not fit the leisure life. Indeed, they are an anathema for many retirees. Retirement jokes and greeting cards show people peeling off the old skin of suits and ties and donning a new skin of leisure clothes. A casual sports shirt and slacks are the norm. So she discarded all but a few “dressy” clothes needed for formal occasions and retirement parties. Mrs. Barclay said the clothes sorting was enjoyable since it got rid of obsolete clothes, yet it was also a “sobering realization” that a major part of her life was likewise being cast away. The new retirement garb is an outward sign of retireehood to her, as well as to others.

Thus, despite the absence of the medium of dirt and earth in the backyard, she engaged the same culturally defined images of dirt and of reshaping the interior domestic landscape as we saw in the previous examples. She also altered the terrain of her home by carving out a new area (labeled a “work island”) in an arched alcove between the dining room and living room. There she set a small desk and cabinets for artifacts from work to keep important papers, and also for correspondence. Other informants also relocated books and mementos from the work site to their homes. In this way, Mrs. Barclay incorporated fragments from her past work life into her home. These served both as mementos of the past and as a transitional bridge into retirement life.

This first period in her retirement was demarcated from the next in several ways. She took a ten-day trip far away from home and finished the housecleaning. Next, she began to personally define the retirement life as “a selfish way of living, too introverted,” now remarking that “when I first retired, I felt restless. I felt I should be doing something but that is an adjustment you need to make, like any other point in life.” Thus, both behavioral and personal ideological changes mark the stages in the transition. The course of her postretirement experience was patterned by struggles to find a personally satisfactory resolution to implicit cultural ambiguities and contradictions in the prescriptions for retirement life and the social label of “retiree.”

After this point, her early aims motivated in part by the popular or stereotypic prescriptions to be “selfish, whatever I want when I want, travel and laze around” were no longer alluring. In retrospect, she reinterpreted them by bracketing these as a time in a transition, one that was a hiatus prior to negotiating new roles for herself in family and then community arenas. The definition of good works for retirement included volunteer work, serving on local town councils and zoning boards, and helping neighbors. These contrast with career jobs by affording personal involvement and satisfactions from tasks that are appreciated by people the workers know or directly contact, as opposed to the distant and impersonal contributions made at work.

Summary and Discussion

Unexpected regularities in the internal dynamics of one phase in the retirement transition, the initial stage of the phase after retirement, were identified and examined in order to describe the ways people reformulate and come to know a new self and social identity. In this article, I explored the transitional period during which a series of personalized processes takes place as part of relinquishing old ways of life and redefining a new life.

Three cases illustrated the dimensions and experiences of this transitional period. Within the confines of her apartment, Mrs. Barclay shared with Mr. Keith and Mr. Herbison the confluence of cultural and social structural leveling and reorganization of social worlds and identity with the processes of stripping and reshaping the physical terrain and engagement with “dirt” and earth in the home. These were part of reforging personal conceptions of the self and social life. The close association between the spatial distribution of retirement activities and the temporal pattern of social reorganizations across the transition were described. Another key dimension was the tandem inclusion of symbols of the cultural life course with the individual’s lifetime events and sentiments at the threshold of bureaucratically defined old age.

A question for further research is how these personal notions of bounded arenas coincide with those traditionally analyzed as meaningful units for the study of sociopsychological development and adjustment. That is, behaviorally and conceptually the retirees negotiated, serially, successive sets of relationships. These sets index cultural conceptions of boundedness within social systems and also processes by which people cross from one bounded set of relationships to another. As observed among the retiring workers, this is accomplished in part by cross-referencing other meanings. More simply, the retirees’ pattern of serially reforging relationships reveals culturally defined boundaries, crossing mechanisms, and suggests the nature of relationships between the domains outlined (work, domestic, familial, and community).

The special projects can be interpreted as narratives expressed through the idiom of physical activity. Aggregates of activity, as well as words, can be understood as basic units in the representation or creation of meanings analogous to covert categories in language (Berlin et al. 1968; D’Andrade 1974). As a metalanguage, the backyard projects become, in one sense, units in the lifelong processes of reshaping conceptions of self and the person. Together, these insights into the wholes and segments of self-transformation through performance are suggestive of the analyses of verbal discourse by Agar and Hobbes (1982) in terms of the interplay between local coherence and thematic content in the unfolding of discourse (cf. Gatewood’s 1985 analysis of personal representations of segmentation of collective activities).

These perspectives contribute an understanding of what specific elements and dynamics are at play; often these are neglected in studies of “processes” of personal and social change (Luborsky 1985; Nisbet 1969). Arguably, the entire experience-world was made malleable and open for review, but not all features were altered. That was especially the case for gender and conjugal relationships (whose nature is powerfully shaped by wider cultural forces), which were rearranged or suspended but ultimately not recast into a new form.

The informants described here did not attend any collective retirement rituals or initiations instructing or regulating their postretirement behavior. Nonetheless, they pursued remarkably similar patterns in the passage. Their major resources for knowledge and examples were peers who had retired. As briefly noted in the description of the first stage of retirement, age peers, colleagues, and neighbors who were experienced with retirement, and not parents, were the main reference points. Most of the parents of this sample of retirees did not survive to retire.

New retirees’ yard work can be only partially explained if isolated from the events of individual lifetimes, personal and cultural symbols, and transitional contexts. When they are set within psychosocial and ideological context, though, a fuller, more accurate account is provided. A key element of the transition is the fashioning of raw cultural materials into a personally meaningful sense of self and life.

Strong similarities between the nature of these projects and those of transitional spaces and potential spaces (Grolnik 1987) were suggested. The projects were not just instrumental activities; expressive, playful associations and even fantasy are integral components. Informants demarcated a conceptual arena within which they manipulated partially developed cultural and personalized symbols and images inherent to the transition between life stages. Retirees also played inventively with several kinds of raw materials drawn from several sources, including multivalent symbols (earth and pioneer farmers) and recapitulated elements from the normative life course and from individual lifetimes as part of generating new self images.

Partial explanations were found in that informants were reacting to the new freedom or carrying out long-deferred activities. Early in retirement, these reflect a retrospective orientation that shapes retirement as freedom from work constraints, but not yet freedom to conduct other activities. The labors are more than reactive states or the simple fulfillment of long-deferred maintenance tasks, however, and a fuller explanation is possible when set in the context of the retirement transition.

Retirement, the process of separation from the realm of career jobs, is continued in the initial period of social retirement in two fashions. Informants left their homes and community entirely by taking postretirement trips. This accomplishes social separation and isolation from the community of social relationships. Second, there is an isolation and partial seclusion from people in the community accomplished through activities inside the household and backyard.

During this moratorium period, informants worked to strip down the established surface terrain of their yards and households to reveal the bare earth. Physically strenuous engagement with the earth included planting new materials and constructing a new order for retirement life. At this time, they converted it into a productive bed to yield edible produce for personal consumption based on individual production. The steps they accomplished were: secluding themselves from other people and preretirement lifestyles; denuding and loosening prior ties to earthly and social estates; recontouring the land and adding new plants, making the earth and themselves productive; redefining cultural ideals of personal independence and self-sufficiency through the products of labors, which serve to reassert personal values and capabilities; and, lastly, using the values and accomplishments of the project as the starting point for reorganizing life in other contexts.

Retirees literally and metaphorically build themselves with and from the ground up by creatively conjoining psychological and sociocultural processes and coming to know a new self and showing it to others. The informants next re-landscape the contours of relationships and lifestyles, in successively wider domains building upon that new conception of self and individual as retiree. Retirees proceed from personal arenas and domestic, to familial, then to community and citizenship arenas.

Informants shared a strong conviction about the proper sequence for reorganizing life after retirement. No public training or social norms guided these actions beyond generic prescriptions for relaxation and leisure during retirement; however, a nonverbal language of spatial actions revealed a shared notion of a conceptual space and of sets of cultural value dilemmas that were addressed. Thus, informants presented “propositions” about realms of experience and relationships when they focused retirement adjustments in that arena. More needs to be learned about such implicit conceptual realms marked by behavioral domains.