Favoriser l’adaptation à la retraite : investigations qualitative et quantitative de l’identité, du sens et du sentiment de compter pour autrui

Thèse soutenue par Ariane Froidevaux  le vendredi 27 mai 2016 à l’Université de Lausanne, Suisse. Président et membre du jury : M. Jérôme Rossier, Professeur, Vice-doyen de la Faculté Directeur de thèse : M. Andreas Hirschi, Professeur à l’Université de Bern Membres du jury : M. Kène Henkens, Professeur à l’Institut démographique interdisciplinaire des Pays-Bas et aux Universités de Groningen et d’Amsterdam Mme Daniela Jopp, Professeure à l’Université de Lausanne M. Mo Wang, Professeur à l’Un..

Evolution of professionals' careers upon graduation in STEM and occupational turnover over time: Patterns, diversity characteristics, career success, and self-employment

While STEM occupational turnover constitutes a major concern for society given the importance of innovation and technology in today's global economy, it also represents an opportunity to achieve career sustainability for individuals. There is ample research on the reasons why students drop out from STEM education, but evidence on STEM professionals' career patterns and on correlates of occupational turnover after graduation is scarce. Drawing on the sustainable careers framework, the current study examines how STEM graduates' careers evolve over time, revealing diverse patterns of occupational turnover and the relationships of such career patterns with work diversity characteristics in terms of sex and ethnic minority status, career success, and self-employment. Using longitudinal data from 1512 STEM graduates over 10 years, results of an optimal matching analysis demonstrate six career patterns that can be distinguished into three continuity (STEM, part-STEM, non-STEM) and three change (hybrid, boomerang, dropout) sustainable career patterns. We find differences in sex, but not in ethnic minority status, across career patterns. Further, professionals who change from STEM occupations to non-STEM occupations show higher objective career success and are more often self-employed than those following a continuous STEM career pattern. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Health among workers retiring after the state pension age : a longitudinal and comparative study

Background: In recent decades, many countries have observed increasing labor force participation beyond the state pension age (SPA). However, there is a lack of research on employment beyond SPA and how it relates to older work ers’ health. Moreover, there is a need to better understand how institutional factors afect the relationship between older workers’ employment and health. In this study, we examine simultaneous employment and health trajectories over 11 years in 12 countries from Europe and the Americas, and study how these trajectories difer by welfare state regime and level of old-age pension redistribution. Methods: We used a harmonized pooled-country dataset of 3699 older workers based on four representative panel surveys: the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), and the Chilean Social Protection Survey (EPS). We conducted multi channel sequence analysis to estimate the types of simultaneous employment–health trajectories, and multinomial regression analysis to examine the relationship between trajectory types and institutional factors. Results: We found that late retirement was equally associated with poor and good health. There is also a higher prevalence of late retirement trajectories in combination with poor health in liberal welfare regimes and in countries with lower levels of old-age pension redistribution. Conclusion: Our study indicates that nonliberal welfare regimes and redistributive old-age pension policies may be better suited to protect vulnerable workers while providing those in good health with the opportunity to work beyond the SPA

Identity incongruence and negotiation in the transition from work to retirement: A theoretical model

In an aging society, dealing with the disengagement from one’s work-related identity and thequality of retirement adjustment become major concerns for individuals and organizations.However, the processes through which retirement adjustment can be achieved and upon whichconditions this depends are only partially understood, especially regarding identity transitionprocesses. To address this issue, we suggest that identity incongruence, identity transitionnegotiation, and the variety of high-quality exchange relationships represent key factors thatexplain the different experiences in retirement adjustment quality. Integrating social identity, self-categorization, identity negotiation, and interpersonal perspectives, we develop a theoreticalmodel with 12 propositions highlighting the dynamic changes in identity incongruence across timeand the possible coexistence of the work-related identity and the retiree identity. We also discussthe potential boundary conditions of the model, outline directions for future research, and suggestpractical implications at the individual and organizational levels

Hope as a resource for career exploration: Examining incremental and cross-lagged effects

Hope is believed to be beneficial for vocational pursuits, but the question of how and why hope is related to pivotal career development variables remains largely unaddressed. In a series of three studies, we investigated the relationship between hope and career exploration. Study 1 examined at-risk adolescents (N = 228) in Switzerland and showed that hope explains variance in career exploration beyond the significant effects of generalized self-efficacy beliefs and perceived social support. Study 2 found the same result among a group (N = 223) of first-year students at a Swiss university with a measure of state hope. Study 3 applied a one-year cross-lagged design with a diverse group of students (N = 266) at a German university to investigate the mutual effects of dispositional hope and career exploration over time. Although both variables were found to be related within and over time, we could not confirm lagged effects in either direction. The results suggest that hope is significantly correlated with career exploration because both are related to personality and social–contextual variables

Let’s not forget the macro-level factors! : how older workers’ interlocked employment and health trajectories are shaped by welfare regimes and the social norm for working longer

After an era of promoting early retirement as an instrument to address unemployment between the 1970s and the 1990s, the last two decades have seen an increasing labor force participation of older workers beyond statutory retirement age (SRA) in many developed economies (OECD, 2017). This trend is in line with the evolution of researchers’ understanding of late careers from a transition from full-time employment to full retirement (i.e. an event), to a more flexible late career phase (i.e., a process), where retirement consists in diverse activities and is no longer synonym with the end of the career. Retirement trajectories thus constitute chronological sequences of employment statuses (Calvo, Madero-Cabib, & Staudinger, 2018). Since health has been identified as one of the macro resources with the strongest impact on retirement decisions (Birkett, Carmichael, & Duberley, 2017), health statuses should be considered when studying retirement processes. However, the causal influence between employment and health is hard to pin down and likely goes into both directions (Apouey, Guven, & Senik, 2019; Eyjolfsdottir, Baumann, Agahi, Fritzell, & Lennartsson, 2019). In this paper, we therefore investigate the interlocked employment-health trajectories. A Life Course Perspective on Late Careers The life course perspective, which considers retirement “as a transition in the course of the lifespan” (Wang & Shi, 2014, p. 212), is particularly useful when studying older workers’ retirement sequences because it focuses on, first, trajectories’ change over time described in terms of positive or negative pathways, and second, on individuals' limited agency given the influence of the social context (Wang & Shi, 2014). Potential drivers of the co-development of employment and health in later life is the formal institutional context (i.e., the retirement-related public policies) and the social norm of working beyond statutory retirement age (SRA) (Froidevaux, Hirschi, & Wang, 2018; Wang, Henkens, & van Solinge, 2011). However, as pointed by these authors, the influence of these institutional factors on retirement outcomes remains largely unknown. Our first aim is to identify the typical trajectories to map the distribution of potential ways through which employment and health can interact in later life. While past studies have explored the influence of health on retirement trajectories (Baumann & Madero-Cabib, in press) or the influence of retirement trajectories on health (Madero-Cabib, Corna, & Baumann, 2019), to the best of our knowledge this study represents the first attempt to model individuals’ interlocked employment-health trajectories. Notably, because we consider the effects of age, we show evidence that the effect of retirement is distinct from the effect of aging (van der Heide, van Rijn, Robroek, Burdorf, & Proper, 2013). Our second aim is to identify how two different institutional factors may be associated with the employment-health trajectories: the welfare regime on the formal side, and the social norm of working beyond the SRA on the informal side (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Jansen, 2018). By doing so, this study addresses previous calls for additional retirement research focusing not on the micro- but on the macro-level (Shultz & Wang, 2011). Methods We followed 3,701 older workers (mean age of 65 years old) from 12 countries for 11 years (2004 to 2015). Based on the typology by Esping-Andersen (1990), countries representing five welfare regimes were selected: the United States and Chile (liberal countries); Austria, Germany, Belgium, France (corporatist countries); the United Kingdom and Switzerland (liberal-corporatist countries); Denmark and Sweden (social-democratic countries); and finally Spain and Italy (Southern European). A harmonized pooled-country dataset was built from four representative panel surveys: The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), and the Chilean Encuesta de Protección Social (EPS) [Social Protection Survey]. In a first step, to estimate the interlocked employment-health trajectories, we used Multichannel Sequence Analysis (Gauthier, Widmer, Bucher, & Notredame, 2010). We specifically used the Ward cluster analysis, and the Average Silhouette Widths (ASW) index to estimate the most informative and robust number of clusters. In a second step, we examined the relationships between our independent variables of interest (welfare regime and social norm) and the dependent variable (clusters of employment-health trajectories) by running multinomial logistic regressions analyses. Results Employment-health trajectories. First, findings revealed that on-time and early retirement is more frequent that late retirement–regardless of health. Among early and on-time retirees, however, there were more older adults in poor health than in good health. This highlights the importance of health for retirement decisions, as older workers in poor health are often forced to retire early. Among late retirees, in contrast, there was about a similar share of individuals in good and poor health. As late retirement does not necessarily have to go along with poor health (i.e., individuals who could not afford to retire and would have to work despite their poor heath), this may imply that older workers in good health chose to extend their working lives among different other options (e.g., leisure activities). However, our analysis indicated that women, individuals with lower levels of income, and those with lower levels of education were more likely to be in late retirement and poor health or early death; thus, constituting more vulnerable groups. Institutional predictors. Second, of all welfare regimes, older workers in the corporatist and Southern European welfare regimes most frequently followed on-time or early retirement trajectories – while being more frequently in good health in corporatist countries and more frequently in poor health in Southern countries. Descriptive analyses further showed that older workers in liberal welfare regimes are more likely follow late retirement trajectories and in particular, late retirement trajectories in poor health. However, including the social norm into the analysis picks up the effect of the welfare regime and our results clearly show that the social norm best explains late retirement combined with poor health. This finding indicates that if the social norms for working longer are strong (i.e., where it is considered normal that older workers aged above 65 are working), individuals comply with the social norm even under the condition of poor health. Due to such social norms, alternative satisfying opportunities for being engaged in societal life other than work may be lacking, so that older adults work until they are no longer able to or die. Conclusion Our study has important implications for a theoretical understanding of the role of macro-level factors on late-life employment trajectories using a life course perspective. Specifically, our findings suggest that both formal and informal institutional factors (i.e., welfare regimes and social norms) significantly determine the employment-health trajectories that older workers experience in later life. Future studies should explore how the social norm for working longer interacts with the welfare regimes: For instance, does the social norm lead to changes in social policy, or rather vice versa? In terms of practical implications, this work further implies that policies must target social norms in addition to welfare regimes. To do so, a long-term approach to change retirement-related institutional cultures is needed