At the threshold of retirement: From all-absorbing relations to self-actualization

ABSTRACT

To investigate the complexities of the retirement process, the present article draws on a case study of Eva, a Swedish woman who “awakened” from all-absorbing relations. It considers the ways in which retirement can enable liberation from patriarchal kinship structures and embodied values of respectability. The aim is to illuminate how deep, embodied values can become conscious and explicit during precarious life situations and transitional phases. The relation between the Swedish welfare state, an I-we balance, and gender equity values are illuminated. These analytical dimensions support the analysis by providing insights into the ways in which individuals embody and use cultural and social structures when they aim to manage unpredictability and to create change toward self-actualization.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural structures
• emancipation
• gender equality
• I-we balance
• retirement
• Sweden

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank “Eva” and all of the individuals in the research project for sharing their life histories and thoughts on the retirement process. Many thanks as well to Mattias Bengtsson, Marita Flisbäck and Mats Trondman for constructive and supportive comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks as well to anonymous reviewers for their excellent advice on how to further strengthen the article. Finally, I am grateful to my colleague Cecilia Trenter for her clever questions during a lunch break early in my writing process – questions that came to facilitate my efforts to clarify my arguments.

Funding

Financial support for the research was received from Kamprad Family Foundation (Reg. no. 2013–0049).

Notes

^1. One prominent feature of the Swedish welfare state’s development is a movement over time away from needs testing for allowances and conditional rights toward a universal and general system of social security (Berggren & Trädgårdh, 2006, p. 253).

^2. We cannot decide in advance whether the retirement phase will turn out to be of a liminal character for a particular individual. This is an empirical question and may depend, as will be shown in this article, on other critical events in life as well as the specific needs of a particular individual. Retirement as a status passage has lost some of its meaning in modern social life because older people are mobile, moving in and out of working life, etc. (Giddens & Pierson, 1998, p. 107; Moen, Kim, & Hofmeister, 2001; Onyx & Baker, 2006).

^3. Dahl (2005) has also made us aware of the heteronormativity of the gender equity discourse—it is built upon two distinctive gender identities that are often thought to contribute different, complementary, qualities—for example, inside a specific organization (see also Charles & Bradley, 2009). Alongside gender equality we have, ironically enough, gender essentialism (England, 2010).

^4. The name Eva is a pseudonym.

^5. Eva describes her husband as “unobtrusive and careful” and marked by his repressed childhood. Now, he shows his core values, in practice, by helping the son who took over the estate and by doing so in a way his own father never did.

^6. As Flisbäck and Bengtsson (forthcoming) describe it, this could be seen as a learning process for becoming “a self-oriented subject,” which is enhanced during the retirement process, as this is a phase in life when individuals are encouraged by a cultural structure in society to see to their own needs, something that is also often reinforced by neighbors, former colleagues, etc.

^7. Eva’s interest in finance could also be interpreted, from a critical sociological perspective, as a result of a capitalist cultural structure—thus, even if Eva feels emancipated from patriarchal traditions, there are of course other cultural structures with dominating power potentials, and these could, seemingly paradoxically, be perceived as liberating. This may especially be true when it comes to knowledge practices related to such a male-oriented institution as the stock exchange.

^8. Let us not forget that although Eva worked part-time for most of her life, her choice to keep up her professional career when her father-in-law was against it was also a way of trying to maintain a certain level of autonomy.

^9. For example, the labor market is divided with regard to gender; mothers are still on parental leave to a greater extent than fathers are, and women earn less, on average, than men do.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for the research was received from Kamprad Family Foundation (Reg. no. 2013–0049).