Beyond retirement: The Kibuka Transition Model and the rise of the crowning job

1. Introduction

There is a quiet crisis unfolding in the professional lives of millions of people which arrives at the moment a person clears their desk for the last time and steps out of the office into what is usually celebrated as the reward of a lifetime of labour. However, for many people retirement is not liberation but a loss. The usual idea of retirement is based on the assumption that older people want to and should slowly stop working and then stop being productive forever. This assumption was first given a theoretical form by Elaine Cumming and William Henry who introduced disengagement theory which is the proposition that aging is characterised by a natural and mutually beneficial withdrawal between the individual and society.

1 While disengagement theory was influential as the first sociological theory of aging, it has since been largely discredited as a universal account of retirement experience. The lived reality of modern retirement is far more complicated and more urgent than the disengagement model anticipates.

2 People work for reasons that extend well beyond the financial aspect. Work provides social connection, a sense of competence and a source of identity. When formal employment ends the removal of these psychosocial anchors can prompt what researchers like Sadaf Ahsan and others have described as a post-retirement identity crisis which is a period of self-questioning and in many cases, depress