Retirement and Organizations: Advocating Organizational Responsibility for Retirement in Practice and Scholarship

Abstract

In this editorial we discuss organizations’ role in the process of retirement. We argue that organizations have abdicated their moral obligation to older workers, thereby negatively impacting older workers’ wellbeing and their successful transition to retirement. We also note that organizational studies scholars have not paid adequate attention to that negligence, or its alternatives. We suggest that, among other reasons, this oversight can be a result of the comparatively privileged socioeconomic positions of faculty in business schools vis-à-vis older workers in many other occupations, as well as to a discord between traditional human capital and human resource management theories and modern retirement practices. Organizations exert significant influence on how and when workers retire, in ways that are related both to their treatment of older workers and their failure to provide adequate retirement support. These place the onus unduly on individuals to manage their own retirement while simultaneously restricting their control over retirement decisions. We call for renewed research attention to organizations’ role in retirement planning and decisions in pursuit of a more inclusive and socially responsible organizational approach to workforce aging and retirement.