퇴직관리 탈동조화와 중장년 경력전환 전략의 형성 과정: 구성주의 근거이론을 중심으로

초록

This study analyzes the career transition process of middle-aged and older workers under retirement decoupling (the gap between the statutory retirement age and the actual timing of workforce exit) and conceptualizes how career transition strategies are formed. Rather than treating retirement decoupling as a temporal gap, the study reconceptualizes it as the decoupling of retirement management, whereby firms formally maintain the statutory retirement system while adjusting their workforce through early, honorary, and voluntary retirement schemes. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), in-depth interviews with 21 participants (13 middle-aged and older workers and 8 human resource managers) were analyzed through initial, focused, and theoretical coding. The findings show that career transition unfolds as a recursive process in which five categories (sensing the boundary, interpretive negotiation, exploring available resources, enacting transition pathways, and reconstructing work identity) interact cyclically, with "negotiating voluntariness" emerging as the core category. Participants perceived the decoupling of retirement management as a signal of organizational exclusion, negotiated a sense of choice and agency even under coercive circumstances, and enacted transition pathways and reconstructed a new work identity by reappraising and mobilizing individual, relational, and policy resources. This reinterpretation of coercion as voluntariness produced a meaning feedback effect that reinforced the identity of a person who works autonomously. The study reconceptualizes career transition as a process in which resources, voluntariness, and pathways are combined through the interaction of structural conditions and interpretive agency, and proposes a Resource Configuration-based Transition Strategy Model.

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