The Midlife Years: Human Capital and Job Mobility

Abstract

What does midlife hold for today’s U.S. working adults? Until recently, the modern life course was arranged around three distinct life stages: schooling in youth, work/family responsibilities over the middle adult years, and retirement in the later adult years. This tripartite division of the life course (Kohli 1986) was underpinned by normative expectations about role transitions due to age-grading (Mayer and Schoepflin 1989; Settersten 1998) and cohort socialization (Easterlin 1987). The timing and sequencing of role transitions within each life stage – although often gender-segregated into midlife work careers for men and family careers for women – then constituted, until recently, fairly predictable life course pathways, interwoven as the substance of individual lives (Elder 1975). However, the tripartite division, also rooted in state policies and industrial production methods of the mid-twentieth century, is becoming more blurred, associated with recent economic restructuring (Heinz 2003; Mayer and Schoepflin 1989; Myles 1990). A shift in work regimes, from mass production to flexible production, is reshaping midlife work arrangements and perhaps the conditions of employability itself (Myles 1990; Vallas 1999).KeywordsHuman CapitalHuman Capital TheoryFlexible Work ArrangementNonstandard Work ArrangementHuman Capital EffectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.