A Lively Discussion of “Retiring” with MIT Sloan’s Lotte Bailyn

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Credit: Martha E. Mangelsdorf, for IWER

"How do you transition from a life that's centered around your work…to one that isn’t?” 

That, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Emerita Lotte Bailyn explained at a recent presentation at MIT Sloan, is the research question that motivated the scholarship underpinning a new book she coauthored, Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You (Routledge, 2025).

Bailyn, who is the T Wilson (1953)  Professor of Management Emerita at MIT Sloan, spoke at a session of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) seminar earlier this semester. She  described the research process she and coauthors Teresa M. Amabile, Marcy Crary, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram undertook in their multiyear study of corporate employees as those employees undertook the transition to retirement. Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor, Emerita, at Harvard Business School; Crary is Professor Emerita at Bentley University;  Hall is the Friedman Professor of Management, Emeritus, at Boston University; and Kram is the R.C. Shipley Professor in Management, Emerita, at Boston University. 

The authors interviewed 120 individuals, and conducted multiple interviews with 14 people whose stories are featured in the book. From that research, Bailyn explained, she and her coauthors identified four tasks individuals need to complete in the process of transitioning to retirement. The four tasks are: 1) deciding when and how to retire; 2) detaching from work; 3) experimenting with provisional life structures for retirement; and 4) developing a stable life structure in retirement. 

“You’ve got some work to do to accomplish the four tasks,” Bailyn said. But she also noted that they don’t have to be dealt with in order, and there is no one best way to tackle them. Retirement is “not an event that happens at one time,” Bailyn explained. “It’s a process. It takes time.  It can take many years.”

Bailyn added that, pre-retirement, “organizations don’t know how to deal with their older workforce, and they deal with them pretty badly.” She emphasized the benefits of a “phasedown” period where people approaching retirement can work less than full-time.  

After Bailyn spoke, three expert panelists shared their perspectives on Retiring, with Kate Kellogg, who is the David J. McGrath Jr Professor of Management and Innovation and a Professor of Business Administration at MIT Sloan, serving as moderator.  All three of the panelists spoke highly of the book. “This was not a book,” said Joe Coughlin, Director of MIT AgeLab. “It was a gift.” 

All three panelists also agreed that retirement, as a process and as a stage of life, is not well enough understood or studied. “When it comes to retirement…we run out of narrative” as a society, Coughlin said. “We do not have a societal story of what retirement is.”  

Jamie Ladge, a Professor of Management at the Boston College Carroll School of Management, similarly noted that retiring is an “underrepresented experience.” 

Phyllis Moen, Professor Emeritus at both the University of Minnesota and Cornell University and a McKnight Endowed Presidential Chair, identified four specific areas where there is a need for additional research on retirement: 1) conceptual clarity and an examination of outdated templates about retirement; 2) how retirement experiences vary and how, in particular, financial inequality plays out in retirement; 3) alternative life course pathways (for example, people who take on other jobs after they retire from their primary career) and how they vary by gender; and 4) technological, organizational, and policy changes that will affect the future of both work and retirement.

“Retirement, paid work, and education as institutions are socially constructed, unequal, dynamic, changing,” Moen concluded. “And they can be changed.”