One wonders if the maintenance stage itself is disappearing, as
the corporations that once provided lifetime employment shift to
new methods of organizing their labor (Collin & Young, 2000).
New models of protean (Hall & Mirvis, 1993) and boundaryless
(Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) careers are emerging in conjunction
with the revised psychological contract (Rousseau, 1989) between
employer and employee. With a new focus on constructing and
managing careers (Savickas, 2000b; Watts, in press), these models
emphasize resilience and starting over, not maintenance and preser-
vation. Given these social changes, I have replaced the mainte-
nance stage in Super’s vocational development theory with the
management stage in career construction theory.
Career construction theory asserts that coping with change and
managing transitions involves re-exploration and re-establishment.
Having secured a new role, the individual typically recycles—a
minicycle—through one or more of the career-stage maxicycles
(Super, 1984). Thus the high school graduate entering her first job
usually progresses through a period of growth in the new role, includ-
ing exploration of the nature and expectations of that role. She
becomes established in it, manages the role if successful, and then
experiences disengagement if, with further growth, she becomes
ready to change jobs or even switch occupational fields. Similarly,
the established worker, frustrated or advancing, may experience
growth and explore new roles and seek to get established in one of
them. As workers manage their careers, they sometimes wish they
could experience a long period of maintenance in which their
future, with a solid pension, was secure. But now even the role of
pensioner is being reconstructed by societies that once viewed age
sixty-five as the time of mandatory retirement.
Career Stage Five: Disengagement
The career stage of disengagement (sixty-five and older) involves the
vocational development tasks of decelerating (reorient vocational self-
concept), retirement planning (disengage vocational self-concept),
A DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY OF VOCATIONAL BEHAVIOR 181