competing workers, changing technology, increasing family demands,
and diminishing stamina. To conserve what they have established, if
not improve it, individuals must continue to do what they have done
before, and do it well. This requires that they avoid the stagnation
of just holding on until retirement. Stagnating—a negative style of
maintenance—implies that the worker holds onby exerting minimal
effort, responding obsequiously to authority, and bending the rules.
Updating,the second style of maintaining, involves more than just
doing tasks; it means striving to do tasks better by keeping current in
the field and renewing skills and knowledge. Workers who stay fresh
remain committed to meeting normative expectations and achiev-
ing goals. Innovating,the third maintenance style, means breaking
new ground by doing tasks differently, doing different tasks, or dis-
covering new challenges. Of course, the ground they break may lead
innovators to construct a new path—one that leads to changing
jobs. Each of these three positive styles of maintaining vocational
self-concepts during later adulthood (doing tasks, doing tasks better,
and doing different tasks) can create a successful and satisfying life,
especially when harmoniously integrated with other life roles.
Many readers may be wondering why they do not know more
people who are maintaining their positions. This raises an impor-
tant point. An increasing number of workers are recycling through
exploration and establishment, then losing their positions and
doing it again, and then yet again. The social expectation that older
adults maintain a productive society harkens back to bureaucratic
organizations wherein the worker, once stabilized, was expected to
put in thirty years and retire. The maintenance stage is the main-
stay of careers that unfold in bureaucratic organizations. However,
today, as many of the large organizations that sustain career main-
tenance disappear, fewer people experience the maintenance stage
as it was once conceptualized. Some workers experience a short-
ened version of the maintenance stage; others experience only a
brief period of stability before being forced to recycle to new posi-
tions; still others are perpetual establishers who enjoy the adventure
of starting anew.
180 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT