ABSTRACT
The management of human stress includes a set of mechanisms all the way from one extreme— which would consist of individual techniques—to the other extreme— which consists of well-elaborated and institutionalized organizational solutions. Organized or regularized methods for the management of stress that include organizational forms, cultural traits, and other inventions, the development of social identities, and the like. There appear to be three major kinds of career stress in large organizations: risk of unemployment, the career sequence, and the process of disengagement from organizations that must inevitably come at the end of one's career. The development of alternative identities as a method of maintaining distance from the potential stresses of organizational employment, while itself a technique for the management of such stress, carries its own burden of stress. The most intensively studied has been the possibility that such alternative identities will conflict with one's organizational or occupational identities.
