ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three themes as they relate to a life-course perspective on work and retirement. They are the significance of institutional structure in forming an age-based life course; the way that the individual life course is rooted in the institutional life course but departs from it in important ways; and the relationship between inference about life-course processes and existence of life-course data. The basic conceptualization is that employment and state institutions create an institutionalized life course so that the rules of these institutions determine the tempo of individual lives, governing transitions from education to work to retirement. The effects of institutional age structuring are mediated in their effects on the individual life course by choices at key branching points. While institutional and individual employment trajectories are used most naturally to analyze events such as job changes or retirement, their effects are broadly important in shaping the individual life course.
