“Work is Staying Alive": Aging and Sense of Work for Teachers of Higher Education

Abstract

In the face of changes in the demographic profile of Brazilian population with the increase in the number of elderly people, the subject population aging has been extensively studied by areas of Human and Health Sciences. There is still a big gap regarding to these studies in the area of administration. The goal of this article is to understand the meaning of work for elderly professor of higher education. In order to support the study, theories are redeemed about the centrality of work, aging and meaning of work, retirement and on teaching. The research is qualitative and data were collected through field research. The corpus of interviewees was composed of 16 teachers. The interviews were analyzed in depth by the method of content analysis. It could be perceived that the work for the interviewees is something very important, that retirement is unwanted and feared and that teachers feel prejudice at work because of their age. In existing gender relations in the workplace, showed the existence of prejudice is not declared by the men against the women work.

Keywords

• Aging
• Meaning of Work
• Professor of Higher Education