From Work to Retirement—Critical Perspectives on Normative Transitions in Ageing Societies

Dear Colleague,

The social organisation of the life course as a sequence of education, work, and retirement has undergone radical transformations over recent decades (Phillipson, 2018). While careers are becoming more and more individualised, fragmented, and precarious, policies have turned increasingly towards the imperative of ‘extending working lives’. This has resulted in the paradoxical situation where older adults are politically expected to work longer, while the actual opportunities to do so do not always exist. Moreover, this also impacts the pathways and trajectories on which older adults transition from working life to retirement. Therefore, new forms of retirement transitions need to emerge or gain importance, such as bridge employment, encore careers, partial retirement, or transitions out of long-term unemployment.

The majority of retirement research has so far adopted functionalist or rational choice perspectives in their concerns with individual motivations to retire, institutional possibilities for retiring, and how retiring affects economic and health-related outcomes (cf. Eckerdt, 2010, Wang and Shi, 2014). In reaction to this research, more critical perspectives have acknowledged the socio-structural and institutional constraints older adults face in retiring. The institutional pathways taken by individuals towards retirement have been shown to be strongly dependent upon welfare legislation (Fasang, 2010), discourse, and norms around the ‘right’ retirement ages (Jansen, 2018) as well as individual characteristics, such as gender, health, or education (Loretto and Vickerstaff, 2015). As Phillipson (2018) has argued, retirement has itself become a ‘contested’ institution in the 21st century, fragmented across different pathways and transitions, and older adults’ (in)ability to remain in the labour market has increasingly become framed as an individual responsibility.

Consequently, this Special Issue aims to assemble contributions that critically engage with recent developments in the transition from work to retirement. Critique, in this regard, can draw on three paradigmatic traditions: (1) structuralist (targeting socio-economic structures and powerful institutions), (2) symbolic (targeting discourse and power), and (3) culturalist (targeting social practices and subjectivities). Constructive, reconstructive, and deconstructive approaches are welcome. Topics may address new and emerging transitions, discourse about retiring, institutionalised and/or everyday ageism, practices of ‘doing’ retiring, as well as the role of social inequalities and intersectionalities (e.g., gender, age, class, ethnicity, and disability).

Dr. Anna Wanka
Guest Editor

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• life course
• retirement
• extending working lives
• labour market