Recent research on ways of ‘supporting the supporters’ of elderly people at home has taken a ‘snapshot’ approach to assessing carers' needs and has focussed primarily on the perceptions of service providers. Such an approach tends to neglect the complexity of caring relationships (particularly that between carer and person cared for), which must be understood if carers are to be offered appropriate help. The present paper reports the construction of ‘caring biographies’, using in-depth interviews with 41 daughters who had cared for their mothers on a co-resident basis and who had ceased to do so within the last ten years. The biographies were used to examine the nature of the caring process in terms of the carer's motivation to care, changes in the mother/daughter relationship and in the carer's extra-caring life. The research reveals both the power exerted by the injunction to care and the mixed legacy of satisfaction overlaid with bitterness that was experienced by a majority of respondents, largely as a result of inadequate and/or inappropriate support. We suggest ways in which professional workers may recast the way in which they approach the needs of carers based on a deeper understanding of the temporal and relational dimensions of caring.

Recent international research on retirement neglects the macro social context in which the process occurs. In an attempt to redress this neglect this paper analyses the phenomenon of retirement in Japan. It is argued, firstly, that different understandings of egalitarianism and individualism structure public policies about retirement in different countries. Japan with its different culture but highly developed economy provides a unique point of comparison with other developed countries because it can provide evidence of cultural values affecting individual motivations to action. In Japan, a strong group orientation as opposed to individualism in other developed countries has two consequences relevant to retirement. Firstly, individuals are unwilling to separate from their work group and, secondly, they are not socialised for leisure. Evidence is presented on how macro social factors influence work participation and attitudes. Finally, multivariate analyses show that cultural factors operate in conjunction with economic ones in retirement decisions. It is concluded that macro-social factors cannot be neglected in studying retirement and that caution is needed in taking policy innovations for dealing with population ageing from one culture and another.

At a time when the proportion of full-time permanent jobs is decreasing and there is evidence of a growth in ‘peripheral’ forms of work, it is important to review the position of older workers, both men and women. Using data from the Labour Force Survey of 1984, it is shown that, while the employment rate falls sharply in the ten-year period prior to state retirement age, it is only those of post-retirement age who are disproportionately represented in peripheral forms of work. It is suggested that some ‘peripheral’ forms of work allow greater flexibility in age of retirement than permanent full-time jobs. While there are clear gender differences among those of pre-retirement age, with a higher proportion of women than men in peripheral jobs, there is a marked erosion of these gender differences amongst men and women who work beyond state retirement age.

Change of residence from a private household to a residential care facility, implying the relinquishing of household activities, is as critical a life event for older women as retirement from employment outside the home is for older men. This transition terminates many of the activities that had structured the older women's lives for decades, and implies modification of patterns of lifestyle. Based on interviews with female residents of residential care facilities in the Munich area, a close relative who had observed the transition and an employee at the facility, the impacts of the move on dimensions/aspects of lifestyle were analysed, as well as the success with which adaptation to the new setting was made. The positive relationship posited by the continuity hypothesis between continuity in lifestyle and contentment with life situation were generally upheld, although the compensation for a dimension of lifestyle disrupted by the transition by another dimension often occurred.