This paper examines associations between early and mid-lifecourse events with economic activity in later life. These lifecourse trajectories are in turn examined for their impact on the pathways of men and women to retirement, including whether these pathways are perceived by individuals as been chosen or imposed. Data are from the three waves (2005, 2008 and 2011) of the French version of the Gender and Generations survey and comprise a sub-sample of 2,016 respondents in the birth cohort 1941–1960 who participated in all three waves. The analysis is undertaken within a gender perspective and in the context of the (de)standardisation of the lifecourse. The results show that mid-life and later-life work history, job category, employment sector and economic activity are influenced by early lifecourse events for both men and for women. Different pathways to retirement are observed according to institutional factors that determine access to pension rights. Women whose family formation occurred early, together with women who had an absence of family events (partnership or childlessness), were much more likely to be economically active in later life than men with the same characteristics. The results suggest that institutionalised (standardised) lifecourse patterns exist simultaneously with individualised (destandardised) patterns.

This article explores the conditions for extended working life from an organising perspective. Based on the idea that temporality makes up a fundamental organising dimension, it discusses conceptions of internal job mobility, and if and when employees are expected to relocate to a different unit at work. The material consists of interviews with 11 men between the ages of 56 and 74, working in manual and managerial capacities at a foundry of a Swedish branch of a large international steel company. The results show that internal work mobility is regulated by normative assumptions of mobility in terms of on- and off-time. This socio-temporal order constructs younger age groups as the age normality while designating the older employees’ transitions as a normative breach. It is also shown that the temporal order constitutes a disciplining element steering employees from an early stage to plan for limitations that may arise as a result of ageism and/or physical changes. The result confirms that transition to less-physically demanding tasks is a prerequisite for continuing working in a physically demanding job. These transitions are not, however, included in the socio-temporal order of the company, but are presented as the older employees’ individual problem. All together, these results show the need to introduce organisational practices and corporate strategies in the debate on extended working life.

The sector of temporary employment agencies in Belgium has been growing for more than 20 years. If temporary work is seen primarily as a path into the workforce for young people, it also concerns seniors, in increasing proportions. The problematic of end-of-career temporary work was analysed from a dual perspective, considering the embedding of temporalities in advanced modernity and more broadly the ‘lifecourse’ paradigm. A typology was created based on qualitative analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews of temporary workers ⩾45 years old. Results demonstrate how the experiences of temporary workers nearing retirement depend on professional, familial and social paths, and also reveal the presence of different cultural models: What is the importance of work in construction of an identity? What standards and values are applied? How is social time prioritised according to these norms? These analyses incorporate an intersectional framework in which gender and social inequalities structure the lives of workers approaching the end of their careers.

Compared to younger age groups, older people spend more time in their locality and rely more heavily on its pedestrian and public transport infrastructure. Qualitative studies provide unique insight into people's experiences. We conducted a qualitative evidence synthesis of United Kingdom-based studies of older people's experiences of travelling in the urban environment. We searched health, social science, age-related and transport-related databases from 1998 to 2017. Fourteen papers (from 12 studies) were included in a thematic synthesis, a three-staged process that moves iteratively between codes, descriptive themes and cross-cutting analytical themes. Emerging themes were discussed with policy advisers. Four overarching themes were identified. The first and second theme pointed to the importance of ‘getting out’ and of being independent travellers. The third and fourth themes highlighted how local environments and travel systems enabled (or prevented) older people from realising these valued dimensions of travel. The loss of local amenities and micro-environmental features, such as pavement quality, personal safety and aesthetic appearance, were recurrent concerns. Free modes of travel like walking and bus travel were highly valued, including the social engagement they facilitated. Our review suggests that, while its extrinsic value (reaching destinations) matters, the intrinsic value of travel matters too. The process of travel is experienced and enjoyed for its own sake, with older people describing its contribution to their wellbeing.

Caring for one's grandchildren has become a more common experience for individuals partly as a result of a longer overlap between the lives of grandparents and their grandchildren. Existing research shows that around 50 per cent of grandparents engage in some grandparental child care in most European countries, however, this proportion is higher among older people with a migrant background, partly due to greater economic necessity among migrant families. Research has also highlighted ethnic differences in parents’ child-care selection, even after controlling for their socio-economic status. Building on these strands of work, this paper investigates the differences in the use of (grandparental) child care among parents from different Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in the United Kingdom, using data from Understanding Society. The results show that parents from Other White, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and African communities are less likely to use child care than White British parents, while the opposite is true for Caribbean parents. However, among parents using child care, individuals from the Other White, Caribbean and African groups are less likely than the White British majority to be using grandparental child care as a supplement to other child-care types, or on its own. Ethnic differentials in the use of child care per se and grandparental child care in particular, have significant policy implications, and may mask other kinds of ethnic differences.

In policy debates it is commonly claimed that older workers are entering a period of choice and control. In contrast, Guy Standing's book The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class, published in 2011, argues that older people are increasingly joining the ‘precariat’, by taking low-level jobs to supplement dwindling pension incomes. We argue that many older workers, not just those in ‘precarious jobs’, feel a sense of ‘ontological precarity’. Pressures to work longer, combined with limited alternative employment prospects and inadequate retirement incomes, give rise to a heightened sense of precarity. We develop a new theoretical model for understanding precarity as a lived experience, which is influenced by the intersection between precarious jobs, precarious welfare states and precarious households. This model is then illustrated using qualitative research from two organisations in the United Kingdom: ‘Local Government’ and ‘Hospitality’. In both organisations, older workers experienced a sense of ontological precarity because they worried about the long-term sustainability of their jobs and saw limited alternative sources of retirement income. Household circumstances either reinforced interviewees’ sense of precarity, or acted as a buffer against it. This was particularly important for women, as they typically accrued smaller financial resources in their own right. Our concluding discussion builds on this more advanced theoretical understanding of older worker precarity to call for a rethinking of state and employer support for decisions around later-life working and retirement.

Despite its benefits for prolonging careers, participation in training is far lower among older employees (age 50+) than among younger employees. This study analyses gender differences in older employees’ training participation. To investigate the predictors of training intensity, we examine two forms of training: formal educational programmes and on-the-job training. The study draws on a novel data-set, the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, carried out in nine European countries in 2015 and 2016, analysing 2,517 older employees and their managers, spread over 228 organisations. We concentrate on the interplay between employees’ gender, managers’ gender and managers’ ageism in shaping older employees’ training participation. Our findings indicate comparable training participation of older men and women in both forms of training, yet older women more often pay for enrolment in educational programmes themselves. Also, predictors of training participation are different. In line with the tenet of ‘gendered ageism’, we find that managerial ageism primarily targets older women, excluding female employees from the training opportunities available to their comparable male colleagues. Finally, female managers are associated with higher training participation rates for older employees, but only for older men. This result supports ‘queen bee’ arguments and runs counter to ‘homophily’ arguments. Overall, the study demonstrates that workplace dynamics and managerial decisions contribute to the reproduction of traditional gender divides in the late career.

With a policy shift towards personalisation of adult social care in England, much attention has focused on individualised support for older people with care needs. This article reports the findings of a scoping review of United Kingdom (UK) and non-UK literature, published in English from 2005 to 2017, about day centres for older people without dementia and highlights the gaps in evidence. This review, undertaken to inform new empirical research, covered the perceptions, benefits and purposes of day centres. Searches, undertaken in October/November 2014 and updated in August 2017, of electronic databases, libraries, websites, research repositories and journals, identified 77 relevant papers, mostly non-UK. Day centres were found to play a variety of roles for individuals and in care systems. The largest body of evidence concerned social and preventive outcomes. Centre attendance and participation in interventions within them impacted positively on older people's mental health, social contacts, physical function and quality of life. Evidence about outcomes is mainly non-UK. Day centres for older people without dementia are under-researched generally, particularly in the UK. In addition to not being studied as whole services, there are considerable evidence gaps about how day centres are perceived, their outcomes, what they offer, to whom and their wider stakeholders, including family carers, volunteers, staff and professionals who are funding, recommending or referring older people to them.

In many countries, population ageing is challenging the viability of the welfare state and generating higher demands for long-term care. At the same time, increasing participation in the labour force is essential to ensuring the sustainability of the welfare state. To address the latter issue, affected countries have adopted measures to increase employment; e.g. welfare recipients in Germany are required to be available for any type of legal work. However, 7 per cent of welfare benefit recipients in Germany provide long-term care for relatives or friends, and this care-giving may interfere with their job search efforts and decrease their employment opportunities. Our paper provides evidence of the relationship between the care responsibilities and employment chances of welfare recipients in Germany. Our analyses are based on survey data obtained from the panel study ‘Labour Market and Social Security’ and on panel regression methods. The results reveal a negative relationship between intensive care-giving (ten or more hours per week) and employment for male and female welfare recipients. However, employment prospects recover when care duties end and are subsequently no longer lower for carers than for non-carers.

Swedish nursing homes’ use of Instagram has increased vastly in the past few years. Instagram is understood as a means to manage the image they wish to mediate to the public. This article examines what is displayed in the nursing homes’ Instagram accounts, and what kind of reality is thereby constructed. The data consist of 338 Instagram images from four nursing homes’ Instagram accounts. It is found that nursing home life is primarily depicted on Instagram as active, sociable and fun, with informal, friendly relations between staff and residents, and residents able to continue to live as before, if not better, and to interact with surrounding society. Frailty, boredom, loneliness and death were absent from the data, as were mundane care activities. The article concludes that the presentations in the Instagram accounts challenge the traditional idea of nursing homes as total institutions, and the decline and loss associated with living in such institutions; however, there is a risk that these idyllic presentations conceal the inherent problems of nursing home life.

Policies to extend working life (EWL) assume homogeneous workers face similar choices about working longer: this may be difficult for women, workers in physically onerous jobs or in low-paid precarious employment. Work-life trajectories are gendered; women interrupt employment and pension-building to provide care. There is occupational variation in capacities to prolong working lives: physically demanding jobs cause work-related health deficits. The precariously employed cannot contribute regularly to pensions and may face age discrimination. This research provides an inter-occupational and cross-national dimension to EWL research, comparing women teachers and health-care workers in the United States of America (USA) and Republic of Ireland. It documents intra-cohort distinctions that emerge among women when considering educational opportunities and occupational tracks expressed in lifecourse trajectories and accumulated capacities for extended work. Analysis draws on interview data from ten teachers and ten health-care workers in each country, comparing the implications of EWL policies for women workers: in precarious versus secure occupations and occupations with different physical demands. It reveals work-life trajectories leading to poorer financial and health outcomes for older health-care workers, especially in the USA. Most women (regardless of occupation or country) opposed extending working life, with concerns ranging from health status and ability to work to the desire to have healthy years in retirement. The most important distinctions are between the occupational categories considered, rather than cross-national differences. Implications for national and work-place policy and research are considered.

The aim of this study was to explore older workers’ motivation for a full or extended working life. With particular focus on assistant nurses aged 55–64 years, working in the elderly care sector. Focus group interviews were conducted with five different groups of assistant nurses. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews and five main themes were developed from the data: ‘Organisational issues’, ‘Health-related problems’, ‘Private issues’, ‘Meaningfulness and appreciation’ and ‘Social support’. Several of the main themes concerned problems with too high work demands of the assistant nurses. These findings suggest that it is important to improve the working conditions of assistant nurses in order to create a more sustainable working life. Increasing the number of staff and improving recovery opportunities and work–life balance could be important steps to improving the working conditions for this group. Finally, upgrading the competency and professionalism of assistant nurses could help to increase the motivation for a full or extended working life.

Attitudes to ageing can predispose decision-making as governments, interest groups and electorates negotiate competing demands in the context of economic constraints and social change. This paper, based on national survey data, investigates change and stability in Australian attitudes to intergenerational equity from 2009–2010 to 2015–2017, alongside concurrent socio-economic and policy change as well as cohort succession. The emphasis is on the baby-boom cohort who are viewed as significant beneficiaries of social change relative to opportunities of younger and older cohorts. Views of older people as a needy group may be changing slightly as more enter later life with substantial wealth and resources. Our results show that there is little perception of intergenerational conflict with the exception of the Millennial cohort whose life chances are compromised by economic and expenditure constraint over the past decade. Overall, attitudes remain sympathetic to older people, especially among women and people rendered vulnerable by poor health, non-home-ownership and low socio-economic positions. The findings do not align with government portrayals of intergenerational inequalities notwithstanding many having negative views of the future and ongoing expenditure restraint strategies. At what appears to be a critical turning point in the life chances of successive cohorts, the findings indicate the interplay between attitudes and social and policy change, as well as implications for social equity and processes of attitudinal change.

Increasing longevity and the strain on state and occupational pensions have brought into question long-held assumptions about the age of retirement, and raised the prospect of a workplace populated by ageing workers. In the United Kingdom the default retirement age has gone, incremental increases in state pension age are being implemented and ageism has been added to workplace anti-discrimination laws. These changes are yet to bring about the anticipated transformation in workplace demographics, but it is coming, making it timely to ask if the workplace is ready for the ageing worker and how the extension of working life will be managed. We report findings from qualitative case studies of five large organisations located in the United Kingdom. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with employees, line managers, occupational health staff and human resources managers. Our findings reveal a high degree of uncertainty and ambivalence among workers and managers regarding the desirability and feasibility of extending working life; wide variations in how older workers are managed within workplaces; a gap between policies and practices; and evidence that while casualisation might be experienced negatively by younger workers, it may be viewed positively by financially secure older workers seeking flexibility. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing employers and policy makers in making the modern workplace fit for the ageing worker.

This article explores the relationship between Social Quality and income in later life and represents the first application of the concept to a United Kingdom data-set with an explicit focus on older people. In order to undertake this analysis, confirmatory factor analysis models are employed in conjunction with the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). This enables various dimensions or domains of Social Quality to be measured and then subjected to further scrutiny via regression analysis. Initially, the paper explores links between low income, poverty and older people, prior to outlining the concept of Social Quality and its four conditional factors. Following the methodology, the impact of income on Social Quality domains is explored. We identify that differences in income in older age provide a partial explanation of differences in individual Social Quality. While there is a statistically significant relationship between income and certain aspects of Social Quality such as economic security, altruism, social networks and culture/participation, other factors such as health, identity and time did not have a statistically significant relationship with income. This indicates that improvements in the income of older people are likely to positively impact on aspects of their Social Quality. Finally, some policy implications of the finding are outlined with particular reference to the potential role for pensions in enhancing aspects of Social Quality in retirement.

This study responds to a gap in the literature relating to the resilience of people living with dementia in care homes. We applied an ecopsychosocial framework of resilience, theorising that sources of resilience may be personal, social and structural. Visual arts enrichment activities were examined to see how they might provide opportunities for resilience. The data used for this study were qualitative and originated from people with dementia aged between 70 and 99 years old (N = 48) living in four care homes in North East England, United Kingdom and staff/carers/family members (N = 37). The results showed that visual arts enrichment activities supported the resilience of those with dementia through creative expression, increased communication, improved self-esteem, and influenced relationships with carers and family members. It is concluded that even those with advanced dementia are capable of demonstrating resilience which can be supported by, and explored through, visual arts enrichment activities.

The inclusive development strategy proposed by the Chinese government embraces social inclusion for older people. In line with most developing countries, China's policy on social inclusion for older people focuses almost exclusively on material security in the form of pensions. This paper examines the impact of pensions on social inclusion for older people across four dimensions: family interaction, social support, social participation and self-assessment using data from the 2014 China Longitudinal Ageing Social Survey. The results demonstrate that pensions improve dramatically the relationships between older adults and their family members and friends, and therefore their social inclusion in the life world. The exception is social participation which seems to be immune to material income effects. However, the stratified pension system in China generates complex and hierarchical effects on social inclusion among different sub-groups. Social inclusion among older people with high exclusion risks but low pensions is very sensitive to pension levels. Conversely, most pensions are distributed to those with the lowest exclusion risks as a result of the disappearance of their impact on social inclusion. We argue that future social inclusion policies for older people in China should focus first on achieving greater equality in pensions.

It is well established that carriers of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele run a greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia and a strongly age-related condition known to disproportionally affect women. Low educational attainment also stands out as a prominent risk factor, and it has been suggested that occupational class plays a similar role in disease susceptibility. Not yet fully explored, however, is the question of whether socio-economic status (SES) could moderate the effect of APOE ε4. In the present paper, we address this issue. As substantial inequities in workforce participation and educational opportunities have existed between men and women in previous generations, we further examine whether SES-related moderations of the relationship between dementia and APOE ε4 are sex-specific. Our analyses are based on a sample of 580 individuals from the H70 Birth Cohort Study and the Prospective Population Study on Women in Gothenburg, Sweden. Data were analysed using Cox proportional hazards regression, and the results suggest that while high SES postpones dementia onset among male APOE ε4 carriers, this is not the case for women. These findings underscore the long-term impact of social inequity on health as well as the importance of considering potential interactions between social and genetic risk factors if we are to understand better the complex aetiology of dementia.

The aims of this exploratory study were: to investigate the process of visual art appreciation in a person with dementia, in real time; and to test the feasibility of using video-analysis as a method to explore this process by and with a person who has minimal verbal expression. Gallery personnel guided a woman with severe dementia around an exhibition. Audio-visual recordings of the interactions were analysed. Patterns were identified, and interpreted in the light of conversation analysis theory and research. Evidence was found of turn-taking vocalisations on the part of the research participant. Her participation in a dialogical process was facilitated by the skilled and empathic gallery personnel in ways that the analysis makes clear. We argue that this supports the inference that successful communicative acts took place, contrary to expectations in the light of the participant's level of disability. We demonstrate in this paper how a woman with minimal speech due to dementia was enabled to engage with visual art through the facilitation of an expert guide, attuned to her needs. This is a novel example of a person-centred approach, because it takes place outside the context of caring, which is the typical setting for examining person-centred ways of relating to individuals with dementia.

The relationship between living alone, loneliness and social isolation, and how they are associated with health remain contentious. We sought to explore typologies based on shared experiences of loneliness, social isolation and living alone using Latent Class Analysis and determine how these groups may differ in terms of their physical and mental health. We used Wave 7 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (N = 7,032; mean age = 67.3) and responses to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) loneliness scale, household composition, participation in social/societal activities plus frequency of contact with friends, family and relatives for the Latent Class Analysis. The optimal number of groups was identified using model-fit criteria. The socio-demographic characteristics of groups and health outcomes were explored using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. We identified a six-cluster typology: Group 1, no loneliness or isolation; Group 2, moderate loneliness; Group 3, living alone; Group 4, moderate isolation; Group 5, moderate loneliness, living alone; and Group 6, high loneliness, moderate isolation (with high likelihood of living alone). Groups experiencing loneliness and/or isolation were more likely to report poorer physical and mental health even after adjusting for socio-demographic confounders, this was particularly notable for Group 6. Our results indicate that different typologies of living alone, loneliness and isolation can be identified using data-driven techniques, and can be differentiated by the number and severity of issues they experience.