scholarly journals The End of the Retirement “Age”: How the New World of Work Is Transforming the Old World of Retirement

Author(s):  
Veronica Sheen

The nature of work is undergoing fundamental transformation in the twenty-first century with drivers including digitalization, automation, and new forms of work organization. This chapter explores how the concept of retirement itself is increasingly redundant in relation to the new world of work. Of course, working lives inevitably do come to an end, but for whom, and at what point, and under what personal and social financial conditions, is this end point? Many people will want, and be required by public policy, to continue their working lives well into later life. In addition, the new dynamics of work and employment unfolding may enable this later life engagement. But in the “post-work” world predicted by many scholars, will later life employment be a possibility for them, and even for many people in their middle and younger years? This chapter explores the implications of the future of work for how traditional models of working lives and retirement need to be restructured and examines the one vital reform to ensure everyone can sustain a decent life in the new highly volatile world of work.

Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld

Some people have a drink when they get home from work—a martini, a beer. Maybe two or three. Life is especially stressful in the twenty-first century. The same indecent forces that are destroying nature are disrupting our working lives as well. Who will own the company tomorrow? Will there be a “reduction in force” or some other euphemism for the ax? When is the next reorganization coming? Is my ten or twenty years of faithful service an asset or, more likely, a sign of obsolescence and suspicious loyalty to bosses and co-workers now out of favor or working for other companies? How am I to answer the fax that arrived at 4:00 p.m., the one that seemed to contradict the fax that arrived at 11:00? When will I find time to fill out the questionnaire from the Resource Management Office, and does it take precedence over the Goals Enhancement Strategy questionnaire that came from the Administrative Services Division? Are my computer files compatible with the new software system, and, if so, why did the box on the screen say, “This paragraph is un-readable. Do you wish to substitute a standard paragraph?” Just what is our real work, anyway? Alcohol can take the edge off stress, but it is not everyone’s consolation. Some choose television or the Internet; mine is to pick up one of the scores of detective novels that I keep close to hand and plunge in. Then I can forget for a little while the vice presidents, deans, and other academic, corporate-style bosses who do their best to make life in the modern university an unproductive misery. In this way I can put out of mind, temporarily, the pleas of students who don’t understand why there are no courses to take and the ravings of colleagues who can’t figure out how to cope with the contradictory, impossible demands placed on them. Why should detective stories be, for so many, such a good and entertaining way of escaping from reality? That they are is clear; billions of copies have been sold.


1994 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell D. Lansbury

This paper examines new forms of work organisation which may emerge in the coming decade, as the distinction between white and blue collar work fades and occupational status is defined more in terms of skills and knowledge. Demarcation barriers between skilled and unskilled work, trades and professions will become less relevant as multiskilling and inter-changeability of personnel becomes a requirement in most organisations. The proportion of self employed in the workforce will also increase and most people will work on contracts rather than be guaranteed long-term employment with one organisation. Few people will pursue the same occupation throughout their working lives. Retraining will become a constant requirement to ensure that skills remain relevant. While the latest technologies will continue to be used in order to maintain a high standard of living, there will be pressures on industry and governments to retain some labour intensive forms of work in order to contain levels of unemployment. Three possible scenarios are presented for the future of work in the twenty-first century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS PHILLIPSON

ABSTRACTResearch on older workers and retirement has yet to adjust fully to an environment influenced by a combination of demographic change, technological developments and economic recession. A key dimension to the changing relationship between ageing and work is the tension between policies to extend working life and the increasingly fragmented nature of late working life, with the emergence of varied transitions, including: bridge employment, second/third careers, part-time working, early retirement and other variations. These developments indicate both the challenge of conceptualising new forms of work-ending, and – in policy terms – the extent to which these can successfully accommodate longer working lives. The paper provides a critical perspective to the policy of extending working life and the narrative which underpins this approach. The paper argues that retirement has become a ‘contested’ institution in the 21st century, fragmented across different pathways and transitions affecting people in their fifties and sixties. The paper argues the case for improving work quality and security as a precondition for supporting policies for encouraging working in later life. An essential requirement for this will include linking debates on extending working life with technological developments and changes affecting the workplace, creating differentiated paths to retirement and labour force exit, enhancing the provision of training and continuing education, and re-thinking the idea of the ‘older worker’.


2020 ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Vera Borges ◽  
Luísa Veloso

In the wake of the 2008 global financial and economic crisis, new forms of work organization emerged in Europe. Following this trend, Portugal has undergone a reconfiguration of its artistic organizations. In the performing arts, some organiza-tions seem to have crystalized and others are reinventing their artistic mission. They follow a plurality of organizational patterns and resilient profiles framed by cyclical, structural and occupational changes. Artistic organizations have had to adopt new models of work and seek new opportunities to try out alternatives in order to deal, namely, with the constraints of the labour market. The article anal-yses some of the restructuring processes taking place in three Portuguese artistic organizations, focusing on their contexts, individual trajectories and collective missions for adapting to contemporary challenges of work in the arts. We conclude that organizations are a key domain for understanding the changes taking place.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110265
Author(s):  
Rachel Ong ◽  
Gavin A Wood ◽  
Melek Cigdem

In the life cycle model of consumption and saving, homeownership is an important vehicle for horizontal redistribution. Households accumulate wealth in owner-occupied housing during working lives before benefiting from imputed rent streams in retirement. But in some countries housing wealth’s welfare role has broadened as owners increasingly use flexible mortgages to smooth consumption during working lives. One consequence is higher outstanding mortgages later in life, a burden exacerbated by high real house prices that compel home buyers to demand mortgages that are a growing multiple of their incomes. We investigate whether these developments are prompting longer working lives, an idea that is especially relevant in countries offering relatively low government pensions. Australia is one such country. We use the 2001–2017 panels of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to estimate hazard models of exits from the Australian labour force as workers approach pensionable age. We find that those with high outstanding mortgage debts are more likely to postpone retirement, as are those with relatively low amounts of private pension wealth. These results are stronger in urban housing markets, and especially among males.


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