Retirement: Institutional Pathways and Individual Trajectories in Britain and Germany

Since the 1970s people have retired increasingly early across advanced societies. Parallel to this trend, numerous institutional early retirement pathways evolved, such as bridge unemployment and pre-retirement schemes. This article compares retirement in Britain and Germany to show how individuals progress through these institutional retirement pathways. The analysis uses longitudinal data and recent innovations in sequence analysis to capture the sequential nature of retirement as a series of transitions over time. As expected, prominent institutional retirement pathways are mirrored in individual retirement trajectories. Beyond these expected patterns, there are pronounced regularities in individual retirement trajectories outside of explicit institutional pathways. The \'institution of the family\' is an additional powerful force in structuring women\'s retirement. Access to advantageous institutional retirement pathways is stratified by gender, education, income, and health. The article concludes that specific population groups, particularly women, are systematically excluded from protective institutional early retirement pathways in Britain and Germany.Retirement, Aging, Life Course, Sequence Analysis, Germany, Britain, Gender

Did economic globalization destabilize careers? Evidence from Germany

In this article, we analyze the impact of economic globalization on the turbulence of early work careers in Germany. We conceptualize turbulence as the absolute number of employer changes, the predictability of the order of jobs, and the variability of the durations spent in different employment states. Results from empirical analyses based on the German Life History Study (N = 5,432) show that – contrary to what is often implicitly assumed in careers research – there has been only a small increase in the turbulence of work careers over the last decades. Early work careers became slightly more dynamic for individuals born in the 1930s and 1940s, but for individuals born in the 1950s onwards, there are no significant differences in the turbulence across the cohorts. Additionally, we find no evidence that industry-specific economic globalization influences the turbulence of work careers. We conclude that researchers should consider the relative stability of careers and that the impact of globalization on work careers might be overestimated

Mobility in Europe: Analysis of the 2005 Eurobarometer Survey on Geographical and Labour Market Mobility

The European Commission has designated the year 2006 as 'European Year of Workers' Mobility'. The purpose of the initiative is to inform EU citizens of the benefits and the costs of both geographical mobility and job or labour market mobility; the realities of working in another country or changing job or career; and the rights they are entitled to as migrant workers. The initiative also aims to promote the exchange of good practice between public authorities and institutions, the social partners and the private sector, and to promote greater study of the scale and nature of geographical and job mobility within the Union

Uncovering Social Stratification: Intersectional Inequalities in Work and Family Life Courses by Gender and Race

Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. Further, single outcome studies tend to conflate labor market inequalities related to gender, race, and family situation. We combine an intersectional and quantitative life course perspective to analyze parallel work and family lives for Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting instability spillovers between life domains that are most prevalent among Black women, followed by Black men. The findings highlight a sizeable group of resourceful Black single mothers who hold stable middle-class jobs and have often gone unnoticed in previous research. We conclude that economic interventions to equalize opportunities in education, employment, and earnings, particularly early in life, are more promising for reducing intersectional inequalities in work-family life courses than attempting to intervene in family lives

From never partnered to serial cohabitors: union trajectories to childlessness

[Background:] Childlessness has increased in many European countries. Partnerships and parenthood are obviously closely related, but there is relatively little knowledge on how childlessness is linked to contemporary union dynamics that involve high rates of separation and unmarried cohabitation. [Objective:] To situate (biological) childlessness in longitudinal dynamics of union formation and stability, we take a life-course approach to union trajectories that consist of states entered via the formation and dissolution of cohabitations and marriages. Concretely, we identify groups of similar union trajectories of individuals between the ages of 18 and 39 who are childless at age 42. [Methods: We analyse register data on Finnish men and women born in 1969 and 1970 (childless N=3,241) with sequence, cluster, and multinomial logistic regression methods. [Results:] Four clusters of typical union trajectories were identified among the childless and assigned these labels: 1) Never Partnered (45%), characterized by never having entered a coresidential partnership, or just having entered a cohabitation near age 40; 2) Briefly Cohabited (25%), characterized by mostly living single after a brief cohabitation spell; 3) Cohabitors, Often Serial (19%), marked by typically discontinuous cohabitation; and 4) Married (11%). The Never-Partnered cluster is male-dominated. Men with a rural background and less-educated men and women are overrepresented among the Never-Partnered childless. [Conclusions:] For the great majority of the childless in our study cohorts, union trajectories are marked by either the (almost) complete absence of coresidential unions or fragmentary cohabitation histories. [Contribution:] The study contributes to the literature by showing that union histories, including never partnering as well as cohabitation instability, are key for understanding contemporary childlessness

Uncovering Social Stratification: Intersectional Inequalities in Work and Family Life Courses by Gender and Race

Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. Further, single outcome studies tend to conflate labor market inequalities related to gender, race, and family situation. We combine an intersectional and quantitative life course perspective to analyze parallel work and family lives for Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting instability spillovers between life domains that are most prevalent among Black women, followed by Black men. The findings highlight a sizeable group of resourceful Black single mothers who hold stable middle-class jobs and have often gone unnoticed in previous research. We conclude that economic interventions to equalize opportunities in education, employment, and earnings, particularly early in life, are more promising for reducing intersectional inequalities in work-family life courses than attempting to intervene in family lives.Peer Reviewe

Neighbourhoods, networks and unemployment: The role of neighbourhood disadvantage and local networks in taking up work

We bring together research on social networks and neighbourhood disadvantage to examine how they jointly affect unemployed individuals’ probability of re-entering employment. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’ provide information on the proportion of friends who live in the same neighbourhood, and are linked with small-scale administrative information on neighborhood employment deprivation. Results indicate that neighbourhood employment deprivation prolongs unemployment, but only for individuals who report that all of their friends live in the same neighbourhood. Living in an advantaged neighbourhood with all of one’s friends in the neighbourhood increases the chances of exiting unemployment. In contrast, neighbourhood location is not associated with unemployment exit if one’s friends do not live in the same neighbourhood. We conclude that neighbourhood effects on exiting unemployment critically depend on individuals’ social embeddedness in the neighbourhood. Not just residing in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, but actually living there with all one’s friends, prevents individuals from re-entering employment. This opens new avenues for theorising neighbourhood effects as social rather than geographic phenomena, and highlights that the effects of neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics are conditional on the level of interaction residents have within their neighbourhood